By FINTECH Books Contributors, Dan Callahan & Jon Sabes Follow: @JonSabes With all the businesses that may be changed by emerging genetic research about life expectancy, there was one crucial industry that had gone unnoticed: the life insurance industry. Predicting how long a person will live has been an expensive guess for the life insurance industry as it seeks to profitably sell policies and annuities to a population that has been living longer with each successive generation. As the CEO of the 10-year-old publicly traded company in the life insurance secondary market, I believed emerging insights in epigenetics and genomic technology held the promise of better predicting life expectancy, a crucial part of our business. By 2015, I had found a scientist at UCLA who was closing in on this capability, even though he was unaware of its implications outside the lab. In November of 2016, my company GWG Life, signed an exclusive license for DNA Methylation technology developed by that scientist, Dr. Steven Horvath, that analyses genetic material from blood or saliva to achieve a more accurate – and cheaper – way of predicting lifespan than the traditional method of blood analysis and medical reviews. Dr. Horvath’s groundbreaking work found that human cells have an internal “biological age” and “biological clock” at the DNA molecular level that is indicative of the aging process. His team analysed over 13,000 individual DNA samples to identify a specific set of bio-markers that could be used to predict the individual risk of all-cause mortality. The implications of the discovery are simple and profound: Individual lifespans can now be estimated with significantly greater precision. We are working right now to translate this technology into an actuarial underwriting methodology that we believe will be revolutionary. We believe the technology will create a marked leap forward to better assess, select and price risk for the life insurance, long-term care, and annuity businesses, and beyond.