Collapse of a billion-dollar longevity project: U.S. pharma market transforms ahead of a new wave of biomedical innovation

On November 12, 2025, it became known that the American biotech company Alphabet’s Calico Life Sciences (Google’s parent structure), which specializes in longevity research, is terminating a ten-year billion-dollar partnership with AbbVie, and laying off chemists working on discovering new drugs.

Joint investments at the level of approximately $1.75 billion invested in the ten-year project, ended with limited clinical results, which created a precedent in the pharma sector of institutional fatigue from fundamental aging research, which requires decades, not quarterly reporting cycles.

The termination of the partnership between AbbVie and Calico Life Sciences demonstrates the shift of the American pharmaceutical industry from long-term scientific projects with an uncertain monetization horizon to models oriented toward faster commercialization.