Loyal, a Silicon Valley start-up hoping to develop life extension pills for dogs has raised $11 million in funding. The start-up’s official name is actually Cellular Longevity but it operates under the brand name Loyal, under which it plans to sell the dog longevity drugs it plans to have developed within three years.
The company is run by Celine Halioua, a 26-year-old who dropped out of her Oxford PhD programme in 2019 to take up an offer to work for a longevity-focused venture capital fund in San Francisco. Within a year she had reached the conclusion that developing drugs for dog longevity was a realistic shorter-term target and a significant market, and founded her own company in 2020.
The strategy of the drugs Loyal will develop will be to address the underlying cause of the diseases particular dog breeds commonly suffer from, rather than treat age-related diseases after they have developed. Halioua believes this could extend the median lifespan of different breeds by between 6 months and 3 years. As well as keeping them healthier and more active for longer.
She points at studies that have indicated the lifespan of labradors can be extended by almost two years by restricting their calorie intake. Doing so seems to delay the onset of cancer, osteoarthritis, and other conditions typical for older labradors. What intrigues Halioua is the calorie reduction approach shows evidence of delaying the onset of different diseases.
“These are very different diseases, An osteoarthritis drug would never work for cancer and vice versa, but clearly, there was some conserved ageing mechanism that was impacted by the calorie restriction that impacted the development of those diseases in labradors.”
Loyal’s team believes that combining different therapies that target the underlying causes of diseases that kill dogs in their old age could significantly extend their life expectancy. Initial research is focusing on larger dog breeds and particularly the question of why they often have much shorter median lifespans than those of smaller breeds.
Halioua explains:
“These things are all complex, there’s no one holy grail, but if you find something that hits a large driver of why these dogs are dying sooner, and actually ageing faster, then that might help get them a little bit closer to their smaller dog.”
Despite not offering any concrete information on what is in the drugs or what they specifically target, Halioua says Loyal will next year start trials on two treatments that the start-up believes may show an anti-ageing effect for dogs. What she would say was:
“It’s basically trying to compensate for the genetic mistake that we accidentally gave dogs when we were inbreeding them to create breeds. Each dog breed has kind of a classical genetic mistake. Like German shepherds often get hip dysplasia, golden retrievers get cancer at quite high rates. And so the drug is targeting what we think is the core genetic mistake that causes them to age at a much faster rate and die faster.”
Ultimately Halioua believes that effective anti-ageing treatments for dogs will help convince humans to try similar trials on themselves. Most anti-ageing research is done on lab mice but the young entrepreneur says dogs are a much better comparison for humans:
“We are nothing like mice, they have shorter lifespans, they are super inbred, they live in labs their entire lives. Whereas dogs live much longer lifespans and develop age-related diseases over time like humans do. Dogs are one of the best models of human ageing”.
“A mouse will often have cancer induced or get a model of what is supposed to represent Parkinson’s and will test a drug for efficacy against it, whereas dogs actually develop the diseases naturally and develop them at approximately the same rate and time in our lifetimes that we do.”