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An Outsider Looks in on the Longevity Science Community


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Posted 09 January 2016 - 12:05 AM


So you want to observe complexity. You might start with the obscure, rapidly moving collection of human endeavors that boil and ferment at the boundary of late medical research and early clinical development. Advocacy, fundraising, research, networking, non-profits, for-profits, and academics, a multi-level debate of a thousand opinions, and the foundations of new medicine are all mixed into one heated cauldron. In one sense it has always been this way. Figuring out what was happening in aging research and the quest for longer, healthier lives was a real challenge fifteen years ago, back at the turn of the century, let me tell you. But at least back then you could ground every investigation in the truth that if someone was trying to sell you something, then that something was irrelevant: snake oil and wishful thinking and nothing more. The serious science of aging and longevity was restricted to the laboratories, not yet to the point at which meaningful therapies could be constructed. Even stem cell treatments for narrow aspects of age-related degeneration or late-stage age-related disease had barely started to emerge back then.

Nowadays it remains a sizable task to make sense of the science and the state of development if you are coming in as an outsider. Where to even start? That is one of the reasons I continue to write Fight Aging! - because signposts are needed, and for better and worse this is one of them. If people find it hard to make sense of where things stand, how can we ask them to give us their support and their funds to move forward towards rejuvenation therapies? Education, in the sense of providing resources and making matters comprehensible for those who are interested in learning more, is an important part of advocacy.

There is one fundamental way in which understanding longevity science has become much harder today: you can no longer draw the line between the laboratory and the commercial world to say that only in the lab can you find legitimate, useful efforts to build treatments for the causes of aging. A limited number of actual, real rejuvenation treatments that clear or repair one specific root cause of aging are in development, in clinical trials, in biotech startups. There will be more with each passing year. As a result you have to know a lot more about what is going on, and must be prepared to evaluate basis for the treatments that will be available via medical tourism, long in advance of any regulatory approval, just a few years from now.

The popular press article I've linked below is written by an outsider in the context of a time of great change, when the approach to aging in the research community has undergone a fundamental shift, SENS rejuvenation research and any number of gene therapies that might compensate for aspects of degenerative aging are moving from lab to development, or and many of these treatments will pour directly into the global medical tourism marketplace. These treatments are not all of the same class, however, and their usefulness will vary greatly: repairing the damage that causes aging and age-related disease, such as via SENS treatments, is very different from modestly compensating for the harm that damage causes, such as via most of the plausible near-future gene therapies. However: it isn't a joke to say that if you know the right people, you can go to an overseas clinic and pay a few tens of thousands of dollars to undergo a gene therapy today. It probably won't be terribly efficient at obtaining a good percentage of cells affected, but that issue is already pretty much solved back in the labs, and will also be solved in the field in a few years. The avalanche is underway, and loud enough that even normally oblivious sections of the media are pricking up their ears:

Special Series: Is Silicon-Valley Birthing the Next Set of Pro-Lifers

Elizabeth Parrish is 44, the tough-gunning, sharp-talking CEO of life-sciences startup BioViva, and seemingly full of life herself. But she says she suffers from a deadly disease. Hoping to stave off the sickness, Parrish recently journeyed to a clinic in Colombia, where she underwent a course of therapy that the FDA hasn't touched with a 10-foot pole. One treatment would alter her telomeres - the stuff at the end of her DNA. The other would inhibit a protein that stops muscle growth. Her affliction? Aging - and all the nasty diseases that come with it, from Alzheimer's and heart trouble to "basic muscle deterioration." Parrish, though perhaps unorthodox, is not alone in her insistence that aging is an evil we have a right to combat. Rather, she's part of a whole generation of futurists talking eagerly of the right to grow old in a better way. At a time when we're living longer - the average life expectancy in 2013 was nearly 80 years old, according to the CDC - this cohort wants even more. They want to live not a few years longer, but tens, even hundreds, of years longer, and what's more, they believe they - and one day all of us - are entitled to do so.

The burgeoning interest in long life isn't mere academic fodder: It has implications for public policy, law, and the health care system as we know it. The central question around which this explosive new debate will churn: Is aging itself a disease? Or is it, as the dominant thinking goes today, just the unfortunate condition that gives rise to a bunch of other nasty illnesses? If societies decided that old age was not a sad yet inevitable fact of life and that it - like malaria, like cancer - demanded a bevy of dollars and doctors battling it, then your primary care doctor and insurers, palliative care providers and government agencies would all have to adjust to a brand-new gravity. This is a whole new iteration of the term "pro-life."

The aging haters have a reasonable spiel down: It's health, pure and simple. That's the line researcher Aubrey de Grey, one of the most prominent scientists working on anti-aging issues, gives me. We're not talking about a right to never die, in his view, or even a right to live on and on. It's the right to have your health taken care of, your diseases ebbed away. It's just that aging happens to be an "uber-disease" we've not yet started to fight. Rather, if we live longer, well, that'll just be a rather nice side effect of researchers like him solving aging diseases.

Despite controversy over certain methods, some spine-tingling peer-reviewed research has lately appeared from hospitals, universities and privately funded groups like de Grey's Mountain View-based SENS Research Foundation - which just had its first paper in Science this year - or Google's biotech company Calico (which is still stealthy as hell and said they couldn't speak to us yet). Nonetheless, progress so far has come at a pace far slower than the private sector likes, and is laden with all the annoyances of bureaucracy and peer review. The National Institutes of Health organizes itself around diseases, but aging is a "constellation of diseases," like cancer, muscle wasting and dementia. The NIH doesn't really tackle constellations. De Grey spares no words: The National Institute on Aging (NIA) doesn't have much money, and the way it gets distributed is "inherently biased against revolutionary work," he huffs. A spokeswoman for the NIA pointed us to some examples of NIA-supported research in aging biology and in the "burgeoning field" of geroscience (which doesn't treat aging as a disease, but offers a kind of interdisciplinary approach).

And so, as with so many of our grand inventions of the future, the wealthy and the adventurous of the world will enter the fray first, potentially paying exorbitant amounts to be patient zero over and over again. Does that mean the right to a long life won't trickle down to the masses? No, de Grey insists, obviously tired of this question of access. "Once people get over the psychological stranglehold that humanity has" when they talk about death, "there's not going to be any problem at all." People will see the tech and demand it; doctors, insurers and the government will have to cave. It'll get cheaper, as technology does. Anti-aging therapies, de Grey predicts, are "going to be as available as water."


View the full article at FightAging




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