Global Healthspan Summit explores new investor strategies, emerging opportunities and the challenges of making healthspan science investable.
Happening today and tomorrow in Riyadh, the Global Healthspan Summit 2025 brings together leading experts, investors and innovators to shape the future of healthcare science and investment. As breakthroughs in biotech, regenerative medicine and age-related disease interventions accelerate, strategic funding plays a critical role in translating research into real-world impact. This high-profile event serves as a platform for exploring the latest advancements, fostering collaboration between industries and identifying opportunities that can drive meaningful progress in extending healthy lifespan worldwide.
Longevity.Technology: One of the most anticipated discussions at the summit, Investment Focus – What Now, What Next, examined the evolving landscape of healthspan investment. The session started with Hevolution Foundation‘s Chief Investment Officer Dr William Greene in conversation with International Moderator, Nisha Pillai.
Greene kicked off explaining that the winds of change are blowing for healthspan.
“There really is a palpable change in the interest in the investment world, in the pharmaceutical industry and certainly in the biotechnology world, in thinking about investment in what we call healthspan, and in catalyzing a shift to more of a healthy rather than sick way of looking at disease and looking at functional status – and you can really see it,” said
Greene referenced the estimate that if we could add one year of healthy lifespan to the longevity that we’re achieving, that would be worth $40 trillion in increased domestic product, productivity and decreased healthcare costs.
“Now that’s a big number, but if you break it down, individuals, their families, their communities and societies all benefit from people living longer, healthier and being productive,” he explained. “And if you add up each of those, they overlap and it is just tremendous.”
Greene went to say he has been both encouraged and excited by the change he has seen even in the last couple of years.
“As we build our portfolio of investments within Hevolution, it is really quite remarkable how the number and quality of potential co-investors, other venture capitalists and potential CEOs and entrepreneurs has really increased – and they’re bringing really good ideas.”
However, Greene also referenced the “lingering skepticism” that increasing healthspan will be as easy or straightforward as cancer and infectious disease.
“What we need are practical examples of companies that develop drugs and therapeutics that have potential in healthspan, that make it all the way and get to people, and that create value for pharmaceutical companies and for patients and physicians. We have to build those companies, foster those companies and help them be successful – and then people will come.”
Asked about risk and de-risking the sector, Greene said that Hevolution both embraces risk and tries to reduce it.
“In the world of biotechnology and pharmaceutical drug development, it’s fashionable to talk about the valley of death, but there are actually many valleys of death, which is why it’s so hard to take a scientific idea and turn it into a drug,” he explained.
“We’re investing across the value chain from idea all the way into clinical trials and beyond. We’re actually identifying really interesting scientific ideas that could be companies, and taking those ideas, maybe from academic labs, and studying them in a really rigorous, more industrial setting to demonstrate whether the observation that was published holds up, can be extended and turned into something practical … And when those work, we’ll start companies from them. We are also starting companies ourselves in our office from bold next generation ideas that are quite risky in the beginning – we’re putting in the first money, doing the work and then we’re inviting investors in once it’s a little more pragmatic.”
To watch the Global Healthspan Summit live today and tomorrow, please go to: www.hevolution.com
