"Must Love Dogs"

How Loyal founder and CEO Celine Halioua sustains the energy to fight for human life extension, one canine at a time

This story originally appeared in the inaugural installment of the “Fantastic Builders and Where to Find Them” series. I’m re-printing it here on the occasion of an historic milestone: just last week, Loyal secured the FDA’s first-ever formal acceptance that a drug can be developed and approved to extend lifespan.

Builder spotlight: Celine Halioua

Image source: https://x.com/celinehalioua

Principles on display: Your life as the yardstick; finding person-life fit

Celine Halioua

, the 30-year-old firebrand founder and CEO of Loyal, is one of the purest examples of practical idealism that I’ve ever had the pleasure to encounter. Her long-term ambition is to increase the human lifespan through anti-aging drugs. This is notoriously hard for a million different reasons, some of them regulatory (the FDA doesn’t like approving experimental drugs for non-disease targets), some economic and structural (e.g., it takes 20-30 years to see if a human anti-aging drug is working). But instead of giving up or getting cynical, Celine found an ingenious path forward: start by extending the lifespan of dogs, and establish a precedent for the human use case from there. 

Whenever I hear Celine speak, her boundless energy and optimism belie the enormous complexity and multi-decade time horizon of the mission she’s taken on. How does she do it? And how does she stay so cheerfully patient through all the regulatory and bureaucratic hurdles that have forced her onto this circuitous path to begin with? 

The simple answer is that this path has been anything but “forced” on her; she chose it. Indeed, she custom-crafted it, based on the sum total of her values and proclivities. During the talk she mentioned that she happens to be a dog lover, and afterward I asked her whether she would’ve been able to sustain the same excitement about this path if she hadn’t been. “No,” she said, after a moment’s reflection. “I’ve actually come to love dogs and dog owners even more since I started this,” she continued, smiling with delight as she described her conversations with prospective customers and the lengths to which they’re willing to go for the chance of a few extra years with their beloved pet. 

This is the big secret behind Celine’s seemingly infinite reservoir of energy and enthusiasm: she has charted a path that she can love, with her own life as the ultimate yardstick.