Investors around the world are flocking to a new type of biotech investment known as “longevity stocks.” The companies behind these longevity stocks are working to expand the lifespans of people everywhere.
And these longevity stocks are among some of the best biotech investment opportunities...
Organovo Holdings Inc. (NYSE: ONVO) – which Money Morning’s Biotech Investing Specialist Ernie Tremblay told readers about in December 2014 – is one. Its treatments reverse the effects of degenerating tissues and organs.
Another company we’ve discussed at Money Morning is Celgene Corp. (Nasdaq: CELG), which has spent tens of millions of dollars investing in stem cell technologies.
While those are great biotech stock picks, we’re really blown away by the potential of the newest longevity stocks we’ve discovered …
You see, doctors from Harvard, MIT, Penn, Scripps, and Johns Hopkins have helped to develop a treatment that could be the first step toward a permanent cure for mankind’s most deadly disease: Aging.
They may have just unlocked our ability to switch on an “immortality” gene… and one company is at the forefront of this development…
Immortality Genes Can Help Us Live Forever
For many, the concept of unlocking an immortality gene in humans sounds too fantastic to believe. But the gene has already been discovered in nine other species on earth.
And the gene is present in human DNA too. Here’s how it works…
As we age, cells die off and are replenished through cytokinesis. Cytokinesis is the process where cells repeatedly duplicate – they make copies of themselves.
Here’s the problem: Every time your cells duplicate, the protective “caps” at the end of each strand of your DNA, called telomeres, shrink. So over the years, with each successive copy, the telomeres keep shrinking, the DNA gets more exposed – and your cells become less and less accurate copies of themselves.
The gradual deterioration of these telomeres is the primary reason we get weaker and sicker over time, and why aging eventually kills us.
But what if the breakdown of telomeres can be slowed – or even reversed?
“Immortality might be much more common than we think,” said Dr. Kevin Peterson, a molecular biologist at Dartmouth.
Longevity Stocks Profit from Immortality
It all started when Dr. Carol Grieder and Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn, biologists at UC Berkeley, showed that an “immortality gene” creates a protein that prevents the deterioration of telomeres during cytokinesis.
The implications of this discovery for human aging were huge. It won Drs. Grieder and Blackburn the Nobel Prize in medicine in 2009.
Harvard geneticists “switched on” the telomerase in mice, and found that they lived 40% longer.
That’s the equivalent of adding an additional 32 years to your life. They described what they saw as an “unprecedented reversal of age-related decline.”
And now, after decades of experimentation and recent clinical trials, doctors have developed a safe and effective treatment that could allow us the switch on the human immortality gene.
The New York Times described this breakthrough therapy as“The biggest change in our understanding of biology since the discovery of the double helix.”
Within the first year of this treatments release, we could be looking at a $6.2 billion industry.
And from there it’s going to take off.
Each year - the costs of the treatment will come down - and more and more people will be able to access it.
By year three it could be at the center of an $11.65 billion medical phenomenon.
And it won’t stop there.
Within 5 years – when immortality becomes affordable for everyone - it will explode to at least $29.78 billion annually.
