Why ‘healthspan’ is a vital new concept in life science investing
At the Optimum Strategic Communications’ 16th Annual Healthcare Investor Conference, held on Thursday 10th October 2024 at The King’s Fund, London, Dr Mehmood Khan, CEO of the Hevolution Foundation, spoke to Clive Cookson, Senior Science Writer at the Financial Times, about investing in “healthspan”.
What is “healthspan”? Unlike “lifespan” it isn’t an everyday term. Yet clinicians and health economists say it should be, because our healthspan has profound implications for the quality of our later lives – and the affordability of our healthcare systems.
Simply put, it is the length of time we enjoy good health. According to the UK’s Office for National Statistics, while UK female life expectancy is currently about 83 years, on average only the first 63 are spent in good health. The last 20 tend to be in poorer health – which is costly both in personal and financial terms. For British men, the figures are 79 and 62 years, respectively.
As nations’ populations age, so the number of people who are not living in good health is rising – and fast.
With this growing concern in mind, Saudi Arabia launched the Hevolution Foundation in 2021 with its remit – as CEO Dr Mehmood Khan told Optimum Strategic Communications’ 16th Annual Healthcare Investor Conference in London on October 10 – being “to extend healthy lifespan for the benefit of all”.
Speaking in a fireside chat with Clive Cookson, Senior Science Writer at the Financial Times, Dr Khan explained: “People want to live independent, functional and healthy lives for as long as they can.”
Dr Khan said research suggested that if the UK could compress the average length of ill health suffered by people by just one year, then “the UK’s NHS becomes completely solvent”.
The Foundation has already invested around $400m in a range of institutions including universities and biotechs around the world.
But its ambitions are bigger.
“We could commit up to $1bn a year,” said Dr Khan.
All that is limiting the scale of investment is the Foundation’s “capacity to deploy, and the field’s capacity to absorb it,” he added.
The Foundation has four main strands. The first is a science funding grant for labs investigating the fundamental biology of ageing. Currently, the Foundation is backing some 150 of them, making it the second largest funder of such labs worldwide. “We don’t ask for IP; we ask for no royalties,” Dr Khan stressed.
The second is its venture capital fund, which invests in early-stage companies which might “typically” be less attractive to VCs – for example, as they might be working to a “longer timeframe.” All profits will go back into the Foundation.
“We’ll invest in anything from university spin-out [stage] – we are actually spinning out our first biotech from a university right now …. all the way through to pre-IPO,” he said.
The third is a non-profit centre for translational research, to validate clinical research; and the fourth an in-house research program to function as “a bridge” between the lab and commercialisation.
Dr Khan emphasised that the Foundation was focused on “healthy lifespan and not longevity.” He said: “We are not interested in just extending people’s lives for the sake of living longer.”
The longevity field, said Cookson, had developed something of a reputation as a plaything for Silicon Valley billionaires – and one where the science was not always rock-solid.
Dr Khan responded by saying that the “elixir of youth” had preoccupied mankind “for millennia.” But he countered: “My team … spend a significant amount of their time trying to sift through the noise.” It was essential they eliminated “the hocus pocus” to get to “the credible science.”
One major roadblock that ‘longevity’ companies have had to contend with, and one that faces the Hevolution Foundation, is that regulatory authorities do not recognise ageing itself as a disease.
This matters, because drugs today are only granted marketing authorisation on the basis that they can treat a specific disease – for example a type of cancer, or Type 2 diabetes.
Dr Khan said the Foundation intended to tackle this problem in two ways. Firstly, it would invest in companies which were developing drugs for particular age-related diseases. But it would also invest in those firms which he said were “taking a bet that there will be a regulatory ageing pathway in the future”.
These might be firms with a new molecule, he said, but they might also be institutions looking to see if a known drug could be repurposed for its healthspan-enhancing characteristics.
While this might currently seem a remote possibility, Dr Khan noted that some medications are used far more freely today to prevent disease from ever occurring (known as primary prevention) than they were just a few decades ago.
“In the 1980s, when I was a young [hospital] house officer here in England, statins were not approved for primary prevention,” he said. Today, up to eight million Britons take statins, mostly for primary prevention.
With Western countries now suffering from record numbers of people off work due to illness, many with age-related conditions, Dr Khan said tackling the causes of such worklessness should be a priority.
“This is not an opportunity of the health ministry,” he said. “This is an opportunity for the finance ministry, and the labour ministry.”
The ageing of the continent’s population and the brutal fact that “Europe is running out of workers” made the task of keeping its workforce healthy even more urgent, he added.
The Foundation is funded by the Saudi government, specifically its Royal Court, which Dr Khan compared in function to the UK government’s Cabinet.
Dr Khan an endocrinologist by training, has worked at the top level for leading international organisations including Takeda, PepsiCo, and the Mayo Clinic.
