Anti-aging breakthroughs typically deal with eccentric diet trends or nutritional supplements.
But Google Inc.'s (Nasdaq: GOOG, GOOGL) Larry Page and Sergey Brin have taken anti-aging to a whole new level.
In 2013, Google founded the biotech company Calico along with Apple Inc. (Nasdaq: AAPL) Chairman Arthur Levinson.
Calico isn't your typical biotech company. Rather than focusing on diseases, Calico was founded to cure aging.
According to Page, expanding the human life span by as much as 100 years is the company's goal.
"[Aging and illness] affect us all -- from the decreased mobility and mental agility that comes with age, to life-threatening diseases that exact a terrible physical and emotional toll on individuals and families," Page said in a statement announcing the company. "And while this is clearly a longer-term bet, we believe we can make good progress within reasonable timescales with the right goals and the right people."
In September 2014, Calico partnered with the $112 billion biotech firm AbbVie Inc. (NYSE: ABBV). Both companies provided $250 million in funding to fight diseases associated with old age. Together, Calico and AbbVie are creating a research center in San Francisco.
And Google isn't the only company dumping millions of dollars into ending the effects of aging...
Money Pours into Biological Immortality Research
Peter Thiel, hedge fund manager and founder of PayPal, has made anti-aging his next big venture.
Thiel has contributed $3.5 million to the anti-aging non-profit Methuselah Foundation. Its mission is to find drugs that cure types of age-related damage like loss of cells and excessive cell division.
And Thiel is using his nonprofit, Breakout Labs, to fund dozens of other scientists working toward the goal of immortality. So far, he's given 22 startups anywhere from $50,000 to $350,000.
Larry Ellison, co-founder of Oracle Corp. (NYSE: ORCL), finds accepting mortality "incomprehensible."
Ellison has donated more than $430 million to anti-aging research. "Death has never made any sense to me. How can a person be there and then just vanish, just not be there?" he told biographer Mike Wilson in 2003.
Peter Diamandis, the founder of the X-Prize and International Space University, has recently founded a company called "Human Longevity Inc."
This company's sole purpose is to extend the healthy human life span as long as possible. And Diamandis is offering a $10 million prize for technology that gets us closer to that goal.
And these huge investments are starting to pay off...
A gene therapy treatment is already in advanced clinical trials at Stanford University. In January 2015, it was discovered that the treatment reversed the biological age of 60-year-old human skin and muscle cells by 25 years. After just a "few days of treatment," the cells became indistinguishable from those of a 35-year-old.
Harvard doctors are researching this too. Recently, they activated the same immortality gene in mice. It extended the average life span from two years to almost four years.
Best of all, these new developments will create one of the greatest investment opportunities of our lifetime. The anti-aging market is expected be worth $345 billion annually by 2018.
Now, Money Morning's Tech Specialist Michael A. Robinson, a 35-year Silicon Valley veteran and one of the top technology financial analysts in the country, has found the perfect way to profit from this market now. And hardly any investors know about it...
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