The Current State of Aging Research — Ending Age-Related Diseases 2018 Panel | LEAF

so okay welcome everybody so I'm gonna kick it off with a few basic questions here just to kind of set the stage a lot of us here that in a research community have been in this field for quite some time and I just want to get an overview kind of this arc of progression of this field and I want to just start off maybe you know from left to right or you know start with the name or if anybody else wants to jump in but what's the general sense of the current state of longevity or basic aging research here now in 2018 compared to when you first started in this field and how has it changed you know you could kind of riff on theory and practice you know but how you know how do you see it now versus how it was when you entered the field so I I think we are at a very exciting time because there are so many opportunities now in the aging field we have approaches to first approaches to rejuvenation we have biomarkers we better understand the aging process than before so it's very exciting time and I think we are ahead of a major transition in the field in the sense because we accumulated so many tools but at the same time I would say that we are at the very beginning of the road not that in the middle or not at the end because as we discussed today there is no clear understanding of what we are targeting what is the aging process and what should be the targets so I think it's still a long wait before the actual region Asian therapies will be available probably we would be able to extend lifespan a little bit of human human lifespan 20% 30% because we know that it can be done in all model organisms there is no reason why it shouldn't be done in humans but most sophisticated approaches I think would take more time so 25 years ago aging was viewed not very kindly by most of science I think that's changed radically last 25 years to today where I think it's a very desirable field of study I remember working with dr. timorous at Berkeley about 20 years ago actually she tried to actually she didn't really go out quite actively in saying that she was aging research or latch that's what she was but she kind of couched the the research in 20 different ways so people wouldn't kind of criticize her but I think now we're perfectly comfortable telling people what we do and I think it's very well accepted I think if you remember seeing my slide that when a couple like Google starts looking in the field I think it's time to get really serious here and they're getting very serious about it and a lot of companies in the valley look on valley and when I mean Silicon Valley by the way I mean the entire Bay Area so Silicon Valley by the way isn't Silicon Valley anymore because most of the silicon is being done in Singapore in China and Japan so it's really software and computer and I think it's technology valley how about that because all the technology I mentioned are working are being worked on in in that area and I'm originally from Canada by the way and I naturally migrated there because that's where the futures being invented and I believe abri it's no accident you're in Silicon Valley and not other places in America I believe so both of us are actually not Americans we're not born in America but we gravitated to Silicon Valley because of the reason that that's where the futures gonna be invented and so so so aging I believe is gonna be propelled forward enormous ly by people like Aubrey and all of you here if you are interest in the field and help helping us move forward but Silicon Valley has definitely helped Benton figure this problem out because that's what the valley does it solves problems I certainly agree with what the others have said I would say that there is actually another even bigger thing that happened well arguably bigger certainly when I started in this field 25 years ago a large part of why I switched from working in artificial intelligence research was because I discovered that gerontology was a real backwater it was considered very poorly by most other biologists and hardly anybody was working out and it seemed like the people who were working on it were mostly not working on doing anything about it so the thing that the thing when I started to come to conferences and get to know people I found very much what Steve just said that even within the field you know thinking about actually intervening in aiding and postponing it was largely you know not something you did you never kind of mentioned that in a grant application or anything like that and if it's fun to go back over the years and look at the subtitles of the comes of the major conferences so like there's a conference every year run by an organization called the gerontological Society of America and each conference is called something like you know their 28th conference of the annual meeting of the ESA but then there's a subtitle and the subtitles have changed over the years back then the subtitle would always be about understanding aging better and now every single year it's all about doing something about aging it's all about intervention it's all about actually keeping people healthier for longer and of course the team is completely correct that we can't do it yet to speak of and it'll be a little while before we can well even I probably are a little bit different from each other in terms of our predicted timeframes but we all know that the time friends are very speculative we just don't know how long it's gonna be we just know that the harder we work the thinner it's going to be and the fact that it's now respectable to talk about intervention is the first and biggest hurdle and it has been overcome now it's possible to talk to other biologists and other scientists and indeed the general public about the possibility of bringing aging under medical control in a way that was unthinkable even ten years ago and certainly 20 or 25 years ago so yeah I totally empathize with the whole backwater aspect I just entered the field 18 years ago and I remember when I was just looking for for laboratories to work in before I joined David Sinclair's lap when he himself just joined Harvard Medical and I was one of his first grad students you know it seemed like a dirty word I was looking for you know labs that were working on you know telomeres or cancer or not aging right certainly not longevity because that's kind of way out there but it's it's changed dramatically and what what would you say specifically has happened you know some specific milestones over the past 18 years or so that now we're here talking about interventions and now it's not so much of a backwater we're just not making laundry lists of things that go wrong but we're talking about interventions what are some of the that you see the key developments very specifically over the course of you know a decade and a half or two decades that has gotten us to this point here like a little bit more precisely for the audience I I think that the main development is the overall development of science in the genomic revolution for example so you know much of what we know is defined by genomics and in general omics approaches because aging is a systemic process the only way to study it is to study systemically and we have to use advanced computational technology and advanced omics approaches and this is something that now is being used but which was not before in terms of the concrete development it's hard to say I would say now we know that a lifespan of all organisms that we try in the lab can be altered yeah I think this is important important development so this should apply to humans as well there's no reason it it cannot apply other developments this I don't know in vivo rejuvenation approaches I think this is something a human acha that developed the IPS this is it directly applies to the aging field but yeah it's the still there's a long road ahead of us in the I guess intervening 25 years or so again I again I am a technology person so I'm gonna have to kind of rely on that and that well for one how about the human genome project okay so 25 years ago it was 1993 and the human genome project was just starting and very very very slowly and what craig Venter came on the scene clearly things went up exponential rate but they were predicting that would take a very long time there are predictions of 20-30 years and the cost estimates were just way off the charts but when you know when modern sequencing technology came online thanks to by the way computer technology because the two were very tied together the human genome project actually I think but 80% of it was done with 10% of the time of their whole project so again it was an exponential increase so I think I think technology again I hate harping on that thing but I think it's critical 25 years ago by the way who heard of the Internet in 1993 I have no idea how it could detect my life nor my research without the Internet now I know there's like color does the internet have to do the aging well has quite a lot to do the AG because I don't know I'd book my airline ticket to come here from California or you know a million other things we use the internet for how would I search PubMed how would first for example artificial hotels you robots read all this information that's on the internet and so on so and so on so I think and also I'll have to do a shout out to Aubree here because in addition to technology I think awareness has been huge and an obvious did a great job and letting people know that this is a prom that is is this fixable and and so I think those have been and and and obviously right now we don't need to couch or hide the fact that we're doing this work because it's very well accepted now and I think so so I think those two factors really the technology and and the publicity that this is a fixable problem I think those two things have been major factors and in bringing us here today yeah thanks Dave guess I've made a bit of a contribution when it comes to the advocacy side and largely I think you know perhaps just being out there and saying things that were initially regarded as completely crazy and and wrong and just getting away with it you know actually being able to say the same things for a decade or more and not be demonstrably knocked down and shown to be wrong you know that's actually quite powerful in terms of changing the whole tone of the conversation that's gone on so I think perhaps just by putting my head above the parapet so much that helped but it took to the technological developments I think yeah absolutely they the generic developments that have happened whether it's the human genome project or development of CRISPR or the development of IPs all of these things which of course have huge relevance across the whole of medical research have also got huge relevance in terms of the credibility that attaches to the idea of bringing aging under medical control I'm actually rather more pessimistic than most gerontologists with regard to the idea that we can extrapolate from laboratory organisms to humans in terms of longevity I believe that not enough attention is paid to the fact that longer lived organisms seem to be much more difficult to life extent than short lived ones especially by simple methods that relate to calorie restriction this should not be ignored because first of all it's very obviously true and second of all it's not even a surprise it's pretty obvious just because long famines are shorter than sure a lot less frequent than short famines in nature that you would expect that short-lived organisms would have machinery to respond to to famines better than long-lived organisms well but say we're saying that you know I don't object to the fact that this has been somewhat swept under the carpet because it has contributed to the the increased credibility of the idea of doing something about aging even if by what I would say are scientifically fragile arguments so yes I mean all of these things matter and I think it's really the sum total of all of these technological and you know rhetorical developments that is led us to this much happier state that we're in now right now is there is there a technology now that you see that's maybe nascent or being developed right now or maybe it's just about to become ature that you that you believe is going to really push this field forward dramatically is there something that excites you right now in the field of I guess maybe specifically aging in longevity research but it could be outside of you know longevity and aging research something more generic ái for example is there something that you know if somebody said what is going to give us our biggest bang for the buck that's gonna really push this forward is there something on your mind or is it still a bit hazy to say I would say AI and biomarkers of aging because these are the tools that that can be used to accelerate aging research so does not need to be just a bit generic biomarkers could be more sophisticated biomarkers that that will be developed in the future but we know already that there are some biomarkers I think there's a first generation biomarkers that I available and I think it's very exciting yeah I'll have to agree with with that you know and probably add a little bit more to that so clearly AI is going to make a huge impact on this field and actually um we attended a conference and at the buck Institute which is in Novato which is just north of the the Bay Area and it's a private research center for for aging research and there are quite a number of speakers there and it was basically a day of AI and aging so it's very interesting but I think also I think the benefit of AI it's gonna remove this 10 scientist 11 opinion situation because I think we're inherently limited as human beings to absorb information or as computer as well there's very unlimited very unlimited to what they can do I mean I have a key fob in my pocket here that stores 16 billion bytes of information whereas 25 years ago I think that was the entire storage capacity United States or something like that I mean so but nonetheless on the the rate of processing speed and the REA of the rate of storage increase is is just it's exponential and so I think this situation where the I think there's this being Indian parable where there's an elephant and there's 10 people looking at different parsley elephant and one says oh it's a snake because it feels too stale and you know one says oh no it's something else because it feels its toes and so and so forth I think that will go away because with AI there first of all it's unbiased and it has all the information and as I mentioned before just if you look at papers on that that have the word aging in it and PubMed last year 20,000 papers I don't even know between the four of us we could read twenty files and papers in a year that's a lot of papers and and be able to understand and regurgitate and assimilate all that information and guess what this year it's gonna be more and then so on and so forth it's gonna be increasing exponentially and so I think AI and it's gonna play a huge role and also the ability to visualize its information because I think humans ultimately are going to be solving this problem not the AI will use AI as a tool and so I think it's I think it's gonna be pretty amazing what's gonna happen the next a few years yeah I I agree with all that but I think in addition I want to emphasize that precisely because aging is this systemic very multifactorial phenomenon with the accumulation of so many different types of damage we do always want to remember that it's likely that the world will not be a single breakthrough that kind of dominates the rest that the future history of anti-aging research and development the you know the the repair of damaged and the rejuvenation of the body is very much a divide and conquer strategy it's something that requires the development of a wide range of different technologies which eventually will all be applied simultaneously to all of us and as such the way that I look at is you know being at the coalface of anti-aging research is that the breakthrough that matters the most are the ones that get the least publicity because they are at the earliest stages and the reason they're at the earliest stages and also the reason they might have the most is because they involve attacking the most recalcitrant most difficult components of a component of damage in aging the ones that people for many many years had basically given up on its being too hard some of the most some of the breakthroughs that we've made a sense Research Foundation that I'm most proud of risk for that reason that we've essentially been able to revive and kickstart areas of research that had learned pretty much dormant for at least ten or fifteen years just because people in more mainstream peer-reviewed academia had to work on more low-hanging fruit in order to get their next grant applications funded I think what helps us humans in in in in kind of amassing all this data here in all the papers is that a lot of its redundant so that helps a lot so regarding you know aging itself as and I will say longevity I hear these two terms aging and longevity and I know that Leonard hayflick who's a famous researcher hayflick limit a lot of you probably heard of this he basically discovered senescence and mammalian cells you know he posits that you know aging is a consequence of physics second law of thermodynamics and longevity is a consequence of biology do you see there being a grand unified theory of longevity or aging is there something is is there something of that nature that we perhaps possess right now in the literature or that you subscribe to or that's something that you think is still not yet fully hashed out no PDM you probably definitely definitely not hashed out so I mean as discussed many times at this conference already there are more definitions of aging than the number of researchers in the field everybody thinks different and they change the opinion and if you ask a simple question when does aging begin whether aging is the disease just completely different answers to it so I think it's important to to build that foundation so that we could agree upon what what this is and what we are trying to target so even even discussing that aging comes from damage accumulation is it too diluted kind of definition because damage comes from every process and it's just as damaged it's other deleterious changes in balance and cellular components too many cells in an organ or maybe a 1% more glucose in the blood it's all deleterious changes as a function of age as a function of age everything changes in the cell most of the processes change and they are deleterious when we say that we will kind of understand all of them and remove them I think it's just not feasible so it's not feasible to stop aging in there and from that sense no matter what we say how exciting how we will conquer it in 30 years so in hundred years we will leave 200 years or 500 years it's just not going to happen by saying it we need to understand the aging process I think this is the main thing so I think previous speaker mentioned that aging is a multi-faceted problem that occurs at multiple levels and all those levels there their feedback systems and so on and so forth so I think aging is not one problem but several problems and I think what's going to end up happening is that some interventions will take place early on that'll extend life a little bit 1020 years and then again more work will be done and that looks been extended items maybe 30 40 50 years and so on so I I don't think it's gonna be a Eureka moment where hey I discovered how to cure aging I think it's going to be an incremental process I think that process will take a while and I think as far as what aging at least my my view of aging is at a more physiological level not a cellular level because I think that's where we're gonna start first if the physiological level then then start burrowing down you know to the cellular pieces and genetic and so on but just something very simple and I think all of us can understand this estrogen we all understand when women's estrogen levels decrease to a certain point we understand what happens at that point right they go through menopause and so on so that's a very very simple aging type of process that takes place that's very understandable by the layperson basically estrogen levels go up during puberty and so on and women and then they have a plateau and they drop off and then in their 50s they lose the ability to have children and so on and so forth and so that's all basically it's more than just one hormone but basically estrogen is that the major component in that process so I think I think it'll be attacked the hormonal level because again if you look at the hormone profiles let's say of a 20 year old versus saying seventy-year-old you're going to see some radical differences and if you just imagine this little thought game you play I mean imagine a seven-year-old going backwards in time what is their homework hormone profile gonna look like in other words normally what normally takes place is let's say growth hormone ok growth hormone goes up it Peaks and it goes down now if you play the movie backwards growth hormone levels are actually going back up again now I know that's very simplistic and there's I mean the machinery is different now so the the 7 year old is a 7 has a 7 year old body and a 20 L has a 20 robot so replaying or playing the movie backwards it's not exactly the solution but I think it would be common sense to imagine that a long-lived person would have hormone profiles very similar to a 20 year old and so that exact on that that that looks at the physiological level but then of course there's a cellular level which has to be addressed to so once again I think it's gonna be a multi-stage process it's not gonna be a Eureka moment it's gonna take multiple steps to to slow this thing down to a crawl yeah I think ok so I want to really emphasize why I am more optimistic than most people who work on the biology of aging I think a lot of the reason why I feel unwrite to be more optimistic than average is that I think about this in terms of what we need to understand and what we don't need to understand you know it was only when I started getting into this field in the mid 90s that I really began to appreciate the profound difference of mindset that exists between on the one hand basic scientists and on the other hand technologists know basic scientists are all about finding things out for the sake of finding things out and my ex-wife was you know very prominent well exist all her life and she uh you know she was very much that sort of person you know I would say to her well you know why aren't you interested in aging and she would say well it's just you know decay what fundamental truths you're gonna find out about the universe by studying decay and I would say well yeah sure that's true but but it's bad for you and and mushy would say well you know yeah but that's not my problem and I would say well it kind of is but it never really got it never really got through so I felt yeah I'm gonna do it myself really and and yeah the thing is that when you're training and your mindset is all about understanding nature testing hypotheses you know improving knowledge then you you use information you use evidence in a very different way than if you're a technologist and your training and your expertise is about manipulating nature it's just a completely different thing and I never understood how different it was until I started thinking about that so now I believe were in a situation where we can look at the phenomenon of aging which is every bit as complicated as valiant entities no question but then in terms of doing something about it the first step has to be to figure out how to minimize the fraction of aging that we actually need to understand in order to achieve some manipulation and to maximize the amount that we can get away with not understanding that's really what led me to the concept of comprehensive damage repair is a promising approach in the first place it's also what led to my being viewed as crazy for a long time until it became apparent that I wasn't so um you know I believe that this way of thinking about dealing with aging does justify the optimism that I have even though there's still a long way to go to get people to really you know accept it one thing also is that it's not just a single linear spectrum between pessimism and optimism so here's some things that I may be and I don't know if he will be angry at my revealing it but I'll do so anyway the guy who runs the buck Institute Erik ver down very very prominent and very very bright and and good gerontologist he is every bit as pessimistic as they deem but perhaps even more so with regard to the near-term with regard to our decay I'm sorry I'm actually optimistic about aging research well maybe you can see realistic wise a pessimistic okay well I think the word realistic and optimistic or often miss you you know Optimus you say you're an optimist people think you're an over up to me you say you're a realist people think you're a pessimist you know but but um but yes um Eric is very pessimistic about the rate of progress that's likely to occur in the next 10 or 20 years he thinks that we'll be very lucky if we can extend human healthy lifespan therefore human total lifespan by more than 5 years in our lifetimes but he on the other hand he believes that once we do get to maybe 20 years of extension then he agrees with me that we will reach this thing that I've called longevity escape velocity where we are pushing back the rest of Aging incremental eeeh Steve says but faster than time is passing and therefore we effectively have completely defeated ating even though we haven't really defeated it you know this is something that hardly any gerontologist will be willing to say publicly because it scares the funding agencies but the fact is it's pretty obviously true when you think about it so switching to practical applications I think we all agree here that you don't need to have a firm theoretical understanding before you can actually have interventions that's basically been the story of medicine throughout its entire history what what would you say you know to people out there who are you know curious about up-and-coming therapeutics therapies that are just on the horizon that are perhaps trickling in right now into trials or perhaps even being you know used by some people off-label what what do you is there are there can you give like a scope or a timeline of interventions that you see happening soon and then you know maybe you can speculate on what might happen later but let's start with the soonest things that you would see what you think you know hitting the market or that people would experience that you think no right yeah well of course there are some fairly obvious examples that have already been mentioned today and will be mentioned this afternoon things that are going to be in clinical trials very soon or even hourly are in clinical trials when I started the potential foundation especially when I started Sense research foundation the main priority the story the main criterion that we used to prioritize what research to do was that other people were not already doing it perfectly well with perfectly good funding and the only area that that led to our D prioritizing really was stem-cell research you know loss of cells is one of these seven categories that I've been talking about all these years and we do virtually no we've done virtually no work on fixing that because all the really important stuff was being done by other people but somehow it was not seen broadly you know in the in the broader audience as emblematic of the comprehensive damage repair approach and therefore it didn't work as a way of selling it as a realistic way to go forward I think that's now completely changed especially with what's happened with synthetics that have you know really taken the world by storm in terms of not only getting a lot of press but also getting a lot of money you know the fact that we've now got a company based on unabashed damage repair that is you know value in it ten digits that's a very big difference and they're gonna be in clinical trials you know in the next yeah after lunch we're gonna be hearing from Kelsey moody I guess he's going to talk about the fact that approach for eliminating the damage that drives macular degeneration is also going to be in clinical trials pretty soon courtesy of their own work at - I caught which we pioneered at cents Research Foundation it took as many years to get to a point where it could be taken private but when I stood it and you know the this will just be a continuing process of bringing things to a far enough along to get working in in animal models and then to clinical trials but we're very close now in a lot of the areas of damage repair that are the most critical so I think as first technologists are concerned there's I again I believe that the more near-term solution will be generated pretty much by stabilizing the hormonal profile of our bodies and there's a company called Dex con that's doing something like that with with diabetes and they have ways to basically monitor your your glucose levels and so on by a device that you would attach to your body and it's monitor your glucose and updating your cell phone and so I think the solution will be pretty much like that you'll be monitoring your estrin levels your growth hormone levels all the hormones that are basically declining as you grow old and there'll be mathematical formulas to inject the right amount at the right time because again a lot of people and I don't think we've heard this I'm not sure we're hearing this today but again Starkey and rhythms are very important as to when you inject the right hormone the right time it's very important because again all these things are cyclic as well throughout the throughout the day so I think that's those the technologies that I believe are gonna be important near-term but one other thing as far as technologies are concerned as far as aging and again it's not being addressed what if you're 75 years old right now what if you're 80 years old right now clearly none of us have a solution for you right now so again it's not talked about very much but I think cryonics is a very important technology to mention because again it provides a technological life but for those folks not fortunate enough to be young one of us up here and I think that's something that I think we should talk about more because I just don't want to basically throw away a whole generation of people because we just won't be able to figure out the problem soon enough for them to be recipients of it so I think I would encourage people to look into that field and look into companies that are in that field because I think it's gonna be a pretty much a growth industry at least until you know we figure out how to slow down this process I think we have to ask a question what these recommendations or suggestions will be based on so in humans we cannot run an experiment and test the effect of any intervention or lifestyle or therapy or on lifespan so the only way to test an intervention is to use a biomarker once biomarkers better biomarkers will be developed then I think what will be used in in my general public is something which we already know it's a combination of lifestyle changes and maybe some pharmacological interventions I don't know whether it's going to be metformin or a promising or any combination or some other compounds like that because we will know that based on statistics I don't know the UK biobank develops there is many like large collection of databases that now they've been accumulated once they ran across through this biomarkers we will know which changes in lifestyle and which interventions might be extending life Spencer do you disagree I switch up because I think that yes absolutely biomarkers are extraordinarily important they will be obviously helpful but we can actually do clinical trials where lifespan is the endpoints if we are talking about rejuvenation therapies damage repair therapies because it only takes let's say five years if you're taking a population that's already on the Gumpert curve in a long way like their age 70 for example it only takes five years maximum to really demonstrate rejuvenation if you've got it anyway it's working so I believe that increasingly we will be able to use life actual death as vff the market it depends on what you mean by rejuvenation what what do you mean by determination well I mean look how would you measure it a work saying is that biomarkers a would be the best way but even if we only had death that would still be a good enough marker because we're talking about a period of life at which death happens quite quite often you know then we cannot cite each even nation we cannot claim rejuvenation if it's just an extension of lifespan right well it's very hard to uncouple the two things health and life you know being addressed by definition is going from all the state to a youngest age but being sick is risky and words in a subset of cells perhaps in the organs to a youngest state we have to measure it that they go from an old estate to younger States for that we need some some kind of a marker on us an essay like epigenetic clock for example right well I think one thing is what I mentioned is that the word health span has not been mentioned I think maybe that's where our bridge go with this is that increasing healthspan so life and fewer visits to the hospital how about that I think that's that's a pretty good way activities of daily living all that kind of thing but yeah again I do a limb said I'm not in any way denying the value of biomarkers I'm just saying that we do have other options great and I want to save a few minutes for the audience because I promised questions will be taken I'm not a medical doctor but I would recommend right now you could start taking risperdal supplements in a carrier of red wine I do that twice a day works at least for your mood I'm not sure about longevity the experiment is still ongoing I'll let you know at the end how it worked out so right now I'm going to pass the microphone forward I know there was a hand up right there somewhere this gentleman here I have a comment and a question um one thing that we might be able to do to measure rejuvenation we might not even need to use deaths we might do something such as grip strength in the elderly or frailty in the elderly those are empirical categories and that could take even less than five years if we could demonstrate an intervention you know maybe we could look at two years later or the duration of the intervention so that's the first thing we might be able to use as regeneration a rejuvenation excuse me and I actually had a question I might it might be a little personal so if you don't wanna answer I understand but along the lines of taking resveratrol in a glass of wine I was actually wondering if any of you seriously incorporate any of these anti-aging regimes into your own life for example specific diets timing of diet or even supplements such as metformin actually I can start with that first people ask me all the time so Steve you're doing this aging work what what can I do what could I do to extend in my life and I tell them three things eat well exercise and be happy that's the only thing right now that you can do that's going to work yeah I say give me a large amount of money that's the only thing that's going to work intravenously would work yet I have a question about the biomarkers that you mentioned which by microbiome markers are you talking about there are various biomarkers that are currently available so I think the best one is I mentioned in my talk is DNA methylation clock because this way one can trace millions of different CPG sites and and and identify some science we should present the aging process there are some other biomarkers based on metabolites in the blood for example or some other metabolites like somebody mentioned this frailty index like strength grip strength so they all can be considered as as a biomarker it's unclear what is the currently currently is the best so in the future probably they will be integrated and combine them even better biomarkers will be developed this would allow us to trace the aging process and very quickly yes we can look perhaps in a larger population we could run a trial with many people and then perhaps follow them for five years these biomarkers just will be easy because we don't need for them to to die for example yeah so yeah so something which can measure the aging process because if you for example do I mean skin might age slower than then other organs or changes and the blood might be might not present the aging process in an entire organism the question is how to find something which represents the aging of the entire organism not a particular system the only real difficulty that I have with biomarkers is that you don't necessarily know whether they're still going to be biomarkers in the context of an intervention they may track where the chronological age or the age until death pretty well across a population that's not being treated but your treatment may disrupt the aging process in a way that doesn't disrupt the biomarkers or vice versa and of course you'd hope that that mostly wouldn't occur but it is a caveat that well no it has to be aware of when one is identifying biomarkers one has to have good biological reasons for believing that they will continue to correlate with biological age in the context of whatever interventions you may be introducing okay quick answer telomeres yeah okay the question was you know telling me it's good or bad more or less yeah it's telling me a shortening good or bad it's telling me at length something good or bad and of course the reason why this is a controversy is because there's no one answer it's perfectly clear that telomeres get shorter when cells divide and that we have an enzyme called telomerase which counteracts that by putting additional sequence on the end of our chromosomes um there are cells that divide quite frequently in the body and therefore have a lot of telomere shortening that needs to be compensated the cells that divide the most often Express a bit of this enzyme telomerase so they do compensate cells that don't divide at all or that hardly ever divide don't need to worry about this in a currently normal lifetime unfortunately we also have the problem of cells that divide when we'd rather they didn't namely cancer cells so one can argue it both ways one can say that we need to rescue those cell types that are suffering from telomere shortening in order to rejuvenate us and I think the best evidence in favor of that way of thinking is with regard to the immune system which certainly has a lot of cell division that may not be adequately compensated by telomerase and the converse argument is we may need to use telomere shortening as a way of controlling cancer no really therefore the answer to the question comes down not to what we should be doing with telomeres but to what else we can do elsewhere in aging for example if we figured out a way to completely eliminate cancer that didn't have anything to do with telomeres like you know immunotherapy for a couple's budding immunotherapy got really really good then bang we no longer have a reason not to extend our telomeres so the argument in favor of telomere lengthening becomes very strong conversely if we find other ways to to keep cells that would normally undergo replicative senescence from doing so but without extending without extending telomeres then we might be able to use telomere shortening as I thought more powerful cancer therapy it'll depend on they which of these technologies comes along first and turns out to be easiest yeah I think tears may be a factor later on in other words if we extend life 250 years and so on that could play a factor but I can tell you that the reason why estrogen levels go down and why admit women go through menopause and their 50s has nothing to do with telomere shortening and the reason why we're dopamine levels go down in our brain and we don't have that get up and go like we used to have when we were 20 I don't think that has lead to a telomere shortening so I think tumors may play a role later on but I think near-term I don't think they play a factor in why we die at the age of 80 approximately right now so I'd like to thank our panel right now for the discussion we had and there'll be plenty more panels later this afternoon thank you very much

Channel: Lifespan Extension Advocacy Foundation

Views: 11,215

Keywords: Aubrey de Grey, Aubrey de Gray, Dr. Aubrey de Grey, Oliver Medvedik, Dr. Oliver Medvedik, Vadim Gladyshev, Dr. Vadim Gladyshev, Steven Garan, Steven A. Garan, Steve Garan, Ending Age-Related Disease, Cooper Union, NYC, Biotech Investment, Investor, Cryonics, A.I., Artificial Intelligence, Lifespan, Healthspan, Longevity, SENS, Longevity Research, Panel, Life Extension, Life Extension Research, Aging, Ageing, Biotechnology, Life Extension Advocacy Foundation, Advocacy, Lifespan.io, LEAF

Id: Mje_To9DB3c

Length: 43min 16sec (2596 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 27 2018