Today, we have another video from our Ending Age-Related Diseases 2018 conference, which was held earlier this year at the Cooper Union in New York City. The conference was designed to bring the worlds of research and investment together in one place and explore the progress and challenges that the industry faces in developing and funding therapies to end age-related disease.
This was the second panel during the conference and featured Dr. Aubrey de Grey of the SENS Research Foundation, Keith Comito of Lifespan.io, Dr. James Peyer of Apollo Ventures, Dr. Mark Hammond of Deep Science Ventures, Joe Betts Lacroix of Y Combinator and Vium, Dr. Oliver Medvedik of Lifespan.io and The Cooper Union, and Ramphis Castro of ScienceVest.
This video provides insight into the workings of investment and biotechnology funding and should hopefully prove of interest to some of our audience. The panelists discuss overcoming the bottlenecks in funding aging research and the role of venture philanthropy and family offices. In the investment world, family offices are private wealth management advisory firms that serve high-net-worth investors; essentially, they are powerhouses of investment funding. They are essentially the money behind the money in the pharmaceutical industry.
As with the other panels at the conference, there was a Q&A section at the end at which the audience asked the panelists questions. Dr. de Grey describes how hard it has been to get celebrities interested in the field in the last decade, and Keith Comito explains why LEAF’s collaborations on major Youtube videos are part of the plan to popularize the movement and hopefully bring in more celebrity support.