Biopharma ignores most of biology. VC incentives push biotech startups toward M&A-friendly indications, regulatory paths narrow the field further, and status hierarchies do the rest. The result: fertility and longevity, two of the largest addressable problems in human health, have almost no serious companies working on them.
On fertility, Hayashi's group in Japan has already produced live mice from two biological fathers by converting somatic cells into stem cells and differentiating them into gametes. The human version would let gay couples, post-menopausal women, and others have genetically related children. A separate and equally neglected problem: girls are born with 1 to 2 million oocytes, but only a fraction ever mature into usable eggs. Methods to expand that pool remain critically underdeveloped. On longevity, aging is a genetically manipulable and druggable phenotype, this is not hypothesis but published data. Fewer than a dozen credible companies are working on it. BioAge and NewLimit are two of them.
The original article goes further, covering neurosensory aging, muscle loss, cosmetic aging, and several other areas the author argues have validated biology and no serious startups. It also names specific papers and research groups, which is where the real signal is. Read it for the citations, not just the thesis.
[READ ORIGINAL →]