Notes on European Longevity Industry Startups
While much of the longevity industry is based in the US, there are a fair number of companies elsewhere in the world, working on approaches that target the mechanisms of aging in order to better treat age-related conditions or improve health in later life. The article here notes some of the European biotech startups in the industry. The main body of commentary on the industry in this article suffers from much the same issues as most popular science coverage of research into the treatment of aging as a medical condition, in that the author makes no attempt to distinguish between parts of the field that cannot possible do much good (near anything involving supplements, definitely anything involving consumer focused digital health) versus parts of the field that have the potential to produce real rejuvenation in the old (such as senolytic drugs).
The Dutch company Cleara Biotech is developing senescence biomarkers for diagnostics and drug targeting. In 2018 it raised a seed round from Apollo Health. Senisca was spun out of Exeter University in 2020 and is dedicated to the development of new approaches to reverse cellular senescence. Senolytic Therapeutics is a Barcelona-based biotech startup founded in 2017 developing novel medicines that target senescent cells. Life Length is a Spanish company founded in 2010 and has developed a technology for measuring telomere length.
Tree Frog Therapeutics is a French stem cell company that develops C-stem, a platform to accelerate the making of self-replicating cells which can form to grow any part of the human body. The UK-US company Juvenescence is creating a network for longevity companies, scientists as well as AI specialists. It has so far invested in approximately 15 startups. The hopes to IPO in the coming year. Eternans is a UK-based biotech startup, founded in 2017, and is developing senolytic agents to selectively kill senescent cells.
Samsara Therapeutics has developed a screening platform that identifies new molecules that extend healthy lifespan across species, and is funded by Apollo Ventures. The Swiss company Rejuveron is a biotech platform company, that together with entrepreneurial scientists, develops and improves therapies and technologies in this space. The UK-US startup Humanity monitors your rate of ageing and helps users understand which actions will slow down the individual's rate of ageing.
Tracked.bio is a Danish biotechnology company that develops fully automated phenotyping and identification systems for model organisms with the use of deep learning. The systems help effectively evaluate the efficacy of ageing interventions. Age Labs is a Norwegian molecular diagnostics company that discovers, develops and commercialises diagnostic tests for the early detection of age-related diseases. The Swiss startup Centaura, founded in 2019, aims to prevent and reverse ageing by using machine learning to analyse the DNA setup in order to develop an ageing profile.
Link: https://sifted.eu/articles/european-longevity-startups/