Tom Weldon has 35 years of senior management experience, primarily in the medical device industry, in both early stage and public companies. He is a well-known entrepreneur and venture capitalist and holds more than two dozen patents. He has founded more than a dozen companies, which have created more than $2 billion in shareholder value. Today, he is the founder, executive chairman and CEO of Ponce De Leon Health, which focuses on increasing human health span. Rejuvant is a product he helped develop.
Question: As an investor, why are you interested in nutritional supplements and longevity?
Answer: Although there is certainly an interest by private equity (PE) in the vitamin, mineral, supplement (VMS) industry, there is a larger interest in the longevity segment in particular. It is the largest market opportunity in the history of humanity, provided you have a protected product that actually works and can be measured to show that it is effective. What makes this segment of the VMS industry particularly interesting to PE, is that if a product can be developed that is safe and efficacious, the cost of doing so will be significantly lower than products in the pharma/biotech industry, thus making any product suitable for the mass market. Specifically, the FDA (U.S. Food and Drug Administration) does not consider aging to be a disease, and its purpose is to regulate drugs and devices that treat or cure diseases. This theoretically may allow somewhat broader claims to be used with products that are developed to address aging that are not drugs.
From a practical perspective, no one will ever fund a human trial that uses lifespan as the endpoint, so no one will ever be able to make that specific claim. There are, however, biomarkers that are scientifically accepted as an accurate proxy. If aging were a disease, and a longevity claim was the objective of a product, the biomarker endpoint would have to be validated in a randomized, double-blinded placebo controlled human trial, showing that the marker accurately predicted human lifespan before the FDA would accept that endpoint. No one will ever do that trial. This makes biomarkers potentially useful to longevity companies who use VMS compounds, assuming that a recognized biomarker actually showed that the product slows, stops or reverses biological age.
Question: What is Rejuvent and why is there a men’s and women’s formula?
Answer: Rejuvant is a patent-pending, timed release, non-pharmaceutical, commercially available longevity product. The men’s version is a combination of the calcium salt form of alpha ketoglutarate (CaAKG) plus vitamin A, and the women’s version is CaAKG plus vitamin D3. Ponce De Leon Health (PDLH) tested hundreds of combinations of VMS compounds for effect on lifespan and healthspan in the invertebrate model, and then tested the most effective in the small mammal model, before moving into humans. The results were quite interesting, very few combinations of VMS compounds are additive, and just as many combinations actually shortened lifespan. The specific combinations PDLH uses in our products, including Rejuvant, are those combinations that maximize healthspan, which is the disease-free years of living for each gender.
Question: What are the most important results of the clinical trial on the product?
Answer: There were two major papers published on the work PDLH has done thus far: a mouse study published in Cell Metabolism, and a human study published in the journal Aging. The mouse study showed an average increase in lifespan of 12 percent, an increase in health span of 41 percent, and a compression of morbidity of 46 percent. The most intriguing data here is the compression of morbidity, as it implies you live longer, healthier and you are terminally ill only for a brief period of time. If this translates into human results, this further implies a dramatic reduction in societal health care costs, and human suffering.
The human study recently published in Aging, included subjects who took a saliva-based biomarker test (DNA methylation), then began using Rejuvant for an average of seven months, before retesting. As a result, participants decreased their biological age by an average of eight years in seven months. This is an unprecedented study, with results that appear to be similar to the extrapolated mouse data published in Cell Metabolism.
Question: What are your plans for growth?
Answer: We are at a point where we need meaningful expansion capital, to take advantage of the opportunity in front of us. There are also several additional product opportunities based upon our patent-pending processes and products that we will likely partner with strategically to bring to market. Examples would be pet food or treats, sports drinks and longevity food products. We are also exploring additional market channels.
