Hello and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. I'm Manuela Saragossa. Coming up, don't fear old age.

There's a growing industry hoping to carve out a pathway to a much longer and healthier life.

A child born today in the UK, a girl has a one in three chance of living to be 100. So we've got to find a way to make sure they age as well as

possible. The longevity industry wants to transform the way we age, but would you want to live

forever? If nothing too radical happens, I might live in my late 80s. If things go better,

then it might be as long as I want. And I'm of course hoping for that.

That's all here in Business Daily

from the BBC. What does old mean to you? 60 years, 80, 90? Well, how about 120 or even 150 years?

That's how old some scientists and entrepreneurs now expect people could become.

And they're actively helping us get there.

There's a new industry that's grown up around that target.

It's called the longevity industry.

And this week, some of its most enthusiastic proponents flew in from around the world

for a longevity forum here at the Royal Institution in London. It's an appropriate venue. The

Royal Institution, after all, is one of the oldest science organisations in London. It's been around

for over two centuries. Jim Mellon is one of the co-founders of the Longevity Forum.

What's happened in the last few years is the unveiling of the human genome approximately 20 years ago

and the internet collaboration between scientists, which has expanded the pool of knowledge

and advanced much, much more rapidly than in the past, has allowed the

scientists to understand key pathways of ageing. So today there are trials ongoing of compounds

that are thought to increase lifespan and health span, in other words, to make us healthier

as we get older. My view is that in the next 10 years, some of these drugs and therapies will be

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