A ‘reverse aging’ guru’s trail of failed businesses

Harvard geneticist David Sinclair’s seductive notion that aging is a treatable disease has helped companies he founded to raise more than $1 billion. Sinclair also has co-founded companies that sell directly to consumers products such as antiaging dog chews, supplements and tests that purport to show one’s “biological age." Sinclair, who is 55 years old, said in an email that companies he co-founded that went public “paved the way" for many of today’s longevity companies. In a presentation in December 2014, Sinclair told OvaScience investors that traditional in vitro fertilization treatments often fail because the amount of “chemical energy" inside an older woman’s eggs is too low. Sinclair appeared that year in an NBC News segment titled, “Researchers say they are close to reversing aging," promoting his lab’s work on genetic reprogramming for vision loss in mice and brain cells.