Undoing aging: Aubrey de Grey at TEDxDanubia 2013

let me start with a question please raise your hand if you want to get Alzheimer's disease please raise your hand if you think that you will want to get Alzheimer's disease at the age of 90 even better even better even better the first thing I want to explain to you is the relationship between the diseases of old age things like Alzheimer's and aging essentially what I want to tell you is that you should not really pay any attention to anybody who uses the word aging without really explaining what they mean because they almost certainly don't know what they mean it's an extraordinarily poorly used word people can say the most ridiculous things when they think they are understanding what aging really means I'm going to define I'm going to tell you what I mean by aging and that's what's going to be the basis for everything else I say aging is a process that goes on throughout life even starting before were born and it is simply the accumulation of damage in the body in the human body or in the body of any other living animal aging is initially harmless that's why those of you who are 40 years old are still working pretty much as well as those of you who are only 25 years old but aging eventually overwhelms the normal operation of the human body and that's why we get the diseases and disabilities of old age and they are awfully bad for us in an audience of Ted or TEDx it is very controversial to say that I am working on the world's most important problem but I really am and this is why aging kills a hundred thousand people every day that's twice as many as all other causes of death added together two-thirds of all deaths are from aging in the industrialized world it's 90 percent of all deaths it's an insane number and of course it's not just the death it's the suffering that goes before the death that's why I mentioned out summers disease I didn't say who wants to die I didn't say who wants to die at age 90 because you might be a bit confused about that a lot of people are and I'm going to come to that in a moment but none of you want to get alzheimer's disease even at age 90 ultimately it's all about this hands up anyone who wants to be the person on the right okay even if the person on the left is about to have his head bitten off by a shark okay so it's all about health it's all about looking and feeling and functioning just as well as you did when you were 25 however long ago you were born but still people say these things you know people first of all they just don't listen they think that it's all about being in a bad state of health for a very long time they think that the elimination of Aging is a bad idea because they can't work out what they would do or they can't work out where we would put all the people or they don't think that it's going to come along in time for them and of course they don't care about their children at all I mean goodness me oh cool so I think it's all about this I think it's that aging is so horrible so scary that we have found it necessary to put it out of our minds and pretend that it's not horrible at all and it doesn't matter how we do that so long as we can so long as we succeed in tricking ourselves into the idea that aging is a good thing even though it doesn't look like a good thing that made perfect sense it was a rational thing to do until very recently because until very recently nobody had any idea what to do about aging but now we do now we are within a reasonable distance within striking distance of developing medicine that really brings aging under the same level of medical control that we have already today for most infectious diseases like you know tuberculosis or whatever it's like this people will refuse to think about whether it's actually a good idea to defeat aging because they say well it doesn't really matter whether it's a good idea or not does it because we're never going to do it but the same people at the same time will also say that will refuse to think about whether it's actually likely that we could do anything about aging anytime soon because who cares because it's a bad idea right so the pessimism about the desirability and the pessimism about the feasibility joined together to perpetuate each other and that's why I have to give these talks about why it's so important to do this but of course in order for me to make any kind of case for this I have to show you that this part over here that aging is immutable really is no longer true and that's what I'm going to do for the rest of my time the way that my organization sense research foundation is going about combating aging or developing medicine that will combat aging is we are developing regenerative medicine for aging we're interested in not just slowing aging down slowing down the accumulation of damage in the body and thereby delaying the age at which we get sick we're interesting actually repairing that damage reversing biological age taking people who are already maybe 60 years old and making them biologically thirsty again that might sound as though it's far harder than just slowing aging down and indeed most people who study the biology of Aging made that assumption but a decade or so ago I realized that that assumption is wrong and that actually repairing the damage of aging is likely to be much easier than stopping it from happening in the first place and the reason that the way I realized that would essentially by looking at the details regenerative medicine is all about restoring the structure of the body whether it's at the level of the whole organ by replacing an organ with an artificial one or at the cellular level using stem-cell therapy or the molecular level repairing the insides of cells for example aging is all about the accumulation of damage and damage happens at all of those levels we have to think about molecular and cellular and whole-body damage when we think about aging and as I explained a moment ago aging is initially harmless it is harmless for a long time because the body is set up to tolerate a lot of damage but it's not set up to solid an infinite amount of damage and that's why eventually we get the diseases and disabilities of old age now the reason that that definition of aging is so useful can be explained using this little diagram these two approaches that I'm describing here the gerontology approach and the geriatrics approach our ways of potentially combating aging postponing the ill health of old age and they have both been around a long time and neither of them work and neither of them ever will work well not for a very very long time anyway the geriatrics approach is an attempt to treat the diseases of old age just like infections to eliminate them from the body by attacking the symptoms directly and that's obviously hopeless because aging is a side effect of being alive in the first place you can't eliminate it from the body the gerontology approach says let's try to slow down the creation of damage so that so that it doesn't get to this bad level until a later age but here's the problem with that we just don't understand the body very well this here is a simplified diagram of a small subset of what we know about how the body really works and as you can see there's no way that we could possibly manipulate this thing to do less of something we don't want it to do namely the creation of damage without at the same time breaking it so that it does things that do more harm than good you know that and that's an understatement of the problem the real problem is that this is a small subset of what we know about how metabolism works right and any biologist will tell you that that is completely overwhelmed by the astronomical amount that we don't know about how metabolism works let alone all the stuff that we don't even know that we don't know so you know there's no way we're going to make this work but luckily there is this third approach this is the regenerative medicine approach we can call it the maintenance approach essentially what this is we say let's not try to interfere with the process where metabolism creates damage or the process where damage eventually causes the diseases and disabilities abate of old age instead let us separate those two processes from each other by going in and repairing the damage and this is the damage of course everything I have said so far has been very dry and theoretical and maybe it'll work and maybe it won't in order to actually justify what I've said so far I have to give you some details and in the seven and a half minutes I have left I won't be able to give you very many details but at least I can start the great thing about damage is that it's not very complicated there are only seven major types of damage that we need to fix seven major types of side-effects of the body's normal operation that build up throughout life and eventually contribute to the diseases and disabilities above age and here they are and as you can see there are proper you know real concrete biological phenomena cell loss that simply means cells dying and not being automatically replaced by the division of other cells you can go down the list and it's the same thing for all of them but here's the really good news we can be pretty confident that this list is comprehensive the reason we can be confident is twofold first of all it's been the same list for 30 years all of these things have been talked about for thirty years and researched by people who study the biology of Aging you know we've come a very long way in biology in that time you would really have thought that the list would have got longer if you know it could have done but also I mean the list has not been an explicit list until I came along I started talking about this more than ten years ago and challenging people to say okay what's missing is there anything missing and no one has come along with anything that can be convincingly added to this list so that's pretty good news but only pretty good the really good news is on the next slide we have a fair idea how to go about actually fixing all of these things the reason that this classification of damage is useful is because for each category we can describe a generic therapy that can be used for each of the types of damage to actually implement the maintenance approach to get rid of these types of damage we can start with cell loss the loss of the death of cells and not compensated by the division of other cells stem cell therapy of course is exactly what that is there to fix stem cell therapy is about replacing cells that the body is not automatically replacing if we go down this list we can see the same sort of thing and I'm going to talk about a couple of them in some detail now first of all this one this doesn't get a lot of attention everybody knows that cancer is a major cause of death cancer is something that is essentially defined as having too many cells because cells are dividing when they're not supposed to but there's another way of having too many cells which is cells are not dying when they are supposed to and most people who don't study aging forget about that because it's not very you know high-profile but it turns out it's really important in aging it's the main reason why we have less good immune systems when we rolled up and we're getting somewhere in actually fixing this the work I'm describing here was not done by my organization actually it was done by other people but it's very much within the theme of what we work on essentially this was a experiment in mice just very recently in which they showed how to get rid of these death-resistant cells which wouldn't die when they were supposed to him and which were poisoning the rest of the body it was a rather artificial experiment with mice that had been genetically modified so it was only a proof-of-concept it doesn't really show us how to develop drugs for this for humans yet but it was a really good proof-of-concept these two mice that you see here they are the same age and as you can see one of them is much happier than the other the Mercer the mouse at the bottom is about to die a month away from dying and the mouse at the top is completely healthy just as healthy as a normal mouse that doesn't have the problem of these accumulating cells the little graph on the right is one of a dozen or more different experiments that these people did to quantify the biological age of these mice so this was fantastic here however is some more early stage work which is looking at one of the other of these seven components the accumulation of molecular garbage inside the cell this turns out to be incredibly important in some of the most major age-related diseases cardiovascular disease the number one killer in the Western world macular degeneration the number one cause of blindness in the elderly and the problem here is that cells accumulate material because they cannot break it down this is what happens in cardiovascular disease white blood cells normal white blood cells go into the walls of our major arteries and they process stuff that is stuck there which is mostly composed of cholesterol and they're very good at processing cholesterol cholesterol itself is not the problem but unfortunately the cholesterol is contaminated with a small amount of oxidized cholesterol which the white blood cells are unable to handle and that what that that stuff poisons these cells and they become like this they become foam cells full of stuff that they can't process we figured out or that we might be able to use some ingenuity from the rest of nature not from human the human body but from bacteria in the soil I realized that the process that turns young people into dead into old people and eventually into dead people is followed by another process that turns dead people into decomposed people and that process is not anything to do with what's in our genome it's to do with bacteria in the soil I realized that we might be able to find out how they break down the human body and we might be able to use that information to help our own cells this is a human cell to break down things that they normally can't it works this particular substance here 7q toh cholesterol is the thing we're going after it's the main reason why we get cardiovascular disease and we found some bacteria using this system called an enrichment culture which can break it down these two strains of bacteria can break it down really well we published this and you can see five years ago that was the first paper published from work that since foundation date it's taken us that long to get to the next step to identify the genes and enzymes that these bacteria are using and to modify those genes and enzymes so that they work in human cells we published this just last year showing that we have succeeded in this cells that are given this gene which is encoding an enzyme to break down seven keto cholesterol and modified so that the enzyme is targeted to the correct part of the human cell those cells are protected from this substance this toxic substance that's denoted by the fact that the bar on the right is always taller than the other bars the other bars are negative controls where there's no enzyme or the wrong enzyme or something so it's a long project don't get me wrong we've done steps 1 through 4 here within the next year I hope that we will be working in mice in mouse models of cardiovascular disease but that will probably take a few years before we can move to clinical trials but we're getting there and the key thing is this will be a far far more powerful therapy for cardiovascular disease than anything that exists today so we're very excited about this so I'm going to stop there just to remind you this is what it's all about stopping you from getting like the person on the right and this is what I want to leave you with it's not just me here I'm a biologist I get this work done when I can but ultimately it's all about public support for all of this the reason I give so many talks like this the reason I give so many interviews the reason that this movement needs to grow is because without public supports not just public philanthropic financial support but government supports commercial support we're not going to get this to happen very soon we need everybody to go out there and advocate to talk to your friends talk to your family talk to your colleagues about how this is the world's most important problem and people are genuinely working to solve it thank you very much you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 483,757

Rating: 4.8114538 out of 5

Keywords: biomedical gerontologist, aging, research, ted x, American Aging Association, SENS Foundation, medicine, Hungary, human body, tedx talk, regenerating, biology, life, biomedical, ted, aging process, Budapest, Aubrey de Grey, gerontology, TEDxDanubia 2013, ted talk, English, ted talks, gerontologist, geriatrics, tedx talks, Rejuvenation Research, pathology, tedx

Id: qMAwnA5WvLc

Length: 19min 6sec (1146 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 21 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

I really, really hope he presents some new findings the SENS foundation is working upon.