Building Healthspan as the Next Infrastructure for Longevity

Everyone agrees that healthspan matters as much as lifespan. People are living longer, yet too many spend the last decade or more with chronic disease. The question isn’t whether healthspan matters; it’s how to close the gap between living longer and living well. By 2030, 1 in 6 people will be 60+, and by 2050 the 60+ population will reach 2.1 billion. Keeping people healthier for longer is not just about individual well-being – It’s akin to strengthening the very infrastructure of the economy and society.

Healthspan as a new class of infrastructure

Think about infrastructure – roads, power, broadband. Extending healthy years functions in a similar way: it raises aggregate productivity, defers disability, and reduces pressure on public and private budgets. That’s why U.S. policy is starting to treat it like infrastructure. ARPA‑H’s PROSPR program explicitly funds tools and markers to delay age-related decline – shifting the emphasis from inspirational messages to measurable capabilities the system can adopt.

Make It Work Across the System

What stalls progress today is fragmentation. A tracking app here, a supplement there – each can be useful, but impacts are small without integration into clinical workflows, payment, and everyday life. Consumers will act, but only when solutions are credible, frictionless, and affordable. That’s the job for founders: make prevention buyable by the people who manage risk (employers, payers, senior communities) and usable by the people who live with it.

Averin’s portfolio companies are well suited for this:

·       Earlier detection that ties to care: Freenome​’s multi-omics platform aims to detect cancer with a standard blood draw and is advancing multiple clinical programs. The infrastructure move is not the assay alone, but screening that routes people into navigation and follow-up so diagnoses shift earlier and spend moves with them.

·       Primary care where seniors live: Pine Park Health brings longitudinal, team-based primary care into senior living communities so care arrives where people are, with a model built to reduce avoidable ED visits and hospitalizations. That is healthspan delivered through operations.

·       Continuous sensing that informs protocols: Biolinq is developing minimally invasive biosensors worn on the skin. The opportunity is to turn trend alerts into confirm-and-act pathways that clinicians and purchasers can trust.

Use consumer energy the right way

Consumer enthusiasm is a tailwind – but it’s a signal, not the finish line. Wearables are a perfect example. Apple Watch’s new hypertension notifications look for patterns of possible high blood pressure and explicitly advise users to confirm with a cuff and clinician; they do not measure blood pressure. That is exactly the posture founders should adopt: treat device data as an early warning, then route to clinical confirmation and care. Contrast that with WHOOP’s Blood Pressure Insights, which drew an FDA Warning Letter for marketing a medical claim without required clearance – Illustrating how quickly ​“wellness” crosses into regulated territory when intended use implies diagnosis or treatment. Build for the long game: if your feature influences clinical decisions, validate it, pre-register your study, and write claims that match the evidence.

The Bottom line

Founders should build products that clinicians adopt, payers reimburse, and people actually use – then prove it with endpoints that matter. By doing this you’re not selling wellness, but compressing morbidity at scale.