Does anyone understand the underlying economics or motivations?
How much would you pay for a treatment to prevent or repair the negative effects of aging? For me the answer is "well over 100% of my net worth".
How much would you pay for a treatment to prevent or repair the negative effects of aging? For me the answer is "well over 100% of my net worth".
Specifically manufacturing of medicine is cheap. The R&D is expensive. As such even if the company owning the IP kept prices artificially high. Facilities in Africa, China, India, etc would reverse engineer them and medical tourism would become even more common. This is a constant threat for COVID vaccine manufacturers today. It’s very likely the prices of youth extension are not much greater than the COVID vaccine (I.e. about $20 per dose)
Meanwhile, the population of countries with single payer health care (e.g. Canada, New Zealand, etc), will also reject intellectual property protections for a company halfway around the world. Life extension for the population is more valuable than a few potential tariffs.
Of course the other optimization is forcing everyone to have insurance when healthy and kicking them off when they get sick.
Their point was the high risk versus the high reward. Even if investors gave such money to thousands of longevity startups, would they produce something that makes all the investing pay off better than what they sunk into them? (without pivoting to something other than longevity).