Would You Buy a Drug to Extend Your Dog’s Life?

Today’s episode is about the science of slowing down the aging process … and why one biotech company has found some success with dogs. Last November, The New York Times reported that a company called Loyal had reached a milestone in the development of safe life-extension drugs for our pets. This drug, which is called LOY-1, works to slow the aging process in large breeds. But Loyal’s work holds major promise for helping all dogs live longer. It could even crack open some of the mysteries of mammalian aging, which could lead to discoveries that extend the lives of humans.

Today’s guest is the CEO and founder of Loyal, Celine Halioua. We talk about her experience as a female biotech founder, the weird economics of pharma, the ethics of life extension, the science of why big dogs die young, her theories for how to slow down the aging process in dogs big and small, and the possibility of spillover benefits for humans who would like a few more years with their family and friends.

If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [email protected].

In the following excerpt, Celine Halioua and Derek discuss some of the challenges facing the life-extension industry and why Halioua chose to first focus on dogs.

Derek Thompson: So I want to talk to you about dogs. I want to talk to you about life extension. And first, I want to talk to you about being a female founder right now. Let’s do a little personal history. Tell me what you were doing before you founded Loyal.

Celine Halioua: Yeah. I never thought I would start a company. There was no lemonade stand. I wasn’t having a secret master plan or getting an idea or an insight so I could build a company and raise hundreds of millions of venture dollars or whatever it is. I actually got interested in the space because really kind of my North Star from day one was, “How can we increase the free will of humanity?” And one of the things that I think takes away free will the most is disease, specifically age-related diseases. And it was kind of this realization that there’s many age-related diseases that you could get diagnosed with today where there’s not really anything anybody could do for you, no matter how much effort, no matter how much time, no matter how much money, no matter how much care, just because they’re such currently intractable diseases.

So I was in bio. I was working in a lab for four years, five years, six years straight, just pipetting, working with mice, the whole thing. I then went to Oxford, then pretty quickly dropped out, joined Laura Deming at the Longevity Fund, and, I’m sure we’ll talk more about it, but got the idea for Loyal and a conviction that I could do it while I was at Longevity Fund.

Thompson: There is an impression—possibly unfair, but definitely relatively well subscribed to—that life extension is kind of bullshit, that there’s a lot of people that have talked about life extension for many, many years, and there’s lots of gurus in California, and maybe around the world, that have promised some version of life extension that hasn’t exactly panned out for people because there is no one, really, living to 130. Barely anyone has ever lived to 120, so obviously the promises haven’t exactly been realized. How hard is it to get people—maybe venture capitalists are the first line of credibility, but maybe there’s other lines of credibility to talk about—how hard has it been to get people to take a project like this seriously?

Halioua: Well, so it’s interesting, because there’s been a lot of investment and interest in life span extension, but I would argue in a lot of categories like what you’re describing, where there’s lots of bold promises, and reality’s going to hit at some point, and it’s not going to give the end point that is being desired, and then that net hurts the field. And that’s something I’ve actually been quite passionate about, is this idea that if you’re going to go and kind of try to take the reins in this field that you need to be having a higher degree of responsibility. You know, if you’re working on a breast cancer drug and you fail, nobody rethinks the legitimacy of targeting breast cancer, but if you’re developing a longevity drug and it fails, people absolutely rethink the legitimacy of working on life span extension pharmaceuticals. So this was something that honestly has been a fear of mine from day one because, you know, we have done a lot of things right, and I think we are kind of hitting that stage of the rollercoaster where it’s more downhill than uphill.

But for a long time, I was very cognizant that if something went wrong, it would reflect badly on the field, even though there’s many valid reasons to fail that have nothing to do with the legitimacy of the idea. Unfortunately, I think a lot of the field doesn’t think in that way, and it is quite easy to raise money if you’re just saying, like, “Oh, life span extension. It’ll happen in a year.” And so it’s something I’m always combating, in terms of how can we demonstrate our legitimacy, so like going for FDA approval. We could have developed a supplement and been on market [for] four years by now, right? But we, from day one, were saying we want an FDA-approved longevity drug. We’re doing all our studies in the United States. We are self-subjecting to the highest and most rigorous and most objective quality bar in the world, the one that many other regulatory jurisdictions follow. And that was just one part of many of how we kind of tried to build and actively maintain legitimacy and doing the field right and showing that longevity is just as boring as cholesterol-lowering drugs.

Thompson: And why dogs?

Halioua: Because you can do—well, there’s a couple of reasons that we decided to go dogs first. One is I am a huge dog person. I’m actually in Mohaka right now, and there are senior street dogs everywhere, and it’s going to take all my willpower not to take one home. So it came with the dog side, right? But then also there’s a logistics challenge in life span extension, which is to begin and market and sell a drug for something, you have to show, in a placebo-controlled, Phase III, FDA-sanctioned, double-blinded clinical study, that your drug does what you say it does, so you have to show that it extends life span. And in a human, even the oldest humans, it could take a decade or more to actually show that reduction in early mortality relative to when it was treated.

And so in a dog, you can see biological aging—a.k.a., there’s no decently objective aging parameters, but let’s say as-objective-as-they-come aging “biomarkers”—parameters in about six months, and then you can see life span extension in, depending who you ask, three to five years. And so it was a way to show definitive efficacy quicker, and it’s also a really important problem and a really important market to work on, which is kind of this Trojan horse, so to speak. ... Trojan horse metaphor doesn’t really work here anymore. I was going to say if we only build the Trojan horse, even if it doesn’t enter the gates—that doesn’t make sense, but basically, if we only do this, it’s extremely valuable and extremely important to society, but also it sets them up well to do human aging eventually too.

This excerpt was edited for clarity. Listen to the rest of the episode here and follow the Plain English feed on Spotify.

Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Celine Halioua
Producer: Devon Baroldi

Subscribe: Spotify