I don’t know about you, but for 34 years of my existence, I was always promised a much longer lifespan than previous generations. After all, technology is rapidly advancing, and by the time I reach old age, the new 90 should be the old 50, right?
As you’re well aware, that hasn’t happened yet. Sure there are advancements in technology each and every day, but none of us are expecting to live as long as those characters in futuristic science fiction flicks.
But there are people working on it, and one of them is Celine Halioua, Founder and CEO of Cellular Longevity, Inc. Except this biotechnology company isn’t attempting to extend the life of humans. Halioua is working on developing therapies to treat aging in dogs.
That’s right, man’s best friend, whose life has always been too short for our liking, could finally be living more years with their human. When you think about it more, it makes sense. Biotech firms aren’t going to be experimenting on humans until therapies have been proven to work on other large mammals.
At the time this article was written, Cellular Longevity’s clinical-stage veterinary medicine company, Loyal, had raised $27M. As you can imagine, there is plenty of excitement around extending the lives of Fido or Bailey. But the fact that Loyal’s work is backed by decades of research on the biology of aging has investors even more thrilled.
So what does Halioua expect to accomplish? First, it’s much easier and cheaper to perform clinical trials on animals than on humans, where 90% of new drugs don’t make it through. And most importantly, canine lives are much shorter than human lives, greatly shortening the time it takes to receive results.
Halioua’s interest in the field of biology began at the University of Texas in the state where she was born and raised. Even though she majored in neuroscience, her interest in aging began during her sophomore year internship at the SENS Research Foundation, a leading lab in La Jolla, California, working on age-related diseases.
Fast forward after two internships with the nonprofit, and Halioua was convinced the study of aging was the field she wanted to pursue permanently. “It just made so much sense,” she told Wired in October 2022. “I very quickly knew that this was a hundred percent where I was going to spend my life.”
After impressing an Oxford researcher involved with the SENS Research Foundation, she was offered the chance to move to the UK. That experience quickly soured after realizing that her admiration for the foundation was quickly disappearing. In the past years, she publicly outed the foundation’s co-founder and mastermind Aubrey de Grey for encouraging her to sleep with potential donors to raise more funds (an accusation Grey has denied).
In 2018, Halioua was in search of something new. She contacted a leading woman in aging treatments, the child prodigy who had enrolled in MIT at 14, Laura Deming. Deming was running a venture capital fund for age-related startups in San Francisco. After impressing Deming in a phone interview, Halioua was offered a short but impactful two-week internship at WeWork in San Francisco.
After her brief internship, Halioua was offered a job and the opportunity to simultaneously finish her Ph.D. at Oxford. But soon after, she was dealing with an investigation at the university due to a formal complaint she had filed against her supervisor regarding bullying and harassment. Overwhelmed by the investigation, her studies, and her work, she left Oxford to focus on her passion.