Senior Principal Scientist Drug Substance

Bryan Johnson tackled human longevity. Now he wants dogs to live forever. Aug 29, 2026, 3:00 AM PT Tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson has become famous for his mission to help humans live forever, with his catchphrase "Don't die." Now he wants to do the same thing for dogs. Johnson's interest in canine longevity was piqued when he recently adopted a professionally trained Belgian Malinois named Katara to protect him from attackers. This week, at a longevity event in San Francisco, Katara was a constant presence at Johnson's side as he cheered on tech workers trying to complete as many push-ups as possible, one metric used to measure their biological age. Later, Katara, who will turn two in October, lay patiently at Johnson's feet as he was interviewed by venture capitalist Sarah Guo. "I get quite a few death threats, and so she is my guard dog," Johnson explained to Guo. "We go everywhere together, and we have bonded for the past month." Johnson clarified to Business Insider that he has no plans to launch a company focused on canine health yet. Rather, Katara will be subjected to a version of the rigorous data collection and longevity interventions that he chronicles in great detail for his millions of followers on X and Instagram. "She's going to become the most measured dog in the world," he said in an interview. "We're going to do a whole bunch of longevity therapies on her because dogs are amazing." Johnson thinks there may be relatively straightforward ways to improve dogs' health, starting with food. He said most commercial dog food contains much higher concentrations of harmful compounds. "These are things that glue your organs together," he said. "We're feeding them things that are terrible for their bodies." Dogs and humans are not as different as one might expect, according to Johnson. That means advances in dogs can also help humans. "It's remarkable how much dogs and humans have in common," he said. "When you read through the literature on dogs, and you just replace humans with dogs, there are so many similarities." Johnson has often been frustrated by how long it takes for new human treatments to be approved. That is much less of a problem in animals. "The path for drug approval is substantially faster for dogs than humans, so you can get a lot of scientific work done in a shorter period of time," he said. Several startups are already working to extend dogs' lifespans. Loyal is developing the first FDA-approved longevity and lifespan-extension drugs for dogs, while Rejuvenate Bio is taking a more experimental gene-therapy approach, targeting chronic age-related diseases in animals, such as osteoarthritis, heart disease, and cancer. Johnson does not expect convincing people to improve their dogs' health to be difficult. As someone who urges people to sleep more and avoid alcohol, he has found that many will prioritize their pets' well-being over their own. "Humans will oftentimes care for their dogs better than they'll care for themselves," he said.

Loyal raises $100 million: dog longevity drugs targeting IGF-1 and PPAR pathways. - May 5, 2026 Why it matters. Extending dogs' healthy lifespans creates a multi-billion-dollar opportunity in pet care and provides a large-scale model that could accelerate human anti-aging drug development. Key takeaways. * - Loyal secured $100M Series A to advance canine longevity drug. * - Drug targets IGF-1 and PPAR pathways linked to aging. * - FDA deemed pill likely effective, moving toward market approval. * - Extending dog lifespan could reshape pet care industry revenues. * - Success may accelerate human anti-aging research using similar pathways. Pulse analysis. Loyal's recent $100 million Series A round, led by venture firms focused on longevity, gives the startup the capital to push its canine anti-aging pill through late-stage trials. The compound works by modulating the insulin-like growth factor-1 (IGF-1) axis and activating peroxisome proliferator-activated receptors (PPAR), two pathways that have been repeatedly linked to cellular senescence and metabolic health in mammals. By fine-tuning these signals in dogs, Loyal aims to add roughly a year of healthy life, a claim that could open a multi-billion-dollar pet-health market. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration's recent "likely effective" determination moves the drug one step closer to approval, but Loyal must still satisfy safety, dosing, and post-marketing surveillance requirements. If cleared by late 2026, the pill could be sold through veterinary clinics and specialty pet pharmacies, tapping an estimated 90 million owned dogs in the United States alone. Analysts project that even a modest adoption rate - 5 percent of owners - could generate over $1 billion in annual revenue, reshaping how veterinarians counsel aging pets and their families. Beyond pets, Loyal's approach revives interest in translating IGF-1 and PPAR modulation to human therapeutics, a strategy already explored in rapamycin-based trials. Success in dogs would provide a large, genetically diverse pre-clinical model, potentially accelerating biotech investment in age-related drug pipelines. However, extending companion-animal lifespans raises ethical questions about resource allocation and the emotional impact of longer pet ownership. As investors pour capital into longevity science, Loyal's progress will be watched as a bellwether for the commercial viability of anti-aging medicines across species. Your next dog may live longer. A new pill could soon extend dogs' lives. How will that change its relationship with its pets? One day last november, my dog, Forrest, sat on the cold marble steps of the Smithsonian's natural-history museum in Washington, D.C., ready to meet Celine Halioua, a woman who may one day add a tail-wagging year or so to his life, and also the lives of millions of other dogs. In 2019, Halioua founded a company called Loyal, and in February 2025, a pill that she developed for dogs was deemed likely to be effective by the FDA. If the company ticks a few remaining boxes, the drug could soon be on sale, kick-starting a new era of longevity medicine that could eventually also lengthen humans' lives. More than 10,000 years ago, dogs made a farseeing bet on humans. They padded carefully up to its campfires, ate scraps, and kept watch, hitching their fates to a species that would soon bestride the planet. They have since become the fourth-most-populous large land mammal, trailing only sheep, cows, and goats, which all lead less pampered lives. Now PULSE is trying to keep its best animal friends around longer too. If only I could have explained all of this to Forrest before its walk with Halioua. As a Portuguese water dog, he hails from a clever breed, but he doesn't understand advanced pharmacology, so I worried that he might be indifferent to her, or even rude. But Halioua, who is 31, had arrived with a plan. She stooped down, squealed his name, and opened her hand, revealing a treat that he promptly devoured. Halioua was 18 years old when the cold fact of death blew through her. She was working at a neuro-oncology lab and couldn't unsee the cosmic unfairness of a brain-cancer diagnosis, the way it constricted the possibilities of a person's life and cut short their closest relationships. Death had an important role to play back when life was single-celled and simple, Halioua told me. It helped evolution iterate rapidly and build up more complicated organisms. But now that natural selection has created complex, intelligent animals - namely, PULSE - PULSE should stretch out the good, healthy part of its lifespan as well as that of its dogs, too. With extra decades, she said, PULSE might even become more forward-looking, and less likely to wreck a world that PULSE will have to keep living in. After college, Halioua enrolled in a doctoral program in genetics at Oxford and worked in life-extension research during her time off school. The field has never been uniformly rigorous in its approach to research. Over the years, Halioua has developed an aversion to what she described as longevity "bro science." She's not into the translucent-skinned gurus who primarily experiment on themselves and post their physiological data, including the duration of their sleeping erections, on X. She's not trying to gain eternal life through obsessively healthy living, she once told me over a tray of French fries.