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Posted October 2, 2025 at 12:22 pm
From CRISPR breakthroughs to AI-powered drug discovery, longevity science is moving from myth to marketplace. Host Andrew Wilkinson sits down with Alex Gunz, Portfolio Manager at Heptagon Capital, to explore how innovations in genomics, stem cells, and personalized medicine could redefine healthcare — and reshape the investment landscape. Discover why the race to extend lifespan may also unlock new long-term returns.
The following is a summary of a live audio recording and may contain errors in spelling or grammar. Although IBKR has edited for clarity no material changes have been made.
Welcome to this episode of IBKR Podcast. Today, we’re gonna dive into the life science that addresses longevity. With me to explain is Alex Gunz, who is the Portfolio Manager at Heptagon Capital over in London. Welcome back to the program, Alex.
Always a pleasure to be here, Andrew.
Let’s dive straight in. Can you explain why longevity science represents such a significant shift in how we are approaching healthcare, moving from treating diseases to optimizing health?
This is such an exciting and broad topic, Andrew. It’s something we’ve been writing about for six years, and I guess I’d refer everyone to Benjamin Franklin, who talked very famously about how the only two things that were certain in life were death and taxation. So there’s no doubt we’re getting older — we’re all getting older.
This is a massive challenge for the planet, and therefore it behooves everyone to come up with solutions. And I think the good news, anyway, is that there is a huge amount of capital being thrown at this. And really, there are two key things I would call out. Number one is that there is occurring, at the moment we feel, a really clear paradigm shift where medicine and healthcare are really moving from being reactive to preemptive. That’s going to really change the equation.
And number two, nearly all of the thought process that’s occurring at the exciting edge of this really treats the human body in a somewhat novel way. We think almost of the human body now as being just like any other bit of hardware. In other words, it’s something to be hacked, to be optimized and upgraded — and therein lies the potential.
So how do you define the distinction between lifespan and healthspan, and why is that differentiation crucial for understanding longevity science, Alex?
It is absolutely crucial, Andrew. And I guess the easiest way to explain it is by posing the following question: Why would you want to live a longer life if it weren’t a healthier one?
In other words, there is no point in spending your remaining years on this planet — or anyone spending their remaining years on this planet — in ill health if they’re not going to enjoy that time alive. So put very simply, lifespan is the number of years that anyone will live, whereas healthspan is the number of years that anyone will live healthily. And what we’re seeing in almost every developed country around the world is that the gap between the two is widening. And therefore, it’s up to the science and the investment to try and narrow that gap.
How has our understanding of aging changed with advances in genomics and regenerative medicine?
I think it’s best to really frame the answer to this question in the following way. Big picture — there are so many different innovations going on within the space of longevity. There are multiple overlapping experiments, moonshots — not all of them are mutually exclusive.
But I think, to pick up on the point or the question you asked, Andrew, I’d highlight that clearly, as all your listeners should know, the cost of DNA sequencing and of identifying little bits, if you will, of our genome — the different parts of our DNA — has come down massively. And as a result, it effectively means you have a much bigger dataset with which to play.
And we actually understand how our genes — how our DNA — is changing. Then, the ability to try and address those changes only goes up proportionately.
How about CRISPR technology? How is that technology being applied to longevity research, and what breakthroughs are we seeing?
We’ve been massive fans of CRISPR, Andrew, for quite some time. We first discussed this in one of our thematic pieces, I believe, back in 2017.Perhaps not all of your listeners will be familiar with CRISPR. For those who are not, it’s an acronym for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Palindromic Repeats — obviously a bit of a mouthful, hence why it’s called CRISPR. And the way we try and characterize it is simply: if you think about the tools, if you will, that exist within your word-processing office suite — i.e. the ability to find and replace, to cut, copy, and paste — this is effectively what CRISPR allows you to do with DNA.
In other words, you are — and perhaps to preempt another topic we may discuss, Andrew — you’re moving increasingly with something like CRISPR, with that combination of understanding our DNA much better, almost to a situation where you can get more and more personalized medical outcomes. There’s also a huge swathe of very rare diseases that CRISPR can potentially address, too.
And then what about artificial intelligence, Alex — what role is that playing in advancing longevity science?
I think there are probably two key things I’d call out in this respect.
The first is almost a meta observation. We’ve been discussing artificial intelligence for years now — right? Since 2016, long before ChatGPT and DeepSeek came along. And really, the basic point is that artificial intelligence for many years was called “big data.” It was called “machine learning.” Often, these terms are confused and conflated anyway. So, put very simply, if you now have a bigger dataset — whether it’s a dataset of DNA, whether it’s a dataset of a population, whether it’s a dataset of eating habits — and you can actually apply analysis, you can make predictions, then you will likely get to better outcomes.
We’ve consistently argued that technology — whether it’s something perceived old-fashioned like cloud, or something much more sort of front-of-mind today like AI — these are means to an end. They are enablers, and they should help us solve problems — major meta problems, big-picture thematic problems like aging, improving longevity — more efficiently. That’s the meta thesis. Quite specifically — I apologize, I don’t have these figures off the top of my head, but they’re very well known and well documented — and these relate to the amount of time and money that it takes to bring any drug from inception, idea within a laboratory if you will, through Phase 1, Phase 2, Phase 3 trials, to commercial launch.
I think you’re talking often of maybe a 10-year time horizon, a cost of say a billion dollars, and maybe a 10% success rate. So put very simply, how do you improve those metrics or those ratios? Don’t quote me on those figures, but I think your listeners should understand the broad challenge. And if AI as a tool basically allows you to minimize or reduce that risk of failure, then surely it’s got to be a good thing in this broader debate about longevity.
Now, what about personalized medicine — what role is that playing in longevity science?
We touched a little bit on this earlier, Andrew, and I think it is almost the ultimate endgame in the sense that, if you take a step back and you think about how all of us — you, me, every single person listening to this — what we are made up of, our DNA is something like 99.99% identical.
But it’s that tiny little bit that is not identical where you have those variances — and why two people who may live next door to each other, may be exactly the same age, have the same lifestyle habits, that one of them is gonna live 10 years longer than the other. And if you think about it at that — at our core, if you will — our DNA, our stem cells, these are almost effectively the toolkit, if you will, for how to have… I should rephrase that — for how to have a longer life. So if, with a combination of big data, advances in science, and actually that ability to move to a much more personalized approach to medicine, we can lead better lives, then potentially we will.
I’ll just make one other side observation. When we spoke on a prior call like this, Andrew, we discussed space and the opportunity for the commercialization of space. I was actually on a panel yesterday at an event — listening to a panel at an event yesterday — and they made a very good case for upside within space, with one of the scenarios or use cases being that stem cells will actually grow more effectively in a zero-gravity environment. So as the barriers to putting things into space fall, the scope for stem cell growth — or the expansion of the stem cell industry, if you will — and its application to longevity should, in my mind, our minds, only go up.
Now, I think in your recent paper — available on your website and on Traders’ Insight too — over $8 billion has been invested in longevity science last year, 2024. What areas are seeing the most promising development, Alex?
That $8 billion is a wonderful headline figure, and before we get too excited about it — not to trivialize it at all — a lot of it has gone into some very high-profile areas, Andrew. And I think almost what’s occurring now is that, historically, if you were a wealthy billionaire, you’d made your money, say, in old-fashioned media, then you might buy a sports club or something like that. What seems to be occurring now, particularly for many of the uber-successful people — whose names will all be familiar to us in Silicon Valley — they’ve not only made their billions, now they want to live longer as well, and therefore they’re throwing a lot of dollars at moonshots.
And some of the headline-grabbing things relate, say, to brain-computer interfaces, to cryogenics — high freezing your body — to uploading your memories, if you will, into some sort of cloud so that they’ll be available for future generations. And I think it’s always been the case, as we all know, that some people like headline-catching, eye-catching ideas. So that’s where a lot of the money, in reality, is going.
If you were asking the question, “Which of those dollars is really adding value?” I think the more exciting areas are probably the ones that are harder to commercialize. I think everyone will be aware that, under the current administration, funding to many universities and research laboratories is being restrained. Clearly, the process for getting regulatory approval for drugs has always been complicated. And given that context, the easier dollars — the more compelling money, if you will — is going into those shorter-term, easier wins. So it’s either the less regulated areas like food and nutraceuticals — that we haven’t talked about so much so far — or it’s those more eye-catching moonshots backed by famous people, like brain-computer interfaces.
What’s the timeline on all of this, Alex? How will the practical application of longevity science reach mainstream healthcare? How long do you think that will take?
I think the framing context for this, Andrew, is really to return to the idea that there are multiple, sometimes overlapping projects underway. So there are obviously, today, easy wins.
In other words, you can walk into any pharmacy or large supermarket health store — either in the United Kingdom or the United States, or indeed many other places in the world — and there will be whole shelves of products promoting better health and, by implication, longer life. So some of that is available today, clearly.
Medicine — and it’s a bit like a supertanker — these things do not turn around overnight. But we said the paradigm is slowly, in our opinion, but surely shifting from reaction to preemption. A visit to your doctor, the amount of information that’s available online, will actually really say, “You should do X, Y, and Z today in order to lead a longer life.” And things like wearables — even your iPhone — that will allow you to monitor your steps, to record your heart rate, whatever it might be, these things could all be considered part of the longevity megatrend.
If you’re asking the question, “When are stem cell solutions, when is personalized DNA, when is CRISPR going to become mainstream?” — my best guess is, or hope anyway, somewhere before the end of this decade. If you’re asking about when things like brain-computer interfaces will become more widespread, more mainstream almost, I’d say that’s much longer term.
Now, any MBA student would ask you, Alex — as this technology has been developed, what are the ethical challenges? What considerations should be thought about?
I think there are absolutely no shortage of ethical challenges, and this again makes the whole debate a bit more complicated. It also adds confusion to your question about when these things become mainstream. I guess almost the starting point is that if you believe in natural selection, you believe in DNA, then we as humans are on this planet only for a finite period of time. Our purpose is not to live forever. Our purpose — our bodies are coded, if you will — to reproduce, and that’s it.
The reality also is that we don’t quite understand today how and why we age. Ultimately, the likelihood is something will get us in the end. When you think about the ethical issues, then we get into debates about who should have access to these solutions. How much will they cost? There is also the debate about intergenerational equity. If people live for longer, how do we ensure that new people being born get allocation?
And what I mean by allocation is not just resource from older generations living longer, but ultimately — and almost this is the key discussion we come back to time and time again when we talk about future trends — is, look, we need to come up with solutions about how to allocate scarce resources to a growing population. And if the population’s expanding, then there is the challenge about how you allocate that scarce resource.
And then I guess the very final point is, look, the whole world has only improved, in my opinion, as a result of innovation. And innovation is simply a function of new people — generally younger people — coming to the table, bringing new, exciting ideas to the planet. And if we’ve got more people living for a longer period of time, there may also be a stasis in idea generation.
For the listener, you’ve already mentioned wearables. What advice would you give to listeners who want to incorporate current longevity science insights into their daily lives?
Bear in mind, Andrew — and bear in mind, every listener — I am a generalist fund manager based in London with a liberal arts background, and therefore anything I say should not be treated as medical advice.
Were I to give advice, one superb, superb book which I read a while ago — which we did profile in one of our blogs — is called Outlive by a Canadian doctor called Dr. Peter Attia. And I think that book is well worth a read. What he asserts in that book, and I would concur with this, is that if you want to lead a longer and healthier life, then it is a combination of having good physical and mental health. In other words: exercise regularly, sleep well, make sure you surround yourself with interesting people — companionship is really good — make sure you’re intellectually stimulated, and try and lead a good life. It ought not to be that complicated.
But I think again, and to reference back to your question about ethics, there is this point that, in some ways, even doing an event like this, we are preaching to the converted. Many of your listeners, I imagine, will already be doing things like this — and they’ll also have the disposable income to do this. The challenge is for less well-educated and poorer people to actually really embrace this approach of trying to make more preemptive lifestyle choices.
Thinking of the end of this decade, in five years’ time, what development in longevity science do you get most excited by, Alex?
I think, bigger picture, Andrew, where we are today is still — to use the American expression — in very early innings, and we are only really seeing AI at the training phase at the moment, rather than the influencing phase.
And if we believe, if we’re of the view, that AI can unlock great insights by applying knowledge to large sets of data, then the ability to come up with better healthcare solutions should only increase exponentially. I think, as we’ve touched on on a couple of occasions, this idea of moving over time — and I’d be reluctant to put a very specific timeline on it — toward more personalized, individualized medicine. The phrase mass customization springs to mind — that, I think, is what gets me really excited.
A fantastic discussion once again, Alex. Thank you very much. How can individuals stay informed about credible advances in longevity research?
Needless to say — and with the bias, of course, that this is just one source of information — clearly, this is one of the many future trends we seek to write about and uncover at Heptagon Capital. We discuss it regularly in our weekly blog and in thematic notes, such as the one we’ve just been discussing. Above and beyond that, there’s no shortage of information sources.
I referenced one publication earlier on, and I think, as ever, the sort of caveat exists that it’s not about the quantity of information that’s available — it’s about the quality. But really, again, if every listener is to take one thing away from this call, then it’s really about this idea of trying to move the paradigm away from reaction toward preemption. Some of that’s in your own hands; some of that will be enabled by technology.
Alex Gunz, Portfolio Manager at Heptagon Capital in London, thank you very much once again for joining me today.
Thank you.
And if you enjoyed today’s episode, please don’t forget — subscribe wherever you download your podcasts from. Bye for now.
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