Ancestry.com has a new health focus underway: Aging.
The popular genealogical company is working with Calico, a secretive Google-funded startup focused on longevity research and therapeutics. The two will study the human heredity aspects of lifespan.
This comes right on the heels of Ancestry’s announcement just last week that it’s entering healthcare – building out a new arm, AncestryHealth, whose first offering is a tool to track hereditary disease.
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And this is a high-profile partnership: The well-funded Calico has a number of impressive partnerships in place, with aims to “cure death“: With Harvard and MIT’s Broad Institute, and with pharma giant AbbVie in an R&D anti-aging drug deal that could reach $1.5 billion.
The two companies will work together to examine the role of genetics, and how they influence lifespan in those families, particularly, that have unusual longevity. They haven’t disclosed financial terms of the partnership.
“Our common experience suggests that there may be hereditary factors underlying longevity, but finding the genes responsible using standard techniques has proven elusive,” David Botstein, Calico’s Chief Scientific Officer, said in a statement. “This is an extraordinary opportunity to address a fundamental unanswered question in longevity research using high quality human pedigrees.”
The mechanics of aging have long been of interest to researchers – but we’re approaching a point where we can start quantifying it more accurately. Take the work being done at J. Craig Venter’s Human Longevity Inc., or that longitudinal study released last week that looked at the difference between chronological and biological ages.
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Notably, Reuters reported in May that Ancestry.com is exploring a sale that’s valuing the company at between $2.5 billion and $3 billion, including debt. Sources said that Permira Advisers, the European buyout firm that owns much of Ancestry.com, had hired investment banks to run an auction for the company. In light of a potential sale, it’s interesting timing to roll out a strong healthcare initiative.
