What David Sinclair is Hiding from Elon Musk

all right guys so a bit of a controversial one this week David Sinclair the father of longevity and Adam's Hero has on Twitter released can we redo that don't call it right here is he not okay okay so David Sinclair has on Twitter released a new paper showing that it might be possible to create a pill which can reverse aging a tweet that actually Elon Musk took interest in uh before I give a quick summary of the paper Adam thumbs up a thumbs down for this research I think thumbs down more hype than anything okay fair enough so let me just summarize 10 000 words in a PDF into about three lines so they took six compounds which could potentially be made into a therapeutic a drug one day and they applied them to human and myself and he has this Theory called the information Theory of Aging where he basically says that as we get older our cells are almost like a CD with music on it and as you have that for more and more time you develop scratches on the CD and eventually it stops working that's exactly what happens to ourselves as they Age and what he's shown is that these six compounds might be able to get rid of these scratches in our cells in our DNA and make ourselves into acting more like younger cells so not like these age cells which then lead to disease Etc so he tweeted this out Elon Musk took interest but then a lot of other people like Dr Charles Brenner have criticized this again saying it's more hype than substance I mean Adam what's the what's the anti-take on this why is this not as promising as it sounds no so why it is promising is that he's promising a chemical way we're using small molecules basically a pill that you can ingest that will have a similar effect to a previous study that he showed where they used kind of a very complex genetic editing mechanism to produce the same effect so basically this is what they're they're promising is that uh we can we now have small molecules that can induce and reverse um some aging characteristics now the the claims that they use in the in the in the paper are quite um big like they say reprogram cells to a younger State there's another um researcher called Dr Charles Brenner he's uh he's kind of becoming the anti-sinkler uh he's a researcher in this field and he has like very harsh criticisms towards Sinclair let me let me read out his his um his tweet he said that this is pitched as a groundbreaking study at the first chemical approach to reprogram cells in a younger State This research has actually been going on for 10 to 15 years so there's nothing groundbreaking here he basically says in brief David is publishing other people's compounds to do chemical reprogramming he did not test whether these compounds change cellular identity yeah he is claiming groundbreaking results in this paper pretty pretty heavy takedown yeah he's very scientific in scientific playgrounds that's like uh that's like a heavy insult kind of redescribing phenomenon the phenomena that we already know existed and repackaging it as this uh kind of uh reprogramming cellular reprogramming to a younger state by measuring specific markers of biological age the other criticisms were that the journal they published this in is impact factor five you could say it's a no-name journal it's also been peer-reviewed in two weeks he's a co-editor of the journal I believe as well that's a bit unusual right a paper would you would expect a paper like this to take many months to peer review properly yes absolutely which is a bit suspicious and David Sinclair said well look you know this was really groundbreaking research I wanted to be the first to publish it that's why I published it in this journal and not like a more reputable journal and they just acted quickly because they knew it was so groundbreaking but he's had similar kind of um questionable ways of publishing before so in his book he announced results of research that he has hadn't published in in scientific journals yet right so this Charles Brenner talks about this as well he uh he says that this kind of preempts or puts pressure on editors and Priya reviewers to approve uh the results because he's already announced the results in his in his very publicized book um so you know his publishing practices are a bit questionable the science he's basing this off of is actually legitimate I mean yamanaka won the 2006 Nobel Prize in medicine based on this showing that there's these things called yamanaka factors if you adjust them you can effectively turn older cells into younger cells and that could be used to cure disease and in some ways reverse aging so there is some promising stuff there but he does over hype what he claims right I I think the the bull case here is that this is probably one of the only um known ideas that can potentially lead to Serious life extension so everything every intervention that we're recently but this is the only thing that can extend your life no but we're talking about like actual like uh intervention actual Life Extensions yeah so for example is a compound robomycin is a compound that has been shown to extend lifespan in mice right sorry couldn't help well yeah but like even rapamycin um calorie restriction these kind of very robust findings won't lead to radical life extension we need something that is like radical and uh cellular reprogramming is one of the proposed mechanisms if it works that's if you don't that's if you don't um poison yourself uh yeah it produces social isolation because every time you go to a party or you can talk about is your bloody rapamycin and nobody wants to be your friend now the problem is that cellular reprogramming in reality leads to teratomas it leads to cancer for cancer cells and this is a huge problem that I haven't been able to um to find the solution for I mean David Sinclair is like who am I I'm like a nobody in the world of science right but um some people might say that he is one of the main promoters of this uh elixir of uh use or this kind of anti-aging um Paradigm that we will actually be able to develop these types of drugs and he obviously has kind of cast himself in the role as the spokesperson one of the spokespeople for that for that movement secondly he does have a history as you say of like uh maybe over exaggerating or extrapolating or making questionable uh contributions to Scientific evidence if you look I mean for people who are bona fide scientists will read to see through what you just mentioned there about him being the editor of the journal and the peer review being rushed through within two weeks still see that and they'll ask obvious questions about like the um in the neutrality of that process and the third thing is that he also has a history of like profiting very very handsomely from claims and potential compounds and companies that are in the space I mean he talks about Italian Health before there was another molecule that he sold I think to GSK for a huge that's so true activator no it wasn't virtual it was a yeah it was one of these sir two activators so so he is he has basically um personally profited huge huge sums of money from um the impact and the marketing and the the business that he's been able to build off the back of this scientific work some people might think that we're being like very very salty and um skeptical about him but I think there's like legitimate reasons that are not like not too cynical or like conspiracy or anything like that to be just very very skeptical of the claims coming out of his laboratory and we're basing this on the claims of other scientists who are as accomplished as him so uh I mean we're not maybe not with anything new here yeah maybe I mean I honestly think there is a bit of a like a jealousy factor in these discussions because he is a successful um you know researcher who has become very rich and famous so I mean he's going to have some people digging at his heels the company he co-founded with Adam Newman the disgraced founder of wework it's called life biosciences and I think from what I can tell they've basically done a play where they bought up all the IP all the intellectual property he co-founded a company with Adam Newman yes this is little known fact it gets it it gets better it gets better it just really thought just when he thought like the Davidson clear story could not get more like surprising he starts a company with uh Adam Newman the only way you could have more grifters is if Adam was a co-founder around so yeah he co-founded this and interestingly Adam Newman's names have been taken off the website as a co-founder now but there are the original articles do confirm that he was a co-founder um they've raised over 200 million dollars and they've done this play where they've gone in and well I mean Sinclair says we've undertaken a big land grab of longevity related IP and we pull together a lot of the world's leading longevity scientists so Imran I know you have a lot of experience dealing with farmer and I know next to nothing but is this like a typical or is this like a good way of doing things when you have a lot of basic science that looks promising and you go and start a company you raise a lot of money from private investors and you buy any intellectual property that looks promising and then presumably you run the clinical trials or the further research needed to cement that is that like a normal thing is that a good idea do you think yeah this is constant yeah it's a pretty standard model um I think a few years ago there was like a Tipping Point where actually uh the majority now of drugs that are commercialized by pharmaceutical companies don't actually have their Genesis inside the pharmaceutical companies own r d uh r d Laboratories but they're actually Acquisitions or their Investments that are made like relatively early on in small biotech companies they could be University spin outs um they could be incubated by venture capital firms which is the thing that that many of them do and then those those drugs get basically brought in at some point when they cross the threshold of evidence or how promising they are they can sometimes be acquired and then further developed because what pharmaceutical companies are particularly good at is taking drugs through um licensing and reimbursement it's an incredibly complicated thing to do because you have to assemble these like big dossiers of data and information or health economics modeling clinical trial data Etc actually starts far before that the dossi is just like the final step of that process and then when you get that signed off then your medicine is basically hits the market right so back to your back to your question is that like something that these companies would do yes very standard thing for them to do in fact Pharma companies are like quite expensive at developing r d drugs compared to a biotech which can be run a lot more lean maybe with a very small team uh oftentimes they'll use lots of outsourced services from other companies in the ecosystem so even the biotech is kind of Outsourcing a lot of its work so Pharma companies sources to biotech and biotext Outsourcing to contract research and development organizations for drumble is this a weird State of Affairs where okay I've got that this is a standard operating procedure but is it strange for a biotech startup to raise money from private investors so not like biotech BCS not Specialists but just like family offices and rich people interested in longevity and then use that to buy up compounds is that is that a normal thing I think it does happen but I think anywhere any time where you have like a relatively oh I'm going to call them unsophisticated I don't mean that to be like unkind but you have like an unsophisticated investor and most family offices are ultra high net worths are what you would call unsophisticated investors in these types of fields maybe they won't have the same structure diligence process maybe they would have the same types of deep operating or scientific expertise within their core team they'll be Outsourcing some of that in some cases they won't even be doing that they'll just be investing you know like uh on the basis of like a vision or something like that I'm sure there are ultra high net words that make you know relatively undiligenced investments from time to time so the thing about a venture capital firm like a professional of edge Capital firm that's raising from you know traditional LPS like Pension funds or um or the like is that they'll have to make a case to the people they're raising their money from why they're good stewards of that money Family officers don't have to do that because they're investing the money off as a family of the family business or wherever it is that their source of funds is so there's generally less less scrutiny I would expect like the diligence to be a bit you know thinner and it could be a sign that somebody's basically trying to Hoodwink somebody with a lot of money out of cash um you do certainly see that sometimes in the startup world where some people will say oh we're just like too ambitious and we don't want to waste our time with VCS because they're like small-minded and they want to see like things like unit economics as if that's unfashionable um so I have heard people say things like that but for me it was like it's a bit of a red flag if somebody's just raising from what I would consider uh unsophisticated investors that's a really good point because I remember in his other company Telehealth he also did the same thing he raised quite a lot of money from Mostly celebrities and people with individuals and he didn't get any money from VCS so he seems to be using his star power and his uh Charisma um to fund his companies from maybe less sophisticated investors yeah what most people don't realize that but is that you know in the fundraising Journey like the way that people make money is very I would say non-transparent so I'll give you an example A lot of people who are standing on the sidelines looking at Venture back companies that haven't gone public haven't been acquired and they see the founders just like raising money and kind of grafting in the trenches what they don't realize is that sometimes those Founders will actually cash out a lot earlier than anybody else even when the company is still relatively you know has like a long way to go so classic example I think is like a secondary sale of equity so the founder would sell some of their own equity in a fundraise usually what happens in a venture round is that the company actually creates out of thin air new Equity new shares and that's what causes something called dilution which is that you know when you make the pie bigger everybody's size slice of the pie becomes like you know in relative terms becomes a smaller piece of the overall pie so that's dilution but what some Founders will do is they'll actually take part of their slice and they'll sell it to an investor because investor just wants Equity right so either it's new Equity or it's existing equity so Founders can cash out really early and so you can have a misalignment of incentives right so some of these people who are founding they'll cut deals and I see saw this there was a company called um send sign Health in the UK as an example when that company ipo'd in the UK my understanding is that some of the leadership team actually took seven-figure bonuses just because they floated the company on the stock exchange the company wasn't profitable a company actually is I think is ultimately shut down now um but people basically paid themselves in the company huge bonuses for just going through this fundraising Milestone um and a lot of you know retail investors who invested in that company are left holding the bag another example is that you know with uh it's even institutional investors even like whether you're a family office or you're a fund you can actually buy into an investment early in its life and sell out later in much the same way to other investors when the company hasn't actually proven that it's ultimately successful the product ultimately works so people are this is a greater greater full Theory yeah like I don't want to sound like cynical but like you have to look at these things as like um it's not necessarily always validation that people believe that this company will make it all the way with a real product that's going to hit the market and change the world people could also just tactically be looking at these companies as like interesting investment opportunities where as you said there's like a greater full type opportunities especially during the previous bull market yeah absolutely why aren't big Pharma companies like I know you mentioned the GSK had acquired a compound but why aren't companies like uh AstraZeneca Merck era Lily they don't seem to be doing much in anti-aging or is there stuff going on in the background Adam do you know anything about this or is there a reason why they seemingly aren't taking much interest in anti-aging research well I think because there's just so much to be done in specific diseases and as Imran said reimbursement is is what they're looking for and if you get Target specific diseases it's just a bigger market and it's a more defined Market they research Avenues and the the clinical trial Avenues are all designed for specific endpoints that are very specific diseases um same goes for distribution but there are some companies now like seriously and backed by a lot of money that are trying to make anti-aging your Market I think that the a huge part of what Pharma companies will be looking at when they are um so first thing to say is I actually don't have great visibility on the pipeline of what you might call like you know longevity medications within Pharma it's not something that I track um I haven't seen any data on that um but certainly when you look at like most Pharma companies pipelines they're looking as Adam said it much more tangible near-term things like cardiovascular diseases obesity um Neuroscience mental health cancer Etc and the the reason is that when you think about the market for drugs for longevity medications I mean in a sense every medication is a longevity medication but I think here like what we're talking about is like deliberate life extension for um people who are suffering like the non-specific um you know cluster of like uh Health degradation which you might call aging right it's a combination of different things there might be specific it's actually interesting what is the taxonomy of anti-aging because there might be organ specific or you might include um a sum of existing drugs in that bucket as well but I think we know what we're talking about for the purposes conversation the market is not there yet there isn't a market if you look at um public payers like governments that pay for medications or you look at insurance companies that pay for medications in general for health for Health Care there is not a well-defined market or appetite that we see for people who will take elderly people in the 70s 80s 90s and will spend significant sums of money which is what will be needed because these people probably won't if I don't know how much you're gonna extend their lives but you're not going to have like it's a cardiovascular drug or diabetes drug we have the patient for 50 years you're not going to have like a patient taking these things for like decades and decades so the market is not there the payers are not used to paying for these things they have other competing priorities it's not clear how long the patients will be customers if I can just describe them in that way from a Pharma company's point of view um so it's just it's totally immature it's totally undeveloped it's the past time of basically extremely wealthy people who have the time the resources and them including the money to spend and invest on potentially high cost drugs obviously maybe we should Define it as that but I think it's just because we we can't measure um you know aging or life extension uh but that's where it is what I'm saying yeah I know but the end points that we talk about are you know onset of cardiac uh of heart disease of uh metabolic dysfunction these are hard hard endpoints that you can measure and these are actually longevity medications that's what real medication real longevity is it's prevention of age-related diseases um so I think it's just a definition issue I mean I think yeah well you could say that um weight loss medications are longevity medications these people don't have acute medical issues or like someone who's overweight doesn't necessarily have a medical disease right but I think there are like you know the the whole like Market thing is also like an access question right so who would actually have access to these medications would they have to pay out Pockets um is it just going to be something like you know something that's extremely wealthy use um to give themselves a biological advantage and then I think also at some point like I also see this as sitting a bit on the Spectrum around Health augmentation so like anti-aging when does that become if you take an example from Sports when does like your anti-cardiovascular disease or pro-cardiac health longevity medication become doping as we would Define it today I don't know because you could in theory make somebody like if you could engineer healthier heart Imran with all your respective doping is just an issue yeah I mean don't think it's just an issue in competition healthier my point is the framing my point is the framing around superhuman Health right that's why doping is a problem so where does longevity medication start to become something a bit different I mean someone like Lance Armstrong had testicular cancer and were then went on to win the Tour de France he lived he still lives and he's very healthy he's been doping his whole life uh I think this you know the knowledge and specific knowledge there that we that actually hasn't been studied this is a point that um what's the guy from the network State called yeah he made this point which I thought was pretty good it's like um what if uh you know this hidden knowledge in in the in the doping sphere that can actually be used for longevity is this a fresh conspiracy that the secret medical knowledge that these dopas are using that could enhance your life no it's not a conspiracy it's true but like what combinations of of hormones of uh I don't know increasing muscle mass yeah I mean like increasing your lung capacity increasing your VO2 max like all of these things are probably like you know good for your health or fighting disease or infections I don't know okay fair enough guys you know this quote which is like cynics are right but optimists get rich and I just wonder if are we when we are critical it's very relevant to them David Sinclair conversation it actually is but when we're critical of people like Sinclair are we actually feel like we're you know very correct and scientific about everything but we would actually miss out on the big moonshot opportunities um yeah do you think we're kind of being a bit too cynical there we've seen other initiatives from people like in the web 3 space with things like Vita Dao where people start uh decentralized autonomous organizations to fund some of these more moonshot opportunities we're seeing of course these biotech firms funded by private investors there are some people who are betting on these big moon shots that the traditional um sphere aren't interested in do you think there's a potential yet that we're overlooking this yeah I mean I think we don't have a choice we have to be optimists here and we have to be naive optimists because otherwise we're doomed is this where you show your longevity startup at yeah this is very rough are you evidence-based interventions thank you very much so what's the what's the question like should somebody be bankrolling this the question is that to all does all Innovation at the time seem ridiculous are we looking at the Wright brothers and saying you'll never fly when you know are all great innovators seem like Quacks oh yeah so what we mustn't do is throw the baby out with the bathwater I think the question here is is this announcement from David Sinclair going to be the thing that flies and that is a very different question to is somebody going to build a sound machine that can fly the problem with um this particular instance I think is the like sketchiness around how the data was published issues with the data itself the Charles Brenner tweet as an example the aside from scientific validation the lack of like financial and due diligence validation because of like ultra high net worth family office uh non-sophisticated type investors backing the company so I think what we're doing what we're doing here is we're saying I don't think we're saying um is someone going to come up with drugs that remodel the heart after heart attack that um you know increase plasticity in the brain in the Aging brain that increase muscle mass in the elderly to prevent them from having Falls that strengthen your bones etc etc that is all going to happen I'm sure it's going to happen right people are learning and decoding the you know the building blocks of life do we think that the first person to come out with evidence of a anti-aging drug they will be responsible for the most valuable therapeutic ever made do you think that's likely because the contenders could be actually hair loss I think I think whoever whoever cures hair loss because it's got to be like one medication no we're pretty good no problems with hair loss around here I could do with a bit more hair loss so yeah I mean the pro the thing about like life extension is I think it has like theoretically there's like an unlimited um willingness to pay depending on how long you extend someone's life but also if you just look at what people will do to give themselves like small increments in life so if you if you develop a drug that gives you a meaningful life extension and we just look at what people are willing to pay today for like some of these cancer medications that give you three to six months if you find someone at the margin of their life and you say like how much would you pay for another month like so many people would just throw everything at that but I think that's important you find them at the margin of their life in their acute need because similarly you can make a very good argument that giving someone a Statin might increase their life by I don't know 12 months overall on average something like that and most people who are prescribed Saturns or 50 of them won't take them so I do wonder if you did make an anti-aging drug that you know you need to take every day from the age of 40 and adds a few years on I actually think someone would potentially well I would you know be more likely to take the hair loss drug like I care about how I look right now so I do that's a really interesting point yeah I love that point yeah I think that's right yeah I mean that's the city Point can be made in Reverse when it comes to things like um hormone replacement or especially in people who don't have hormone deficiencies so testosterone replacement therapy is becoming quite popular even in people who don't have acute um testosterone deficiency and the I mean the evidence is still not clear but it might increase uh kind of things like prostate cancer there might be a short cardiovascular yeah cardiovascular issues as well long term and so there might be a short-term gain in health and quality of life but you're probably trading um long-term gains So Adam if someone's listening to this and they want to turn to our esteemed longevity doctor and they're like look this space is full of grifters this is full of people over hyping claims but I want to get to some good resources whether that's like good blogs good YouTube channels um or just good people to follow like who Springs to mind or where can people find legit information on longevity does it exist I think Peter's approach is grounded in science and my third approach he very much focuses on like primary prevention of Maine the main diseases of Aging he focuses a lot of fitness and functional fitness fair enough I sent it out outlived his his new book I sent a copy a free copy to all our clients so you sent four copies out last month out okay awesome um dodgy downloaded PDFs from the Z Library signed Adam patina you can't have Peter at Tia but you should have another Arab doctor should I go to some feedback or anything else yeah yeah overall our last episode on Nico Health got really really good feedback I mean we were reached out to by people working in Nico Health saying good job which is always a bad sign because it means we've been too soft and too too positive but there we go um got a comment from Ash saying great episode but Adam ruined it by plugging his startup too many times it's just fair enough um comment from Mark Cox on point as per and um then we also got a comment from Lawrence Adams because we've missed like two or three weeks of episodes now saying when is Big Picture news coming back uh well we are back and more consistent than ever thank you one episode but yeah we do need to sort this out uh it's It's tricky because it's hard to fit in right for especially for you guys to become busier with different things uh but I think I overall think it's actually better to be less consistent and just come out when there's something to say I think I'm not sure about this method of just turning up every week no matter what even if there's no good news or even if you don't have the time to Prep properly I don't know if I agree with it uh I think it's better to push yourself and you come up with something interesting yet to see that work ethic from you just a context Adam does like zero prep something we've had episodes where he will start going off on a like essay about a topic and Adam did you read the article that we're talking about you're talking about the complete wrong thing and we're course correct it but that never makes it past the edit but no yours which is why you pivots are talking about his startup yeah true yeah no no it's good Adam you're very popular I I don't know much about this topic I have to confess so I don't feel like I have a great deal to add on longevity I think um I'm actually wondering why that is I do think about Health and Longevity but I think about it in the frame mostly personally in the frame of modifiable lifestyle factors and um you know exercise sleep um relationships and diets and all of those things I think that there's it's interesting how enthusiastically a segment of the population is taken to like pharmacological intervention I think that's actually quite um uh I think there's actually quite a big leap for me personally but yeah I look forward today often these people are some of the same people who hate statins and vaccines but they are really really pro-experimental Therapeutics like yeah and off label metformin Etc which is really interesting uh it's uh it's it's more of a tribe or you cynically say a cult then I think evidence-based in a lot of cases is it to do do you think it could be to do with like how they see who they see is like benefiting and making money out of like vaccines and because I think like big Pharma someone was saying to me the other day that big Pharma in the pandemic uh for a period was like trending quite high on trust ratings like people had changed their opinion and in the UK we had AstraZeneca partner with Oxford University to create a vaccine and very publicly do so and also to say that they were not going to make any profit from it at least for some period like that wasn't the intention there but then actually now I think it's actually gone the other way we should actually cover one time why the farm big Pharma is so unpopular despite actually doing such good work in the world I mean obviously there's controversy and things that are less than ideal but overall they make products that save lives and they're hugely unpopular they make products we save lives yeah that is the bottom line they make products that save lives and you know if you work with people in the industry they are a hard-working conscientious people that are out there to make a difference um and some of the smartest people Farm is one of the most complicated Industries I've come across ever like is so complex science regulation commercial like there's just so many difficult things to solve to make that work yeah all right guys well this was brought to you by AstraZeneca that's a joke uh but no this one was good we'll uh report again soon in a week see you later guys we need more longevity in this podcast yeah yeah exactly all right guys see you later

Channel: Dr Mustafa Sultan

Views: 9,468

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Id: zaZOxPvnxvI

Length: 33min 25sec (2005 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 31 2023