Chief Executive Officer & Founder, Loyal

Celine Halioua is the CEO and Founder of Loyal, a biotech startup developing drugs to increase healthspan, the period of life spent in good health. Before founding Loyal, she was a DPhil student at Oxford studying the economics of gene therapy. She sought to understand the incentives of different healthcare systems in providing curative therapeutics. This fed a broader interest in health equality that led her to longevity and preventative medicine. Celine left Oxford to join Laura Deming at The Longevity Fund, one of the pioneering early investors in the longevity field, before founding Loyal in 2019 at the age of 25.

Loyal is developing the first FDA-approved drugs explicitly intended to extend lifespan and health span. On the path to FDA approval, Celine and her team are running clinical trials that objectively and robustly demonstrates that Loyal's drug extends dogs’ healthy lifespan, and does so safely. Because no one has developed a dog — or human — longevity drug before, Loyal is building the path to FDA approval largely from scratch.

Loyal recently learned from the FDA that the company has received protocol concurrence for their companion dog longevity study — likely the first time the FDA has given their blessing to a longevity clinical trial.