Recent Interviews with Aubrey de Grey
Aubrey de Grey is originator of the SENS rejuvenation research programs and presently Chief Science Officer at the SENS Research Foundation, the umbrella organization dedicated to ensuring that therapies to treat and reverse degenerative aging are developed as soon as possible. The Foundation funds a range of research into the underlying biotechnologies needed to produce regenerative medicine for aging, and is supported by a number of noted philanthropists and luminaries in the scientific community.
Success here is as much a matter of convincing the broader medical research community as it is of proving the case via scientific research: like all sweeping changes in the making, this is a bootstrap process of growing the funding and the research results until SENS effectively becomes the mainstream of aging research. This will happen because SENS research programs will prove capable of delivering far better results than the present approaches to aging, and at a fraction of the cost. SENS is based on repair of damage, while today's mainstream is much more interested in finding ways to alter the operation of our metabolism to slightly slow down the accumulation of further damage. It doesn't take a scientist to understand that repair will always win out in terms of cost-effectiveness, and that repair is the only way to rejuvenate the old, those who will benefit very little from ways to slow down the damage of aging.
Yesterday de Grey appeared on CNBC in a short segment to summarize some of his views. It is always good to see a broader audience get a taste of these things, but I should note that in the past decade television has shown itself to be a terrible medium to convey the exciting prospects for longevity science. Even fairly involved treatments of the research and researchers involved produced very little in return: no great visitation of web sites, no donations, no follow up. No doubt we can all theorize as to why this is the case, but it is what it is.
Do you really want to live to 1,000?
At this year's Exponential Medicine conference, CNBC was present to probe faculty about some of the exciting developments within accelerating technologies. One of the most eye-opening speakers is Aubrey de Grey, cofounder and Chief Science Officer of the SENS Research Foundation, who was interviewed about longevity and the prospect of regenerative medicine extending our lives to 1,000 years or more.
By way of a contrast here is a longer audio podcast interview with de Grey from last month, in which he covers the established SENS vision and the long-term goal for the entire research community of eliminating degenerative aging from the human condition:
Eliminating aging (it's more obvious than it sounds) with Aubrey de Grey
It sound crazy when you put it into perspective but at the moment there is a 100% chance of death. I don't want to sound too morbid but this includes you, your friends and your family...Aubrey de Grey joins me [to] discuss his work on resolving the issue of aging which at it's fundamental level is just a problem with our mechanics breaking down over time. We cover neurodegenerative diseases to mitochondrial damage and he gives us the 7 key targets his research as suggested will have the biggest impact on the aging process. The interview was a fascinating insight into Aubrey's work and he will be appearing again soon do to a show about cancer and the potential to solve it.
All he does are interviews. I wish he'd hurry up and actually demonstrate the SENS method. The way things are going, we wont get anywhere. Twenty years from now we'll be hearing about possibilities that will never come. I wonder if Aubrey, in his heart of hearts, knows that this just isn't gonna happen. Not for anyone currently alive, anyway.
Hope i'm wrong.
Work is currently being done on Senescent cells, Mitochondrial Mutations, Intra cellular junk (oxidized LDL), and Extra Cellular matrix crosslinks.
In the next few years Darren Baker's group at the Mayo clinic should demonstrate fairly conclusively whether or not senescent cells contribute to aging in a mouse model (they already demonstrated this in a progeria mouse mouse, but that mouse model accumulates senescent cells at a higher rate than usual, so this result may not mean anything). Once this is demonstrated, and someone demonstrates a technique relevant to humans in mice, this area may attract a lot more funding, or even biotech company interest.
Lifespan benefits are only likely to appear when when all components are all put together. In the interim there is going to be medicines that work on specific diseases (alzheimer's/parkinson's) and this is going to be the best demonstration of SENS/regenerative medicine as a therapy against age related diseases/aging.
These kinds of medicines are likely to reach the clinic in the near future. It's impossible for me to say when but several are going through the trial phase before regulatory approval.
I like the fact (around 32.00) that Aubrey's choice for a punch in the face would be Larry Ellison, for wasting scads of money on scientists who were only doing the same research that the govt. would have paid them to do. I'm sure he's still got plenty left, maybe he can put it to work somewhere like SENS :)
Like has been pointed out in the comments, much of the research SRF and its affiliates are doing remains preliminary. It's because it's not producing amazing, eye-catching results or headlines that it isn't drumming up massive popular support. People are skeptical.
I would say rightly so if it weren't the case that much evidence (and reason) supports the research directions the Foundation is funding and in some cases undertaking itself.
The thing is, studies like the Harvard mouse telomerase study and David Sinclair's research attract a lot of attention because they market the results that they've been getting quite well, even if they ultimately don't mean much of anything in terms of extending lifespan.
The Harvard mouse telomerase study and David Sinclair's research attract a lot of attention because they are results in mice (an in animal mamalian system). The SENS work (apart from the unaffliated senescent cell removal work) is all at an earlier stage as Seth pointed out.
However I think the telomerase and David Sinclair's work is better marketed because it is easier to get other scientist's attention when the result is in an in vivo system. That is the minimum bar for getting other scientists interested in a lot of work. There are plenty of good in vitro results that go no where.
I love Aubrey and think he's a brilliant scientist but I can't help but keep thinking that viewers would take his ideas more seriously in interviews like this if he would cut the beard down to size. I know that's superficial but people judge people by superficial things and when they see beards like that some people just automatically dismiss people wearing them as "crazy" even though it's wrong.
SRF does have results in mice. Why don't you look at its publications page before talking about what you don't know?
Aside from some work on expressing some mitochondrial genes in the nucleus, and Darren Barker's work on senescent cells at the Mayo clinic, which other SENS technological proposals have been performed in mice?
Both those studies were limited enough for others to dismiss them (perhaps unfairly). The mitochondrial study was for a single gene only in the eyes of mice or rats. And the senescent cell study was in progeria model mice.
I'm no expert, so I'd be glad if you can point out others that I've missed.
@APersonOnline: pardon me for copy-pasting a reply from a previous impatient commenter here at FA!:
I think you have missed something about Dr. de Grey's extensive on-the-record statements about the timescales we're looking at. From the very beginning of his work on SENS, Dr. de Grey held out a 50/50 chance that, with adequate funding, we could achieve robust human rejuvenation within 25 years. This is an inspiring vision of what we could achieve if we collectively rolled up our sleeves and really funded the science and made the regulatory reforms required to deliver a radically ambitious progress in merely a generation or so, and one of the chief complaints of the remaining critics that it is unrealistically optimistic. So objecting that we've not yet been able to achieve an ambitious, long-term goal in five to eight years (which is as long as we've been at this as an active research organization) is on its face not reasonable. To quote Churchill in a similar situation:
Second: I must say that despite minimal funding (far less than will be required to succeed in three decades), we have really made quite remarkable progress in those few short years. No cures for age-related diseases or debilities, of course, but no one in pharma would expect to start from zero and have something in medical use in five years, even if one had GSK's resources behind one. You can read an earlier report on some select progress here, and for an update the most recent SENS Research Foundation Research Report here. Our Annual Report for this last year is available in print but not yet for download, and we've not yet completed a more recent Research Report, but I can assure you that we have made substantial progress (such as this recent SENS Research Foundation-funded research on catalytic antibodies that cleave transthyretin amyloid).
I certainly share your frustration with the slow pace of progress. If you want to help the work go faster, there's plenty you can do to help advance rejuvenation research. But do understand that the question is not whether we'll have new therapies in the next five years, but whether we will have them in the next twenty-five, or the next fifty, or the next hundred — or at all. Whether they will come for us, or our children, or our great-grandchildren, or whether humanity will continue to suffer the slow and terrible decline into disease, dementia, debility, and death, generation upon generation, world without end. That's going to be determined in part by the science itself, and to a much greater degree by what each of us does to make it go faster.
By the way, the interview on the SENS strategy for the final defeat of cancer that was promised in the UpgradedApe podcast is now up.
I think it is hard for most people less familiar with the subject than us to grasp how the war on aging will ultimately be won. The crucial thing to understand in my opinion is that we are not going to find a magic bullet that offers a miracle cure and I feel confident when I say that my instincts tell me a comprehensive cure for aging is probably at least 100 years away, this is because there are essentially two problems, firstly we do not understand how the damage which accumulates over the years is actually laid down and secondly we have very limited knowledge of metabolism and a comprehensive understanding in both areas is a prerequisite of finding a cure. In my mind Dr Aubrey de Grey’s theory of SENS which deals with the repair of the damage which accumulates through aging without actually interfering with the rate at which it is laid down offers us a route to significant life extension without the need to cure the underlying aging process itself. My gut instinct is aging will be under a decisive level of clinical control within 20/25 years but I think we will see significant progress within 10 to 15 years and the turning point could arrive anytime from around 2025 onwards. Had I been asked this question 10 years ago I saw 2030 as the turning point so I think I can say my confidence has increased that things are going very much in the right direction especially with progress in immunotherapy, tissue engineering, stemcell therapies and significant breakthroughs in the treatment of cancer, what is plain for anyone to see is that with better funding things will progress even more rapidly.