A Cure for Aging?

Managing Editor’s Note: We’ve got a lot to cover in today’s AMA, but before we get started…

We’re coming up quick on Jeff’s urgent briefing on the major wealth supercycle that’s brewing in a sector that few associate with tech.

But there’s something buried in the SpaceX IPO filing that suggests Elon Musk is about to send billions flowing into that market.

These supercycles are so rare… this could truly be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for those who are prepared and positioned ahead of the supercycle.

You can go here to automatically sign up for Jeff’s SpaceX Supercycle briefing next Wednesday, August 12, at 8 p.m. ET, if you want to learn more about the supercycle and the opportunity it presents.

It has been a quiet summer in the markets…

So many on Wall Street have been taking long vacations in July and August – a byproduct of big bonuses that arrived this February, as well as the bonuses that are already expected to be significantly higher come next February. All for what will be an excellent 2026.

But in tech and biotech, nothing has slowed down… only accelerated.

The biggest news came out of Tesla/SpaceXAI regarding Musk’s plans to build the Terafab, which will become the world’s largest building.

Terafab | Source: SpaceXAI

Above are renderings of what the building will look like, released yesterday. Modern, futuristic, enormous in scale, and dripping with optimism about the future.

I plan on writing more about the Terafab next week in The Bleeding Edge, as there is an extraordinary development revealed, if you know where to look. The implications are ridiculously exciting.

We also saw software companies get a strong bid on the back of great announcements from Atlassian (TEAM) and Cloudflare (NET), destroying the narrative that software companies are dead due to AI, something we’ve been writing about at Brownstone Research.

The fear that software companies would die quickly due to the employment of AI has always been a fear-based narrative.

It assumes that existing software companies won’t aggressively leverage the technology to improve their products. It also assumes there is no value in providing enterprise-grade software systems and support to corporations and governments around the world.

Both are ridiculous assumptions.

This false narrative was a primary reason for one of the most spectacular hedge fund blowups in history – a topic that we explored in Monday’s Bleeding Edge – Situationally Unaware, which I highly recommend.

Great lessons to be learned from the mistakes of others.

Despite the slow summer weeks this year, the S&P 500 is trading at all-time highs, and the NASDAQ is only off by about 2% from its high with strong momentum up and to the right.

I’m excited about what the fall will bring. Aside from much cooler weather, the tailwinds for innovation, growth, and great investment opportunities are just extraordinary right now.

Have a great weekend,

Jeff

Tech to Turn Back the Clock on Aging?

This [article from The New York Times titled Can This New Enzyme Turn Back the Clock in the Human Body?] seems like a bold up-and-coming piece of research on anti-aging.

I know the company is private and small, but I picked it up in one of my technology newsletters. I was wondering what your thoughts are, given the fact that we are pushing the biomed area quite hard right now, as a Brownstone Unlimited member.

– Daniel K. 

Hi Daniel,

The reversal of ageing is one of the white whales of Silicon Valley.

There are a number of tech billionaires who made their fortunes and used some of their earnings to fund biotech companies focused on longevity and ageing.

What Revel Pharmaceuticals is working on is quite unique. I’m not aware of any other company focused on the area that Revel is focused on.

Revel focuses on the damage that has been done to our bodies as we age, with the hope of reversing that condition. Specifically, Revel is trying to develop a therapy to break down the advanced glycation end products (AGEs) that develop in our bodies as we age.

AGEs are a completely normal result of the ageing process, and they result in more rigid tissues that lead to inflammation and metabolic dysfunction. N^Ɛ -carboxymethyl-lysine (CML), an AGE, is very abundant in ageing and was the primary focus of Revel’s most recent research.

What Revel did was to engineer an enzyme that would oxidize CML and restore tissue to that of a younger age.

The company, in partnership with Calico Life Sciences – Google’s longevity-focused spin-out (also private) – used artificial intelligence to evaluate and sort through 500 million possible variants of enzymes in a process to find one optimized for breaking down the CML.

Using the best candidates, they further engineered an enzyme to improve efficacy, which they call CMLase.

Here is what they found in their research:

• 70% reduction of CML in elderly arterial tissue
• 55% reduction of CML in elderly skin tissue (it reduced CML levels to that equivalent of a 31-year-old)
• 45–78% reductions in CML-related eye lens proteins from a 64-year-old donor

Needless to say, these are incredible results, but before we all get too excited and jump around believing that we can reverse ageing, we should remember that this is just pre-clinical research.

It’s also worth noting that Revel is extremely small. Up until 2025, Revel had only raised about $15 million, which means extremely limited resources to work with.

On the back of this research that was just published, Revel appears to have raised $12 million in a seed round of funding. Again, still very small, and just enough to push the research on CMLase further for another year or so.

What I like about this story is that Revel was a company founded in 2020 with no notable investors. It was kind of floundering for a few years, unable to raise any significant capital.

But as we all know, artificial intelligence is transforming the drug development space. The tools available in the last year were not available 2020–2024.

So, Revel was able to leverage this technology, develop a novel enzyme, and perform some pre-clinical testing, which resulted in its seed round of funding.

If it weren’t for AI, I suspect Revel would have likely aged out of existence.

Recommended Links

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How Did Spread Networks Pull It Off?

Regarding [a previous] Permissionless Investor issue…

I am curious about the tunnel that was bored for the straightest possible cable from Chicago to New York. A straight line bore would be about 16 miles deep at the midpoint.

Is that what they did, or did they just stay a few feet underground all the way and hope no one else went deeper for a shorter distance? Or is the Earth flat? It is an interesting, if unusual, question.

– Al D.

Hi Al,

Well, it actually wasn’t a perfectly straight line. They just tried to reduce the bends in the line as much as possible. So, no, the lines weren’t 16 miles deep. On average, the fiber optic lines were only about 3 feet underground.

Spread Networks spent about $300 million constructing the 827-mile, ultra-low-latency fiber optic cable that ran between the Chicago Mercantile Exchange in Chicago and the New Jersey-based equity market data centers that fed Wall Street.

After all that money and effort, the round-trip data transmissions dropped from 16–17 milliseconds to 13 milliseconds. That tiny advantage was enough to mint millions from arbitrage trades between futures prices in Chicago and stock prices in New York.

If you are interested in more of the details, I encourage you to read Flash Boys by Michael Lewis. It’s a fast and fun read that documents the entire story of what was done.

Another Step Toward the Future of Precision Medicine

Hey Jeff,

How does Tempus acquiring Personalis help either company? It seems to me that TEM way overpaid for PSNL.

You recommended PSNL some time ago, and I did not keep my shares. I do have a position, now deeply underwater, in TEM which I’m now inclined to jettison as well. Is this conglomeration worth holding onto? Cheers!

– Gary D.

Hi Gary,

Thanks for writing in. This was definitely an interesting transaction, and one that was actually telegraphed years ago.

For context – and for those who aren’t subscribed over at our First Signal free e-letter, which we publish in the mornings before the markets open – Gary’s question comes from a recent feature by my senior biotechnology analyst, Feruz.

Feruz discussed the acquisition announcement in which precision medicine company Tempus (TEM) will gain ownership of one of the industry’s most advanced cancer monitoring technologies, designed by Personalis (PSNL).

Back in late 2023, Tempus put a strategic deal in place with Personalis, which included Tempus receiving warrants to purchase 9.2 million shares of Personalis as well as $12 million in milestone-based funding.

The collaboration was attractive to Personalis as it included Tempus becoming the exclusive distribution partner for Personalis’ NeXT Personal MRD test.

The relationship between the two companies grew again when Tempus stepped up and invested around $36 million by exercising warrants and making additional investments into Personalis.

Prior to the announced acquisition, Tempus was already the second-largest shareholder of Personalis, behind Merck, with about 13 million shares – about 12.2% ownership of outstanding shares.

Personalis’ MRD test stands for minimal residual disease (or molecular residual disease). What Personalis does is take a genetic sequence of a cancer tumor so that it can identify traces of the circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) in the blood.

This enables highly sensitive detection of any residual cancer, even at levels that are not visible through any kind of imaging. This is the purpose of the Personalis NeXT Personal MRD test.

As for the acquisition itself, Tempus has offered an all-stock deal at a $1.5 billion valuation for Personalis, which is roughly a 25% premium to where the stock is trading today. Tempus’ share price is down due to the expected dilution from the transaction.

At that valuation, Tempus is buying Personalis for around 19 times forecasted 2026 revenue, and around 13.5 times forecasted 2027 revenues. It is definitely a healthy premium to pay, but I wouldn’t qualify that as egregiously overpaying for Personalis.

Personalis is still in high-growth mode. Its gross margins are expanding quickly, and by integrating Personalis’ products into Tempus’ own product/service offering, they believe is that Personalis’ products will become profitable for Tempus.

From a product perspective, what Personalis brings Tempus is a strong fit for its oncology-related business.

This was obvious considering the point that I made earlier about Tempus already being the second-largest shareholder of Personalis and having exclusive distribution of the NeXT Personal MRD product.

As a reminder, I can’t give any personalized investment advice, so I can’t provide any guidance on whether or not you should sell or hold your shares in Tempus.

What I can provide is just my objective view on Tempus at the moment. The company has a healthy growth trajectory and solid gross margins around 65%. It is not yet profitable, and the current forecast indicates that Tempus will be close to free cash flow breakeven in 2027. It has enough cash to get there without raising any additional capital.

In terms of valuation, Tempus is trading at 5.6 times forecasted 2026 revenue and 4.5 times forecasted 2027 revenue. This is not overvalued at all. I would argue undervalued.

As interest rates fall and the biotech bull market kicks into gear, I expect that valuation multiples will expand in biotech stocks, a key point that I have been predicting for the biotech industry.

Full disclosure, I haven’t spent 10 hours or more analyzing Tempus, so I don’t have a strong opinion on timing or a bullish/bearish thesis. I’m just presenting the facts. I hope the information is useful in your own analysis.

The Tempus/Personalis transaction is yet another significant deal in an extensive list of biotech mergers and acquisitions (M&A) this year, and another display of the incredible momentum in the industry after years of biotech winter.

Just this year, we’ve seen a combined (approximate) $187 billion in biotech M&A deals, including:

• Boston Scientific’s (BSX) acquisition of Penumbra in a deal valued at $14.5 billion
• Eli Lilly’s (LLY) absolutely stacked biotech shopping spree, acquiring Curevo, LimmaTech Biologics, and Vaccine Company for a combined $3.8 billion, as well as Kelonia Therapeutics (up to $7 billion), AtaiBeckley (up to $3.8 billion), Centessa Pharmaceuticals (up to $7.8 billion), Orna Therapeutics ($2.4 billion), Ventyx Biosciences ($1.2 billion), Ajax Therapeutics (up to $2.3 billion), and Engage Biologics ($202 million)
• AbbVie’s (ABBV) acquisition of Apogee Therapeutics (APGE) for $10.9 billion
• GSK’s acquisition of Nuvalent, valued at $10.6 billion
• Angelini’s acquisition of Catalyst Pharmaceuticals (CPRX) for $4.1 billion
• Novartis’s (NVS) acquisition of Myricx Bio for $1.5 billion

We’ve covered a number of these over at our Early Stage Trader biotech-focused trading advisory, and that’s just a handful of the dozens of deals we’ve seen just in the first seven months of this year.

There are a number of factors for this surge in M&A activity in 2026. We’ve discussed the oncoming biotech Patent Cliff and the wave of patent expirations scheduled to hit the pharmaceutical industry over the next few years in these pages before… and the “acquire or die” mentality pervading the industry as a result.

There’s also a more general influx of enthusiasm in the industry, and biotech leaders are seeking out the innovators in the sector. These biotech giants are more selective in this M&A activity than they were pre-biotech winter.

Innovation is no longer a bonus; it is a priority, with particular attention paid to modern biotech companies actively integrating new technologies into their businesses. Artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted design platforms – among other applications of AI – as well as next-generation therapies in development and advancements in gene editing.

It really is an exciting time for the industry.

That’s all for this week’s AMA… Thank you to everyone for writing in. As always, you can send in any questions or feedback right here. I can’t always respond to every email, and I can’t give individual investing advice, but my team and I read everything you send and enjoy hearing from you all.

Have a great weekend.

Jeff