These firms are working to unlock the “immortality gene” in humans. The implications are unprecedented…
Will These Top Biotech Companies Help Humans Live Forever?
You and I – we all have an immortality gene hidden inside our DNA. And it holds the key to living forever…
The idea sounds crazy at first. But the gene has already been discovered in nine other species on earth.
Here’s how it works…
Right now, doctors at Harvard, MIT, Penn, Scripps, and Johns Hopkins are developing a treatment that could be the first step toward a permanent cure for mankind's most deadly disease: Aging.
As we age, cells die off and are replenished through cytokinesis. Cytokinesis is the process where cells repeatedly duplicate – they make copies of themselves.
But there’s one 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.
Top Biotech Companies Could 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.
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 five years – when immortality becomes affordable for everyone – it will explode to at least $29.78 billion annually.
