Longevity Industry systematized for first time

UK aging research foundation produces roadmap for the emerging longevity industry in a series of reports to be published throughout the year

The Biogerontology Research Foundation has embarked on a year-long mission to summarise in a single document the various emerging technologies and industries which can be brought to bear on aging, healthy longevity, and everything in between, as part of a joint project between The Global Longevity Consortium, consisting of the Biogerontology Research Foundation, Deep Knowledge Life Sciences, Aging Analytics Agency and Longevity.International platform.

For scientists, policy makers, regulators, government officials, investors and other stakeholders, a consensus understanding of the field of human longevity remains fragmented, and has yet to be systematized by any coherent framework, and has not yet been the subject of a comprehensive report profiling the field and industry as a whole by any analytical agency to date. The consortium behind this series of reports hope that they will come to be used as a sort of Encyclopedia Britannica and specialized Wikipedia of the emerging longevity industry, with the aim of serving as the foundation upon which the first global framework of the industry will be built, given the significant industry growth projected over the coming years.

Experts on the subject of human longevity, who tend arrive at the subject from disparate fields, have failed even to agree on a likely order of magnitude for future human lifespan. Those who foresee a 100-year average in the near future are considered extreme optimists by some, while others have even mooted the possibility of indefinite life extension through comprehensive repair and maintenance. As such the longevity industry has often defied real understanding and has proved a complex and abstract topic in the minds of many, investors and governments in particular.

The first of these landmark reports, entitled 'The Science of Longevity', standing at almost 800 pages in length, seeks to rectify this.

Part 1 of the report ties together the progress threads of the constituent industries into a coherent narrative, mapping the intersection of biomedical gerontology, regenerative medicine, precision medicine, artificial intelligence, offering a brief history and snapshot of each. Part 2 lists and individually profiles 650 longevity-focused entities, including research hubs, non-profit organizations, leading scientists, conferences, databases, books and journals. Infographics are used to illustrate where research institutions stand in relation to each other with regard to their disruptive potential: companies and institutions specialising in palliative technologies are placed at the periphery of circular diagrams, whereas those involved with more comprehensive, preventative interventions, such as rejuvenation biotechnologies and gene therapies, are depicted as central.

In this report great care was taken to visualize the complex and interconnected landscape of this field via state of the art infographics so as to distill the many players, scientific subsectors and technologies within the field of geroscience into common understanding. Their hope was to create a comprehensive yet readily-understandable view of the entire field and its many players, to serve a similar function that Mendeleev's periodic table did for the field of chemistry. While these are static infographics in the reports, their creators plan to create complimentary online versions that are interactive and filterable, and to convene a series of experts to analyze these infographics and continually update them as the geroscience landscapes shifts. Similar strategies are employed in Volume II to illustrate the many companies and investors within the longevity industry.