Celine Halioua, 27, founded Loyal to develop drugs that extend dog lifespan, starting with larger breeds that age faster. She moved from neuroscience research into biotech after realizing dogs are an ideal testing ground for aging treatments that could eventually help humans. The market could be worth billions.
Chapters
Being under 30 and building a biotech company is not sexy. It's a kind of faux pas, honestly. And it's just been very fun learning how to modernize an old industry. I'm Celine Halioua. I'm the founder and CEO of a company called Loyal. We develop drugs to extend dog lifespan, and I am 27 years old. So I grew up in Austin, Texas. We had 15 cats, like 2 or 3 dogs. We used to rescue animals. There's a picture of me with a little baby squirrel on my shoulder, which looking, it's really cute, but looking at it now, I was like, that was a total rabies risk. So I'm definitely a huge animal person. But actually the reason why I started the company was the summer before I'd gone to college for art school, I decided to do an internship at a neuro-oncology clinic. And I basically just kind of realized that we don't actually, in my opinion, have free will. I met a number of relatively young brain cancer patients who there was nothing anybody, anyone could do for them. So really, like, ever since I was 18, I've been trying to understand what's the best way to work on that problem, right? So I was, you know, pre-med student for a while, then I started a PhD, then I worked at a venture fund investing in biotech companies. I ended up going to dogs first about 2 years ago because I basically realized that there was a huge unmet need, especially in the case of larger dogs, but also that dogs were a really awesome proving ground for potentially getting the first ever drug approved explicitly for aging and then translating what we learned from dogs over to people. I struggled for a while because I'd walk into a room and people wouldn't assume that I'm competent. I don't know if it has to do as much with me being under 30 as me being a woman. I think that's really been a big variable in that. So you have to believe that you can build a dog aging drug, that it's a billion-dollar market, that this is the best way to get to human aging drugs, that there's an aging drug for human markets, and that I can do it. I'm competent, my team's competent, and we can execute. We're questioning the variables that have been set for a long time. And that's allowed me to build this really amazing team around this really cool idea in a period of time that has been quite rapid.
