Juvenescence Raises a Further $100M to Invest in Therapies to Treat Aging
Jim Mellon and his allies are in fine form as they continue their quest to establish an industry focused on extending healthy human life spans by treating aging as a medical condition. They have brought in another $100M to Juvenescence, a company founded to make the formative investments needed to build an industry, backing biotech startups working on approaches to regeneration, rejuvenation, and slowing aging. While largely focused on small molecule drug development, of which senolytic treatments are to my eyes much more interesting than the other approaches taken to date, Juvenescence has funded groups like Lygenesis, working on delivery of organoid tissue as a regenerative therapy. It will be interesting to see what the Juvenescence principals choose to do with the funds from this present round.
Juvenescence, a life sciences company utilising expert drug developers and artificial intelligence experts to create therapeutics and technologies to treat diseases of aging and to increase human longevity, is pleased to announce the successful closure of its $100 million Series B round, including a total of $10 million from its founders and a further $10 million each from four cornerstone investors, including Grok Ventures, the investment company of Mike Cannon-Brookes (Atlassian cofounder), and Michael Spencer's private investment company, IPGL. This brings the total to $165 million that Juvenescence has raised in 18 months and speaks to the extraordinary opportunity as well as interest in developing therapeutics with the capacity to modify aging.
Juvenescence is creating a longevity ecosystem, with world class scientists, seasoned drug developers, machine learning experts and a strong team with financial acumen to navigate this emerging new biotech growth sector and to develop 12 therapeutic candidates within the field of healthy aging. "This has been such an exciting six months for Juvenescence. We have been able to add extraordinary people to the Juvenescence team who will bring our age modifying therapeutics to market. We have also augmented our team working on using machine learning for drug discovery and for drug development: culminating with closing on this $100 million Series B financing which provides us with sufficient working capital to progress many of our programs to their initial inflection points".
At least high net worth people are investing in rejuvenation biotech. If it was me I would have invested as early as 2000s and the field would have advanced faster.
It's a really good news !!!!!! However, how much has Juvenescence already invested in the field?
As I understood they already invested $113M by the moment and now they are investing $100M further. Is the total amount $113 + $100M = $213M correct?
Does anybody remember that Aubrey de Grey in his book "The war on aging" in 2005 wrote that when the war on aging begins we would need 1 B ? So how much money is already invested?
@Alekales:
That billion was for Robust Mouse Rejuvenation. For the human one it will be much bigger.
https://www.quora.com/What-does-Aubrey-de-Grey-mean-by-robust-mouse-rejuvenation-In-what-way-were-the-previous-results-published-by-various-research-groups-over-the-last-decade-or-so-not-robust
I mean, most, if not all, of Juvenescence's money is invested on human aging, not mice aging, so it can't be asigned so directly to RMR research. Most of it simply applies research already done in mice to human research.
Take for example senolytics. They have shown a big impact on mouse health, but they can't be used on humans, either because they use genetic engineering of the germline or because they have unacceptable side-effects (chemotherapy drugs, etc.). So Juvenescence is trying to find some senolytics useful for humans, and no money is used to advance RMR.
I have no faith at all in Jim Mellon after he put $40+ million of his investors $$ into AgeX (and thus Michael West) , a person whose companies have wasted > $300 million of investors money to date with nothing to show
Another billionaire who is lost in biotech, a field, based on that fact alone, that he does not understand
$100 millions in the biotech world is not so impressive. Aubrey said we need 1 billion but he was referring to basic science research. For the basic science of the 7 SENS components to translate into a biotech industry it would require 100 billions, because FDA trials are expensive.
This is great news! I look forward to more funding going towards damage-repair research.
@Me too, because Juvenescence isn't doing that right now if you look at their pipeline. Hopefully some of the new investments are going into the damage repair field.