a16z’s Jorge Conde says uncovering ‘unexpected causal relationships’ in biology could define the future of healthspan.
On February 4-5, over 2,500 attendees and more than 175 speakers will convene in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, for the Hevolution Foundation’s second Global Healthspan Summit (GHS). The event, hosted by the global non-profit, will explore the pathways and frameworks needed to drive and accelerate progress in the healthspan ecosystem.
From insights into the research and technologies reshaping the field, to exploring the healthspan investment landscape and funding opportunities, Hevolution’s GHS 2025 is poised to host discussions and actions that will shape the future of healthspan. Hevolution Foundation will also be releasing the second edition of its Global Healthspan Report, one of the leading publications on the state of healthspan science, technology, investments and policy globally.
Building on two global surveys, investment data from Longevity.Technology, expert interviews and research, the 2025 Hevolution Global Healthspan Report will examine the current state and future prospects of healthspan, highlighting key developments and actions the field can take as an ecosystem to bring healthspan to the next level. Longevity.Technology was delighted to be part of the team that contributed to producing the report.
Longevity.Technology: Continuing our interview series ahead of the Hevolution Global Healthspan Summit, today we bring you an interview with Jorge Conde, a general partner at venture capital giant Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) Bio + Health. a16z has long been at the forefront of investing in healthspan-focused companies, and last year led a star-studded funding round in consumer health platform Function. We caught up with him as part of the research for the 2025 Hevolution Global Healthspan Report to find out more about what’s making investors tick when it comes to healthspan.
As someone with his finger firmly on the pulse of the healthspan field, Conde is bullish about the investment opportunities it presents. He hails the “tremendous progress” that has already been made across various approaches to addressing morbidity, fueling a growing ambition across the healthcare industry.
“GLP-1s are a prime example of this progress,” he says. “They attack such an intractable problem – first by overcoming a major barrier to improving human health and second, by offering a solution that has far-reaching societal impacts across the globe. Their success underscores the potential for breakthroughs in other transformative areas within the healthspan space.”
Through his work at a16z, Conde says he is seeing more and more early stage companies going after “big diseases,” such as neurodegeneration and cardiovascular health.
“That is a massive increase in ambition,” he says. “And if and when we are successful there, you’ll see a corresponding impact on morbidity, and when you see that, you’ll see a corresponding uplift in healthspan. That’s reason to be excited, that’s reason to be optimistic, and frankly, that’s reason to be opportunistic.”
Pragmatic optimism required
While acknowledging that healthspan is “incredibly attractive” to investors, Conde also acknowledges any opportunity in the life sciences space must also be treated with some pragmatism.
“Biology is complex and the sector has witnessed many failures along the way,” he says. “So this pragmatic optimism is critically important. But how does that shape the way we think about specific opportunities within the field? What pharma defines as an epoch, startups define as a lifetime. So you have to have that in mind when you’re looking at opportunities at an early stage.”
First, says Conde, early stage companies must be able to demonstrate to investors like a16z that their approach has impact. The solution for early-stage investors, he argues, is to go after a reduction in morbidity that can be measured on a practical time scale for a startup company.
“Is there a likely ability to demonstrate a meaningful impact in reduction of morbidity on a time scale that makes sense for a startup?” he says. “We’ve seen the drama around Alzheimer’s that has played out over the last five years or so, because that’s a really tough and long experiment to run. But there are other genetically driven versions of neurodegeneration that have become much more tractable for modalities like gene therapies. There are viable targets to pursue; easier nuts to crack. And once you do that, then you start to see how you can widen the aperture.”
Another area that Conde says a16z is particularly interested in, is the emergence of new modalities that can change the course of a disease by impacting its underlying biological pathology.
“Many genetic diseases take a lifetime to develop, gradually causing damage that not only shortens lifespan but also steadily diminishes quality of life,” he says. “However, new therapeutic modalities are emerging that have the potential to address the progressive deterioration caused by these conditions.”
By way of an example, Conde points to an a16z-backed company called CAMP4 that is targeting regulatory RNAs with antisense oligonucleotides [ASOs].
“ASOs are a well-established modality, but CAMP4’s innovative approach targets regulatory RNAs to up-regulate gene expression in patients with devastating conditions that severely impact their quality of life,” he says. “By addressing the root cause, this approach has the potential to lift dietary restrictions and reduce dependence on heavy medications. It meaningfully improves healthspan with a chronic therapy – not just by managing symptoms, but by treating the underlying pathology itself.”
Unlocking the ’magic’ of AI
Of course, Conde says that a16z is also keenly interested in the potential of AI to help address some of the challenges in healthspan.
“Health is an extraordinarily complex biological phenomenon – a system that’s incredibly difficult to untangle, especially when it comes to understanding what becomes dysregulated, where, and when,” he explains. “One area we’re particularly interested in is how technologies like artificial intelligence can help us take the first steps toward unraveling these complexities.”
According to Conde, the “real magic” of AI in healthspan lies in finding new, “meaningful” data sets that the algorithms can learn from.
“So what are those meaningful data sets?” he asks. “First, there is a lot of latent data sitting in the halls of Big Pharma and other organizations that have longitudinal patient experience. Healthy phenotype data, things that did or didn’t work in trials – there’s a lot of unstructured data in health systems that follow patients along their journeys. If we can find efficient ways to harness that data, structure it, and homogenize it in a way that we can meaningfully learn from it, then I think we are likely to find some unexpected, causal experiment theories that we can pursue.”
“There’s a lot of work happening at all the top pharmaceutical companies to think through this very deeply,” adds Conde, acknowledging that data is often viewed as a very proprietary and valuable asset. “Some of the portfolio companies that we work with that have really interesting technology on the AI side, are trying to find ways to work with large pharma on this.”
A global healthspan race?
Another area of interest to Conde is companies working on single-cell resolution data on multi-omic axes using technologies that can perturb and understand biological systems at the cellular level.
“Understanding how individual cells differ – whether in the proteins they express or the mutations they carry – is incredibly valuable,” he explains. “It allows us to create a much more detailed and accurate view of the underlying biology.”
An advantage of this approach, notes Conde, is that the number of companies with a clear ability to do this is limited, making it a clear and well-defined investable area for investors.
“Closed loop AI with perturbed biology are the most powerful examples of where I think we’re going to see powerful advances,” he says.
Looking to the future, Conde expects that the biggest opportunity could lie in uncovering “unexpected causal relationships” by interrogating and exploring biology more deeply. He cites the seemingly ever-increasing list of health benefits attributed to GLP-1s.
“In retrospect, these are obvious connections, because if you clear the biggest boulder in the pile, then you could see all these smaller boulders roll downhill,” he says, “But it’s the unknown causal effect that can have a dramatic, outsized impact on our health. And those are the kinds of things where I think we’re going to see a lot of opportunities emerge over the course of the next five years.”
“What’s also true is that over the course of the next five years, if we can identify targets to go after that are as attractive as the GLP-1s, the level of maturity that we have reached to build a widening arsenal to hit those targets has improved dramatically,” he says. “An intriguing dynamic unfolding in our industry is the natural experiment we’re witnessing: once a target is validated, it sparks a global race to develop therapeutics against it.”
To watch the Global Healthspan Summit live on Feb 4-5, please go to: www.hevolution.com
