Anthony Lacavera has never been more excited. For 20 years, the former telecom executive has been trying to ward off aging through a barrage of expensive and sometimes scientifically dubious wellness routines and treatments. Now he wants to turn his passion into a business.

Fresh out of a walking meeting, Lacavera, age 50, is buoyant when we meet at a café in Toronto’s upscale Yorkville neighbourhood to discuss his latest venture. “This is the most passionate I’ve been about a startup ever,” he says. That startup is a yet-to-be-named app that’s soft-launching this month and housed within a new company called Life Engineering. Backed by a slate of high-profile Canadian business people, it’s designed to cut through the cacophony of health and wellness noise and help people live longer.

In some ways it’s a modest venture compared to Lacavera’s other endeavours, like Wind Mobile, the telecom business on which he made his fortune, or the bank he’s in the process of buying. In other ways, with its mission to help people live indefinitely, it’s wildly ambitious. 

The entrepreneur and founder of investment firm Globalive is part of a swell of people—often wealthy, middle-aged men—who are obsessed with evading death. Lacavera believes that, with advances in science and technology, dying will one day be reclassified as a preventable disease. He is confident that he will live another 150 years, to the ripe old age of 200. 

He’s not the only one. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has invested in cellular rejuvenation startup Altos Labs, and OpenAI’s Sam Altman backed Retro Bioscience, a gene-therapy firm with the goal to delay death by a measly 10 years. Both keep youthful through strict diet, exercise and by taking metformin, a diabetes medication which, early studies suggest, may help people live longer.

Then there’s Bryan Johnson, founder of payments-processing firm Braintree, who’s become the poster boy of the longevity movement, spending more than US$2 million a year monitoring and managing his every bodily function in pursuit of not dying. A glut of new companies have appeared to appeal to longevity enthusiasts, selling everything from supplements to wearables to the blood of the young—as one company, Ambrosia, did before getting shut down by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. 

Like many dabbling in longevity treatments, Lacavera has some money to burn. In 2016, he sold Wind Mobile, now Freedom Mobile, to Shaw for $1.6 billion. The sale gave him the money and time to focus more on his health.

Lacavera’s interest in longevity had started decades earlier, just after he turned 30. It was a time, he said, when he felt amazing. “I just wanted to keep feeling amazing,” he said. Under the guidance of Ronald Rothenberg, a medical doctor at the California HealthSpan Institute, a clinic that specializes in anti-aging treatments, the younger Lacavera began experimenting with off-label uses of prescription drugs that were suspected—but not proven—to delay aging. 

He started with hormone replacement therapy to keep testosterone levels from declining—a natural process that’s associated with a plethora of aging indicators in men, like loss of muscle mass and bone density. Clomid was one of the first drugs he took, briefly. It’s meant to treat infertility in women and isn’t FDA-approved for men, but studies of off-label uses show it can increase testosterone levels. A few years later, he started taking metformin. He also added rapamycin to the lineup, an immuno-supprescent used in cancer treatments and to prevent the body from rejecting transplants and implants. There’s also early evidence it could slow aging by stemming inflammation. Lacavera didn’t notice much of an impact so he stopped taking it. 

Many of these interventions have since been popularized by longevity influencers like Peter Attia and Andrew Huberman. But 20 years ago, Lacavera had virtually no peers. “It was so controversial,” he says, acknowledging that his risk tolerance is perhaps higher than most when it comes to experimenting with his health. “New thing? I’ll try it,” he said. “If it’s not going to kill me—with reasonable confidence—I’m doing it.” 

He estimates he spends about $100,000 a year on youth-preserving testing and treatments. That includes annual full-body MRIs and bone-density scans, quarterly blood panels and twice-yearly blood-testing for food sensitivities. Good exercise, sleep and diet habits are table stakes, says Lacavera, who devotes two hours a day to longevity protocols like mobility, breath work and weightlifting. Beyond that, he may spend time in an ice bath or sauna, doing red-light therapy, or a specific style of facial massage meant to stimulate collagen and make his face look more sculpted. 

At 50, Lacavera feels as good as he did at 30. The data, he says, validates those feelings. His level of free T3, for example—a thyroid hormone involved in maintaining a healthy metabolism and heart rate—should have declined steadily with age, but it’s the same as when he was 29, he said. His telomeres—the bits of DNA at the end of chromosomes that protect genetic material—should have shortened by now, leaving his body vulnerable to disease, but, he says, they’re about as long as you would expect in a 34-year-old.

Lacavera acknowledges that his death-defying rituals aren’t accessible to most. The testing and treatments tend to be expensive, and the degree to which they help—or harm—one’s health is poorly understood. 

Over coffee in Yorkville, Lacavera recommends I take a food-sensitivity test as a first step in trying to extend my life. “​​I guarantee you,” he says, “you’re eating things every day that are very bad for you.” He recently stopped eating watermelon and raspberries after, to his surprise, a gut microbiome test showed he had developed sensitivities to those fruits. A previous test flagged cod. “Those things create cumulative inflammation, cumulative stress on your digestive system,” he says. 

That evening, worried about unsuspecting foods chronically inflaming my body, I scoured the internet for at-home microbiome testing kits. I was shocked at the price tags—ranging from about $100 to $665 to collect and analyze a stool sample—and to learn that there’s little scientific evidence backing their reliability. After an hour of research, I abandoned my shopping cart. 

Lacavera’s new app is meant to make it easier for laypeople to make decisions about what might help—and what definitely won’t. 

The AI-powered platform identifies the top 10 experts on a range of health-related topics, based on factors like their academic affiliations, how many scientific papers they’ve published and in what journals, where and how often they’re cited, and their public reach. For each topic, like glucose, for example, or rapamycin, the app summarizes the experts’ findings and shows where they agree and where they disagree. The topics get scores based on safety, impact and consensus, as well as a longevity score to connote the potential overall impact on wellness. 

The app isn’t just Lacavera’s baby, it’s the brainchild of a peer group called the Longevity League, an international club of sorts made up of about 25 members, many of whom are high-powered business executives. The group convenes online once a month with experts on specific health topics, says Gary Leblanc, co-founder and president of Life Engineering. “They give us the latest and greatest, and then we jam on it,” he says.

Among the members are Canadian heavy-hitters Don Walker, the former CEO of auto-parts manufacturer Magna, Alibaba Group president Mike Evans, and Manulife Finance CEO Roy Gori. All three have invested in Life Engineering, along with TV personality and investor Kevin O’Leary. Health experts Richard Isaacson, a Florida-based neurologist specializing in Alzheimer’s prevention, and Toronto-based naturopath Elizabeth Goldspink, have also backed the venture.  

With his new company, Lacavera wants to remove the secret-club exclusivity that characterizes much of the longevity industry today. “This is about getting the basics right,” he said. “This is about making this accessible for everyone.” 

The Life Engineering team hasn’t finalized pricing, but Lacavera said a standard subscription will be about $100 a year, with certain features of the app available for free. For a higher fee, people will eventually be able to upload their blood panel and biometric data and have it analyzed by a physician to get a more detailed longevity score. 

The business will rely exclusively on investments and subscription fees, with no advertisements or brand sponsorships—income sources that abound in the health and wellness space but that can compromise credibility. “That’s a very difficult business model,” Lacavera said of the subscription approach, “but I’m very deeply committed to that.” 

It helps that Life Engineering is first and foremost a passion project. Lacavera wants the app to reach as many people as possible, and to do that, he says, it’s important the business is profitable. “But obviously, at this stage of my life, having had successful exits, the amount of money I can make on this is not a primary focus,” he says. “Building a sound business that has a great brand proposition, meaningful social impact and makes money, that’s the focus here.”