YC Bio

Living healthier for longer will not help the healthcare crisis if the tail-end of life has the same health distribution. I think healthspan is a more important first target that lifespan.

It's great to see some targeted support for bio, though! It seems like a harder market division to get into than a pure tech company.

Think about how complex machines fail. Reliability theory is a good tool for this, and has been used to effectively model how aging works, as failure of units in a system of redundant units.

https://doi.org/10.1006/jtbi.2001.2430

You will see that there is no good way to compress the tail end of mortality and consequences resulting from accumulated unrepaired damage. The only cost-effective path is to postpone it indefinitely through periodic repair of that damage.

Aging is damage, and mortality/disability rises with damage. Effective treatments for aging are forms of repair of damage, of which only senolytics presently exist in any form that is available. Once you accept this model, you can start to reason about the effects of various approaches, and everything makes a lot more sense.

No-one in the field is particularly impressed with Calico at this point in time. Calico is the second coming of the Ellison Medical Foundation, which is to say they're just analyzing the details of aging and expanding on the NIH budget. Nothing they are known to be doing is likely to have the slightest impact on the progression of rejuvenation therapies.

E.g. some resources in which people are less than complimentary:

http://www.sens.org/research/research-blog/question-month-16...

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603087/googles-long-stran...

https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/4/27/15409672/go...

There are plenty of others if you want to go look for them.

Armchair opinion, probably gene editing. Not in people or animals, but I'd put money on it becoming "easy" in plants before much longer, as CRISPR gets more accurate and people apply it to already-understood micropropagation cloning strategies.

There was a startup trying to make autoluminescent plants with jellyfish genes before CRISPR even existed, just using ordinary plasmid creation and transfection techniques.[1] That particular effort failed commercially, but I believe they recently reincorporated as 'GLEAUX'.

Anyways, Biology is messy and difficult, but I really think that we are getting to a reasonably solid understanding of genetically engineering plants. And once someone turns that into a '1, 2, 3' process...well I don't think you need more than a 5-figure investment for equipment/space.

[1]: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....

The more investment and talent going into taking control of our biology and reducing disease, the better.

If using your tech skills to help battle disease in an ambitious way is interesting and you wanna learn about a new, quiet startup (top-tier funders, world-class bio folks already on board for you to partner with, rare advisors from tech/bio/pharma), ping me: kamens@gmail.com

We're hiring a couple more for our early team and specifically looking for data, infra, and ML engineers. No specific bio background required. Staying quiet for now, can share more when we talk.