Forever young: the business of longevity drugs

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1:04The Economist.

1:10Ọrẹ Ogunbiyi: Hello, and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm Ore Ogumbi.

1:20Ọrẹ Ogunbiyi: Today on the show, does British crime data really show that immigrants commit more sex crimes? and the not-so-small world of miniatures.

1:34Ọrẹ Ogunbiyi: First up, though.

1:44Ọrẹ Ogunbiyi: Xin Xi Huang, the first emperor of China, is said to have died after consuming mercury, an elixir he ironically took to extend his life. But he wasn't the last Chinese leader to imagine he could conquer death.

2:04Ọrẹ Ogunbiyi: Just last year, open mics caught the presidents of China and Russia talking about organ transplants that could help people live to 150. It seems that for the elite, life extension is becoming standard conversation. Dario Amadei, co-founder of Anthropic, has written and spoken about how AI, by accelerating science and drug discovery, could help to increase lifespans. I think in 100 years, humans can live to maybe 140 instead of 70 or 80. Open AI's Sam Altman, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, and PayPal's Peter Thiel have all invested in companies looking to extend human lifespan. Despite all this, the elixir of life remains elusive.

2:55Ọrẹ Ogunbiyi: But this focus on living longer could just maybe find a drug that makes ageing optional. And that's changing the drug industry. If drugs for longevity work, the price will actually be enormous. Shaila's Chitnis is a global business writer at The Economist. To give you some sense, the recent revolution in GLP-1 drugs shows that obesity was not just a niche market. Now a drug that slows aging could be bigger still. And that's got a lot of people's attention. So I guess we could say that pharma companies are now seeking the elixir of life. I think to be fair, a lot of the work is actually being pursued by smaller biotechs.

3:41And Big Pharma is eyeing this from the sidelines to see which ones will be promising and then perhaps swoop in to buy them. One of the challenges why I think Big Pharma is a little bit on the sidelines and letting biotechs take the lead is because today aging is not recognized as a disease by the FDA, which is America's drug regulator. And that means that there is no direct route for approving a medicine that slows aging. So instead, companies that want to show that they have a drug that treats longevity must first win approval for targeting specific diseases that are hallmarks of aging and then hopefully try to expand that to other indications.

4:22Ọrẹ Ogunbiyi: And is there a precedent for this kind of approach? Absolutely. GLP drugs are a really good model. They started out first for treating diabetes, moved on to obesity, and have since then actually been shown to treat a variety of conditions from heart disease, sleep apnea, kidney problems. And literally every month, there is a new study that shows a new promising area where it is working. And so the belief is GLP drugs, by lowering some of the risks of diseases that are frequently associated with aging can actually help people live longer. And both Novo and Lily are actually positioning GLPs as the first longevity drugs.

5:03And the early results are promising, but we need to treat them with a pinch of salt. And the reason for that is most of these studies have been done on people that are actually ill with that particular disease. We do not have robust clinical trials on what the effects are, particularly as it pertains to longevity, for healthy people who are taking these drugs. So that is still some time off.

5:27Ọrẹ Ogunbiyi: Okay, so let me get this right. So the way forward is to find drugs that fix known problems, known diseases, but also happen to have a side effect of extending lifespans. Absolutely. And I think it's important to understand what are the commercial factors that are driving this interest. One of the reasons I think why the drug industry is interested in this particular space is again going back to GLP medicines, which have shown how big a potential market could be for diseases that frankly pharma companies were not taking seriously before. And longevity, if you can imagine, is probably the biggest price of them all.

6:04It's challenging, but the price is also really large.

6:06Ọrẹ Ogunbiyi: Tell me a bit more about the commercial incentive here. A lot of pharma companies are facing what is known as a patent cliff, which is when a lot of their patents on blockbusters are expiring by the end of the decade. And so they need to replenish this by coming out with new blockbusters. And going after such large markets like longevity, that's just really tempting. Pharma companies are partnering with a lot of biotech. So for example, I spoke with a company called Insilico, which has really been working on this space for a while. Lilly has struck a deal with Insilico, which is potentially worth up to$2.75 billion.

6:39What Insilico does is they pursue a model which is known as quote-unquote dual-purpose therapeutics. What that means is, since aging is not recognized as a disease, they are targeting specific known diseases, but they are designing those drugs with longevity and aging effects in mind. And Novartis, which is another pharma giant, has also signed a deal worth$550 million with a company called BioAge Labs, which is, again, a Californian biotech that is working on aging drugs. This approach actually gets to the point of getting a drug to market quicker, but then also potentially starting to get data on its effects for longevity.

7:19Ọrẹ Ogunbiyi: Okay, so most of this funding is taking a fresh approach to known diseases. How else are biotechs thinking about this? One of the ones that I found really interesting was a drug that is targeting aging, not in humans, but for dogs. And as a dog owner, that actually interests me a lot. there's this company called loyal which is an american biotech firm which has developed a beef flavored daily pill that is meant to keep older dogs or dogs over 10 years old healthy for much longer by essentially improving the metabolism this drug is actually going through clinical trials or as i may call it canine trials with dogs right now and it could reach the market next year.

8:00Why this is interesting is because studying aging in humans is not that easy, the time spans are much longer and so the hope is by actually looking at what happens with dogs, potentially the same mechanisms could work for humans as well.

8:12Ọrẹ Ogunbiyi: Now Shailesh, scientists and rich folk have always sought to live longer. Why has this science only taken off now? I won't say that the science has taken off right now, the science has been in the works for a while but definitely I think there is a renewed optimism in this space and a big reason for that is AI. The way AI is actually impacting this is there is a belief among a lot of entrepreneurs that a lot of the hard problems in biology that were previously not solvable or were very difficult to crack could potentially be opened up because of AI. So that is one big reason. The other reason is itself, a lot of the founders as well as backers of these AI labs themselves are interested in this field.

8:56And so I think the conference of these two events has really raised the profile of longevity back again. There have been waves, we've gone through these before, but this time I think there is much more interest as well as backing from some of the Silicon Valley types. So there's this wave of new biotechs that have been primarily backed by a lot of the AI folks, which is again generating an interest in this field.

9:16Ọrẹ Ogunbiyi: Now, very important question. The clock is ticking. When do I get to start taking a drug that will keep me forever young? I would love to say soon, but I think realistically it's just going to be a while unless we see some major breakthroughs. And the reason for that is traditionally drug development is a very long and expensive process. So it can take anywhere between 10 to 15 years to develop a drug and over two and a half billion dollars. Now, you compound that with when you're studying aging, the actual effects of aging itself may take 10 to 20 years to fully play out for you to know for sure.

9:51And so really to be able to definitively say if there's a particular drug that improves your chances of living longer or reduces the probability of getting certain diseases, that's going to take a long time to play out. And this field has been littered with false starts for a while. So even when we talk about all the optimism, all the different new mechanisms in which we are trying to solve this problem, we need to caveat that by saying we've been here before. There have been multiple starts and stops. And so we need to tread cautiously.

10:20Ọrẹ Ogunbiyi: Shailesh, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you so much for having me.

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11:55Ọrẹ Ogunbiyi: Immigration is a contentious subject at the best of times. but a number of especially ugly, high-profile sex crimes have added fuel to the fire. The topic has become a recurring talking point for right-wing commentators opposed to migration and asylum seekers. Even Britain's Shadow Justice Secretary Nick Timothy has weighed in, claiming that Afghans are over 20 times more likely to commit sex crimes than Brits. But is that claim true? Our data correspondent James Fransham scoured years of crime figures to find out. So the British government doesn't officially publish crime statistics by nationality or immigration status.

12:39The data that is available and now in the public domain has been published in response to individual freedom of information requests. And these cover raw counts of convictions by nationality from the police national computer. Frankly, Ore, that has left any Tom, Dick or Harry to do their own analysis. And one claim, which originated from a right-wing website called the Centre for Migration Control, claims that Afghan nationals are 22 times more likely to be convicted of sexual offences than British people. But that number is pretty ropey.

13:15Ọrẹ Ogunbiyi: Why is it ropey and is there more robust data that can show us who's actually committing these crimes? So yeah that figure rests on a population estimate for England and Wales of 13 ,000 for the number of Afghan nationals and that comes from an official data source called the Annual Population Survey but by my calculation that number was extrapolated from a sample of fewer than 60 individuals and in 2021 the Office for National Statistics discontinued it because of plummeting survey response rates. Now I've examined the data properly. First the Migration Observatory, a think tank at Oxford University, provided me with the numbers that they had obtained from the Ministry of Justice.

13:59This data detail 8 million crimes across 12 different categories of which 106 ,000 of the 8 million are labelled sexual offences. Now the police recording of self-reported nationality is really, really messy. So there are 309 nationalities listed in this data set. Among them is Buvet Island, which is an uninhabited volcanic rock belonging to Norway. And what we did was to clean up this data and assign each location to its formally recognised country. And what I would say is that the vast majority, four-fifths of sex crimes, are committed by British people. By contrast, 409 offences in total, that's less than half of 1%, were committed by people who, when asked to state their nationality in police custody, said they were Afghan.

14:48Right. So the absolute numbers here are actually very low. They are. Yeah, 409 is not a big number. But whether that's relatively big or small depends on how many Afghans there are in Britain. And that is the kind of question at hand here. how many Afghans are there in Britain. The best estimate of the country's population comes from the census in 2021. And this is a count of all usual residents. But this is where it gets tricky. So remember, we're talking about 409 crimes over a 15 year period, but we can't use 15 years of crime and divide it by the population in a single year because we don't know how the population has changed outside of that census year.

15:30It's particularly problematic with Afghanistan because after the Taliban took over Afghanistan in August 2021, there was an influx of Afghans into Britain. And from our estimates, we think about 36 ,000 Afghans moved to Britain. And so what we did was to adjust the census population and come up with a kind of time series estimate of the population for every nationality in Britain where that was available, based on a combination of visa issuance, humanitarian flows, asylum seeking, and then less people that became naturalised British citizens and those that we think left the country. So on that basis, we think that the Afghan population roughly doubled between 2021 and the end of 2022.

16:18So that's basically how we arrived at a kind of solid population figure.

16:23Ọrẹ Ogunbiyi: And so of that Afghan population in Britain, what does the data show? If we use those population figures, we could create a crude rate, say, so divide the crimes by the headline population number. But that would be misleading. And that's for several reasons. One is because the criminal age of responsibility is 10 years old. So we shouldn't include children in our population. And second is that three quarters of sexual offences are committed by men between the ages of 21 and 59. So what we need to do is to adjust the population to account for its kind of demographic skew, as it were. So Afghans, for example, about 10 years younger than the population at large.

17:06So after we performed all this kind of standardisation and so on, we think the best estimate of Afghan nationals' conviction rates for sexual offences is not 22 times, but seven times.

17:18Ọrẹ Ogunbiyi: That sounds to me like enough to debunk the Shadow Justice Secretary's claim, but it still points to a disparity in conviction rates. What might explain that? Yeah, so I spoke to Ben Brindle at the Migration Observatory. So he points out that it shouldn't be terribly surprising that conviction rates differ between nationalities, just as they would differ between British citizens if you were to look at the data in detail. If you think about migrants' backgrounds, particularly from Afghanistan and other countries, they will have witnessed some extreme violence. They've come from deep poverty. And when they arrive in the country, particularly if they're seeking asylum, they're jobless, they're socially isolated and so on.

18:01So this will likely exacerbate their chances of committing crime. But I think there are some important caveats to point out here in the data too. So we're looking not at individuals here. we're looking at counts of convictions. So therefore, there could be a kind of few bad apples problem, whereby any given year is skewed by six offences committed by one individual. The second point would be to make is that if you come as a migrant to Britain, you give over your biometric data. And therefore, if you commit a crime, you might have a greater chance of being detected and arrested because they have that information about you.

18:42But we don't know anything about that. And I think the third thing to point out is that so many sexual offences, rapes for example, just one in seven are reported to police. So this is not looking at victimisation but it's just looking at the kind of end of that kind of justice route as it were.

19:00Ọrẹ Ogunbiyi: And James just to be clear the data that you looked at most focuses on nationality right not ethnicity. Yeah I looked and nationality because this was the figure that was in the kind of social media claims. Now, there is good data by ethnicity, and that is produced by the Ministry of Justice. And you can see that people of South Asian, of Middle Eastern ethnicity, so that would include naturalised British citizens. They have conviction rates for sexual offences, which are in the round, no higher or lower than white British people. That suggests to me that either there is skew in the underlying nationality data, which may be true, but it's worth keeping these numbers in perspective, Aure, because if we look at the absolute figures, so in 2010 to 2012, Afghan nationals were convicted of 92 sex crimes.

19:54About 12 years later, over a three-year period, that total number was 102. Ten additional sex crimes after the Afghan population has roughly tripled is certainly not an epidemic.

20:07Ọrẹ Ogunbiyi: James, thank you so much for joining us. My pleasure.

20:31As a young person, home ownership can often feel like a bit of a pipe dream. Sasha Loudermilk is a culture intern at The Economist. But I recently had the chance to view a sprawling Victorian manor house, complete with ornate joinery and wrought iron fireplaces, all for the low, low price of£300. The catch? It's about one metre squared. This meticulously crafted mini-mansion was just one of hundreds of tiny creations on display at the miniature convention I visited in Coventry.

21:15There are dozens of stalls here. There is weird and wonderful miniatures, pennies, whitewood furniture, small sorts. There's doll's house builders who are advertising their wares. There is truly anything you could possibly think of here.

21:33Miniatures are having a huge moment. Miniatures.com, one of America's leading small creation retailers, has seen more than a tripling of net sales over the last two years. The International Guild of Miniature Artisans reported a record number of new attendees at their annual art course. And yes, art is certainly the right word because these tiny trimmings are exquisite. As I made my way through the market, I spied micro taxidermy. So it was just born out of wanting a taxidermy head for my own doll's house. And I'm a vegetarian, so it's a bit odd. Making hunting trophies. luxury light fixtures.

22:24The Tiffany lamps, they are very complicated to make. You have to 3D print them and then you paint them, but you have to paint each individual single pane of glass the right colour. And enough food to host a feast. They've got all sorts of vegetable settings, like runner beans being made into pickling jars. Got a little apple pie setting with a little sugar shaker. Lots of apples, lots of pumpkins and cheese boards. In short, if it exists at scale, it probably exists in miniature too. The resurgence of this whimsical pastime reflects a growing enthusiasm for grandma hobbies, with people embracing hands-on analogue activities.

23:10But don't be fooled by the geriatric moniker. the miniaturists i met came in all shapes and sizes from fresh-faced 16 year olds i'm more of an appreciator you know because they can be quite pricey some of these things but they're just incredible and i think in the future i'd love to collect them and build my own world but making them also sounds fun as well you know like because then you can show off your work I can also appreciate other peoples. To seasoned urban planners. Well, this little village is something my friend Sylvia and I put together on our coffee and cake mornings. It's called the Bits and Bobs village because it's literally from bits from our craft drawers and what have you.

23:55It started with two little cottages and over the 12 months it's grown into the full village. It's got the pub called the Dirty Duck. It's got the school with the children at playtime. It's got the church with a wedding, the cafe and the hairdresser. It's got pretty much everything that we think should be in a village. The ability to control a world of your own appeals during times of instability, and this tiny trend offers an accessible form of escapism. Miniatures provide the freedom to create expansively without monopolising your space. But although the physical footprint may seem smaller than other hobbies Things can very quickly snowball As the mayor of Bits and Bob's village warned Well Sylvia wanted to make a cottage And when we'd finished the cottage She held it in her hand this particular morning And she said we could make a village And I was horrified and thought a village But from hence from there the village has grown I guess it really is a small world after all

25:15Ọrẹ Ogunbiyi: That's all for this episode of The Intelligence. We'll see you back here tomorrow.

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