What are the key takeaways from this Pathfinders in Biopharma episode?

Key insights include: **NLRP3 Inflammasome Targeting:** Chronic inflammation rises with age and drives metabolic disease, including obesity. BioAge's brain-penetrant NLRP3 inhibitors, entering clinical trials in 2025, aim to suppress neuroinflammation that disrupts appetite regulation—offering a potential intervention earlier in disease progression than current treatments address.; **Exercise Biology as Drug Discovery:** Apelin, a circulating blood factor that declines with age but surges during exercise, represents a class of "exerkines" that can be mimicked therapeutically. BioAge's Novartis partnership targets this biology to identify metabolic and neurological drug candidates modeled on exercise's proven physiological benefits.; **Centenarian Data as Target Validation:** Studying people who live past 100 in good physical and cognitive health reveals molecular differences that validate drug targets. CETP inhibitors, for example, were identified partly because centenarians carry natural loss-of-function mutations in that gene—providing human genetic proof before clinical development.

What did Kristin Fortney discuss on Pathfinders in Biopharma?

BioAge CEO Kristen Fortney explains how studying centenarian biology and aging pathways—including NLRP3 inflammation and exercise-mimicking compounds like apelin—drives drug discovery targeting metabolic and age-related diseases. Key topics include: **NLRP3 Inflammasome Targeting:** Chronic inflammation rises with age and drives metabolic disease, including obesity. BioAge's brain-penetrant NLRP3 inhibitors, entering clinical trials in 2025, aim to suppress neuroinflammation that disrupts appetite regulation—offering a potential intervention earlier in disease progression than current treatments address.; **Exercise Biology as Drug Discovery:** Apelin, a circulating blood factor that declines with age but surges during exercise, represents a class of "exerkines" that can be mimicked therapeutically. BioAge's Novartis partnership targets this biology to identify metabolic and neurological drug candidates modeled on exercise's proven physiological benefits..

How long is this episode of Pathfinders in Biopharma?

This episode is 19 minutes long. SignalCast provides an AI-generated summary so you can get the key insights in about 3 minutes.

Pathfinders in Biopharma

BioAge is translating insights from the science of aging into new medicines

May 29, 2025

19 min episode · 2 min read

Kristin Fortney

Episode

19 min

Read time

2 min

Topics

Health & Wellness, Relationships, Investing

AI-Generated Summary

Published Mar 14, 2026

Key Takeaways

✓NLRP3 Inflammasome Targeting: Chronic inflammation rises with age and drives metabolic disease, including obesity. BioAge's brain-penetrant NLRP3 inhibitors, entering clinical trials in 2025, aim to suppress neuroinflammation that disrupts appetite regulation—offering a potential intervention earlier in disease progression than current treatments address.
✓Exercise Biology as Drug Discovery: Apelin, a circulating blood factor that declines with age but surges during exercise, represents a class of "exerkines" that can be mimicked therapeutically. BioAge's Novartis partnership targets this biology to identify metabolic and neurological drug candidates modeled on exercise's proven physiological benefits.
✓Centenarian Data as Target Validation: Studying people who live past 100 in good physical and cognitive health reveals molecular differences that validate drug targets. CETP inhibitors, for example, were identified partly because centenarians carry natural loss-of-function mutations in that gene—providing human genetic proof before clinical development.
✓Sarcopenia Regulatory Gap: No FDA approval pathway currently exists for sarcopenia or frailty, despite measurable endpoints and large patient populations. Establishing this path—as the EMA and Japan are exploring given aging demographics—could unlock a significant pipeline of muscle-preserving therapies and accelerate investment in aging indications.

What It Covers

BioAge CEO Kristen Fortney explains how studying centenarian biology and aging pathways—including NLRP3 inflammation and exercise-mimicking compounds like apelin—drives drug discovery targeting metabolic and age-related diseases.

Key Questions Answered

•NLRP3 Inflammasome Targeting: Chronic inflammation rises with age and drives metabolic disease, including obesity. BioAge's brain-penetrant NLRP3 inhibitors, entering clinical trials in 2025, aim to suppress neuroinflammation that disrupts appetite regulation—offering a potential intervention earlier in disease progression than current treatments address.
•Exercise Biology as Drug Discovery: Apelin, a circulating blood factor that declines with age but surges during exercise, represents a class of "exerkines" that can be mimicked therapeutically. BioAge's Novartis partnership targets this biology to identify metabolic and neurological drug candidates modeled on exercise's proven physiological benefits.
•Centenarian Data as Target Validation: Studying people who live past 100 in good physical and cognitive health reveals molecular differences that validate drug targets. CETP inhibitors, for example, were identified partly because centenarians carry natural loss-of-function mutations in that gene—providing human genetic proof before clinical development.
•Sarcopenia Regulatory Gap: No FDA approval pathway currently exists for sarcopenia or frailty, despite measurable endpoints and large patient populations. Establishing this path—as the EMA and Japan are exploring given aging demographics—could unlock a significant pipeline of muscle-preserving therapies and accelerate investment in aging indications.

Notable Moment

Fortney notes that FGF21, now among the most commercially valuable drug targets via incretins, has long appeared in aging biology research—transgenic mice with elevated FGF21 live roughly 30% longer—suggesting the field's most lucrative targets may already exist in plain sight.

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Episode Transcript

Hello, and welcome to Pathfinders in Biopharma, the podcast series from RBC Capital Markets, where we uncover the key trends and catalysts shaping the fast moving world of biotech and pharma. I'm your host today, Scott Neidhold, director in RBC's life sciences investment banking practice. In this episode, I'll be talking with special guest, Kristin Fortney, CEO and cofounder of BioAge, a company that harnesses the biology of human aging to develop new therapies for metabolic diseases. She'll be unpacking the nuances of longevity and the biology of aging, the interventions that can address the challenges of age related diseases, and current and future opportunities for biotech investors. So, Kristen, it's great to have you on the podcast. Yeah. Thanks for having me. I wanna start at the beginning. You're a scientist by training. Your background is in aging biology, genetics, and bioinformatics. You founded BioAge in 2015. Can you tell us a little bit about your background and what inspired you to go on this journey to understand and address aging and ultimately found BioAge? Sure, happy to start at the beginning. So as you mentioned, my research career, my scientific training was really also in aging biology, really more from a computational, statistical perspective. And I was really excited about this area of science because it seems like it could have really profound consequences for human health. There are now a growing list of interventions, drugs, or therapies you can give to a mouse, for example, right, that let the animal live healthier longer, that delay the incidence of multiple different diseases. And if those could be translated to a human context, that would be really exciting for the health of the entire population. And as you mentioned, most recently before founding BioAge, I worked on the genetics of exceptional human longevity in that was at Stanford. And what's exciting there too is just just how concrete it is, right? There already are a lot of people who live to be past the age of 100 or even 110 and are still physically intact, cognitively intact. We really want to learn from those examples. And that was really those ideas that led to the founding of BioAge with my co founder, Eric Morgan. And we really wanted to start out from the outset by studying long lived Cuban populations, people who are already aging successfully, seeing what was different about them, and then using that knowledge and those discoveries to help inform drug discovery for the rest of us. When we talk about the biology of aging, are we talking about lifespan, health span, both? And what does that distinction mean in the context of this work? Yeah. I think that's a a great question. Right? Like, when you're when you're talking about extending lifespan, extending animal lifespan or human lifespan, what does that actually amount to? Like, none of us want to be sick for an additional ten years, right? So there are these two very different …

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