[Techowl]

The Buck Institute [0], featured in this article, is a pretty outstanding organization -- they're unique in being a sizable research center devoted to researching aging. I'm excited to see their idea of age-related diseases as biological maintenance problems gaining some traction.

I'm not entirely sure where the interviewer was going with this statement, though.

> There’s a lot of Silicon-Valley buzz about longevity and many startups working to develop immortality pills.

I've yet to hear of a startup working on an "immortality pill."

[0] - https://www.buckinstitute.org/

[reasonattlm]

There are certainly startups / small companies working on rejuvenation therapies, however, ways to repair the forms of damage that cause aging rather than merely slowing down that damage a little as is the case for calorie restriction mimetic drug development.

See for example these entities working on means to selectively remove senescent cells, with Unity Biotechnolgy being the one connected to Buck Institute researchers:

https://oisinbio.com/

http://unitybiotechnology.com/

http://www.siwatherapeutics.com/

The presence of senescent cells have been shown to directly cause failure of regeneration, fibrosis, fibrotic lung diseases, loss of tissue elasticity, blood vessel calcification, faster progression of atherosclerosic lesions, arthritis, chronic inflammation, immune system dysfunction, and retinal degeneration, just to name a few items from papers published in the past two years. More links are being established in research papers with each passing year. The removal of these cells has been shown in mouse studies to quickly reverse the age-related progression of many of these items.

[mclide]

See also Mount Tam Biotechnologies, a spin-off from the Buck Institute focusing on mTOR modulators, shown to extend lifespan in mice. Their initial application addresses Lupus, an autoimmune disease.

http://www.mounttambiotech.com

[msie]

Any human trials yet?

[reasonattlm]

Unity will be starting human trials this year, so far as we know.

Oisin will follow later this year or in 2018, if they keep to the standard way in which things work in biotech companies following an A round.

I have no idea what SIWA will be doing; they have been around on life support for a while, and now resurrected by the newfound money coming into the field. I'd imagine that their next step would be some form of trial, though it is unclear as to where exactly they are in their animal study schedule.

There are people self-experimenting with senolytic drug candidates now, though not in any way that will provide useful data. If you draw the line at candidates for which there is in vivo evidence in mammals, you're left with just the chemotherapeutics and foxo4-dri. (A pity that fisetin has no in vivo evidence yet...). The chemotherapeutics are worth skipping over, since they are ugly chemicals and really only a starting point for the development of analogs without the horrible side-effects, and foxo4-dri hasn't been tested in any formal way in humans yet.

At the pace at which new drug candidates are emerging and being tested, a couple of years from now would be a good time to be self-experimenting.

[george_ciobanu]

https://www.elysiumhealth.com/

Also see Peter Thiel's work on blood change.

[dvcrn]

Elysiums key ingredient is nicotinamide riboside, a recently discovered pre cursor to NAD+ which has shown incredible results when it comes to slowing down aging. You can buy NR supplements pretty easily and I can't recommend it enough if you're into this stuff.

The next thing is NMN (nicotinamide mononucleotide) but currently it's way too expensive to buy for individuals. There are some Chinese labs synthesizing it for cheap but unless you have access to a lab I wouldn't trust it's what it says it is. Though it's very likely that we will see accessible supplements in the next 3 years.

In fact, NMN was so promising in rats/mice that Keio university in Tokyo just started human trials.

NR (the stuff you can buy already) gets converted to NMN in your body though.

I for now am taking NR (not elysium) daily until some big study tells me not to or until I find a reliable NMN source. What has been discovered so far convinced me to give it a try just for the offchance that it's really doing what people say it does.

We live in exciting times and I am very much looking forward to see what the next years has to offer.