Two nonprofits merged today. Here is the part of longevity that does not scale.

The SENS Research Foundation — a Mountain View nonprofit founded in 2009 around the idea that aging is accumulated damage that can be repaired — and Lifespan.io, a New York advocacy and crowdfunding group founded in 2014, announced today that they have completed a merger into a new 501(c)(3), the Lifespan Research Institute. Two small organizations have become one, with a shared board and a shared budget. Meanwhile, venture investors have put billions into for-profit companies promising to do the same science faster. Why should anyone trying to live well care about a nonprofit merger? Because this is where the field's conscience lives, and this is roughly how much it is funded.

What the new institute does. Three things the for-profit side mostly does not: it funds early-stage research too unglamorous to patent, it runs a crowdfunding platform for studies that would not clear a venture committee, and it publishes a news desk that reports when an aging intervention fails to replicate. The two groups had already worked together, crowdfunding mouse mitochondrial research — a worm-and-mouse corner of the field, and labeled as such. The board includes Bill Liao as chair and Keith Comito as president.

Ben’s take

In venture we fund what sells, and I have said so in pitch meetings. A supplement with mouse data and 50% gross margins gets funded; a careful negative result does not. Nonprofits are where the negative results go to be published. A merger of two small ones is not a sign the science failed. It is a sign of the economics: the part of longevity that tells you the truth about effect sizes has a crowdfunding page and no business model. That is exactly why its news desk is worth your time.

Loree’s take

When a patient brings me a longevity claim, the nonprofit summaries are often where I find the sentence the marketing left out — the sample size, the species, the endpoint. The money does not fund that sentence. Someone has to.

The other side of the ledger. Altos Labs launched in 2022 with $3 billion to pursue cellular reprogramming; Retro Biosciences with $180 million. Neither has human efficacy data for aging itself, and neither has promised any soon. The clearest contrast is a study the smaller side paid for: the PEARL trial, a placebo-controlled test of low-dose rapamycin in 114 adults over 48 weeks, was crowdfunded through Lifespan.io by individual donors. Whatever PEARL finds, it will be published — including if it finds nothing. That sentence is the whole difference between the two ledgers.