A cure to aging !

9 min readAug 8, 2017

Alien Wits serie on “A Cure to Aging !” focuses on regenerative medicine and the new scientific field of rejuvenation biotechnologies, benefiting from impressive fundings of Silicon Valley’s business angels. We’ll take a look at these main actors in part 1, before investigating current available products and scientific progress on this topic. Enjoy our first article and stay tuned !

You may have heard of Dr Aubrey de Grey and his controversial research into “repairing the effects of ageing.”

According to his SENS Research Foundation (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence), “The fundamental drivers of degenerative aging lie in the biochemical and cellular side-effects of essential metabolic processes in the body”. In short, we age because our body parts and cells begins to slowly deteriorate. Their efficiency is more and more reduced, until they stop functioning in a process we usually call “death”. Dr de Grey believe we could extend the average human lifespan to a millenium, or even more.

However, mainstream medical professionals, such as the Dr Tilo Kunath (Centre for Regenerative Medicine at the University of Edinburgh) are growing wary of the charity organisation and his fundraising ; also being adamant on the fact there is no way, for any human being now or in the near future, to live longer than the usual 120 years.

To cure aging

But no one can deny the fact that more and more biotech start-ups, scientists and venture capitalists from the Silicon Valley dedicate their research and funds to a new class of medicine : rejuvenation biotechnologies and medecine. Their goal is to reduce aging to a mere health disfunction, a medical condition we should be able to cure. Here are the main actors of this incredible quest :

Oracle Co-founder Larry Ellison has called mortality “incomprehensible;”
Google Co-founder Sergey Brin hopes to be able to cure death itself someday.
Russian entrepreneur Dmitry Itskov wishes to live to his 10,000.
The co-founder of Paypal, Peter Thiel, gave Dr de Grey $3.5 million to start the Methuselah Foundation, a non-profit that is focused on uncovering promising life-extension therapies. The organization’s goal is to make “90 the new 50 by 2030.” He told The New Yorker: “Probably the most extreme form of inequality is between people who are alive and people who are dead,”. Him and his partners at Founders Fund (a Bay Area venture capital firm) also invested $500,000 in Halcyon Molecular in 2010 ; it’s a biotech start-up whose 28-year-old founder has a “dream to create a world free from cancer and aging.”
Bill Maris, venture capitalist and chief executive officer of Google Ventures, believes we can live up to 500 years. “If given the choice between making a lot of money or finding a way to make people live longer,” he told Bloomberg Markets, “what do you choose?”
As for the companies, Google’s Calico runs a $240 million project that’s studying how to reverse aging.

If we believe Eric Markowitz for Inc. Magazine, “immortality is the next great investment Boom”.

There is a lot to read on the subject and if you haven’t immersed yourself in it yet, I can only recommend you do it ASAP. You wouldn’t want to miss the first real anti-aging pill, would you ?

Davel Gobel, 63, co-founder of the Methuselah Foundation, even believes in the idea of “longevity escape velocity”, a hypothetical situation in which life expectancy grows faster than time passes. So, essentially the first 1,000-year-old could be only 10 years younger than the first 150-year-old.

Brian Singerman, former Google employee who joined Founders Fund, is adamant that aging is a problem that can be solved, along with death. He believes there are two basic elements of curing aging: curing sickness and then, figuring out the processes by which the body deteriorates.

Gregory Bonafiglio, the co-founder and managing partner of Proteus Venture Partners, talks about the major force of the baby-boomers on the market : “The truth of the matter, though, is that the process of aging is one that involves significant deterioration of all organ systems. Whether it’s Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s, all of these things are related to the aging process”. Baby-boomers are about to invest a lot in regenerative medecine (cell therapy and tissue engineering, curing prostate cancer, cardiovascular disease, ensuring bone regrowth, and skin repair) , and they (at least, some of them) have the funds to do so.

Shutting the cellular-aging clock

Gene editing

On this topic, we must talk about Gene genius Craig Venter, the man who sequenced the Human DNA in 1992. He’s raised $300 million from investors including Celgene and GE Ventures for a new firm, Human Longevity, that’s trying to take the DNA information he helped unlock and figure out how to leverage it to cheat death for years, or even decades.

“Our goal is not necessarily lengthening life, but extending a healthier, high performing, more productive life span,” said Venter on the company’s site.

Another example : Sierra Sciences, a biotechnology company based in Reno, Nevada, is working on “shutting off the cellular-aging clock,” the telomere. Their website claims they’re « on curing aging » (by the way, I joined their newsletter because their research sound really exciting).

According to them, « Telomeres are structures at the end of our chromosomes that shorten every time a human cell divides. The length of an individual’s telomeres is closely associated with their biological age. Research shows that control of telomeres could possibly allow humans to live at a physiologically “young” age and health

beyond the current theoretical maximum human lifespan of 125 years ».

Antioxidants

Using the mitochondria-targeted antioxidant SkQ1 to battle the aging of organisms, researchers from Russia and Sweden published a joint study by Lomonosov Moscow State University and Stockholm University. Their results showed a « delayed appearance of traits of aging such as kyphosis, alopecia, lowering of body temperature, body weight loss, as well as ameliorated heart, kidney and liver pathologies ». Their study is available in the journal Aging.

On this topic, Gordon Lithgow, a senior lecturer at the University of Manchester in England, said : “It’s a ridiculously simple idea that aging is due to oxidative stress but all the data is pointing to it,” he adds.

Drugs

About the use of drugs, Novartis, a pharmaceutical company, found that rapamycin can help strengthen the immune systems of older patients. Matt Kaeberlein, a biology of aging researcher at the University of Washington and colleague Daniel Promislow told the Times that their trials with rapamycin and old dogs has had promising early results.

About other molecules, there is the already mentionned Google Project Calico, who entered into a partnership with pharmaceutical giant AbbVie in order to build a mimic drug of FOXO3, a gene associated with exceptional life span.

FOXO3 is a peptide designed by Cell biologist Peter de Keizer of Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and his team. This molecule carries a shortened version of the FOXO4 protein, and seems to be able to prompt senescent cells to commit suicide — while sparing healthy cells.

Bacteria

In this race towards eternal youth, it seems we can also count on bacteria : « Russian Scientist Anatoli Brouchkov, head of the geocryology department at Moscow State University, told RT that he had more energy and a stronger immune system since he started injecting himself with the Bacillus F bacteria after successful experiments on mice and fruit flies », according to Vice (that’s some hard science here, for the record).

Bacillus F is thought to be an ancient bacteria strain discovered at a permafrost site in the Sakha Republic in 2009. Since its discovery, scientists — such as Professor Sergey Petrov of the Tyumen Scientific Centre — have conducted various experiments on animals, finding the bacteria increased the longevity and fertility of mice, and had begun similar experiments on human blood cells.

And vitamins !

« In the first controlled clinical trial of nicotinamide riboside (NR), a newly discovered form of Vitamin B3, researchers have shown that the compound is safe for humans and increases levels of a cell metabolite that is critical for cellular energy production and protection against stress and DNA damage » — the infamous deterioration of the body cells. You can read it all on Science Daily.

A not-so-magical quest anymore

Regenerative medicine was long considered a wishful dream, a delirium about finding the « Foutain of Youth ». However, according to David Gobel, “Now it’s no longer a career-ending conversation; it’s now a fundable conversation, especially in the area of regenerative medicine ».

David Kekich is the founder and CEO of Maximum Life Foundation, a non-profit that “hopes to reverse the human aging process — a la The Curious Case of Benjamin Button — by 2033”. So, quite soon. According to the website, they also use « advanced artifical intelligence » to accelerate their biomedical research.

They also published a book, « Life Extension Express: 7 Steps You Can Take Now, To Catch The Emerging Wave Of Medical Breakthroughs… For A Youthful Indefinite (Yes, Indefinite) Lifespan » with few positive comments. You can also available for free if you subscribe on the website. I will definitely take a look at it and give you a full review later on !

When you look at it, and even if it’s probably one of the most hot topics in Human Health currently, it does not attract much attention. It’s probably due to our old way of thinking, and the belief (deeply rooted in most of us) that aging and dying is a natural process and not a « problem » we can (or should) solve. However, more and more people tend to think differently and to try and break the « taboo ».

But will these breakthrough only benefit rich people and investors ?

In fact, it could be quite the contrary. First of all, we live in a capitalism system for now : business is business, and laboratories producing anti-aging pills, drugs or protocols will want to make benefits out of it. And make them affordable for the majority. Secondy, as Heales association copresident and AFT-Technoprog French transhumanism Association vice-chairman Didier Coeurnelle said (in this previous article) :

“Even if a private company was to make a breakthrough regarding human lifespan, they would endure tremendus political, economical, social, philosophical and ethical pressure to make it available for all. It was the case for the HIV epidemic, even if it’s still not enough. But here, everyone is concerned. We need equality between rich and poor people, but also between today and tomorrow : more than 10 000 individuals die from age-related disease, it’s like 70% of the overall population. We must improve research in that field, so that we can benefit from it in the short term. Life is precious, I bet most people will agree on that. We must prioritize”.

At least, I know where I would be investing if I was a billionaire myself…