Not Everyone Feels the Urgent Need for Therapies to Treat Aging, and this is a Sizable Divide in our Broader Community

One of the many important points made by the advocacy community for rejuvenation research is that participants in the mainstream of medical science and medical regulation are not imbued with a great enough sense of urgency. We are all dying, and yet with each passing year the regulatory process moves ever more slowly, rejects an ever greater number of prospective therapies, becomes ever more expensive. The number of new therapies reaching the clinic falls. Regulators continue to reject the idea that treating aging is an acceptable goal in medicine. We live in an age of revolutionary progress in the capabilities of biotechnology, and yet patients must accept that new medicines are rare, and that fifteen years might pass between lab and clinic. This is not an industry moved by any sense of urgency.

Naturally, those who do see the urgency and are frustrated by the present state of medical development reach for different options. Some of those options are bad: cherry-picking research; testing interventions without evidence; self-experimentation without data or consideration of risk; building an industry to deliver supplements and other products that don't perform as advertised. Some of those options are sound: responsible development and medical tourism that takes place outside regions with the most onerous regulation; self-experimentation within a framework that encourages an understanding of risk and supporting research; advocacy to change the regulatory system.

Self-experimentation is the only way to obtain early access to new classes of medical technology, those described in research, manufactured in the marketplace, but not yet run through the regulatory process. Many will never even enter the regulatory process. The only way to provoke the sort of development needed to produce good data is for a community of self-experimenters to report on their experiences, obtaining a critical mass sufficient to attract research interest and funding. This is essentially what happened over the past few decades for the practice of calorie restriction. It isn't a medical technology, but proceeded through the same path of early research, adoption by self-experimenters, growth of a community, and that community then influenced the research community to pay greater attention. As a result we now have far better human data on calorie restriction, showing that the early research was essentially correct and it is a useful practice that modestly slows many of the consequences of aging.

Most people who self-experiment wouldn't call it that - and probably justifiably so. They rely on hope and how they feel rather than solid data, and are too readily swayed by hype and cherry-picked or misrepresented research. Many of those who went further than their own health to organize business ventures, such as the many members of the anti-aging marketplace, have built an industry that does at least as much harm as good. We cannot let the bad drive out the good when it comes to the frustration with the lack of urgency in medical development that leads people to choose to strike out on their own. It is possible to achieve meaningful gains through ventures in medical tourism, through responsible development, through self-experimentation with data and publication. Where this does happen, however, it is frequently the case that the people involved have a foot in both camps.

Such is the case for the principal subject of the popular science article here. I can't condone most of the activities of the Life Extension Foundation; the heart is absolutely in the right place, but so very much of the implementation is at best a waste, and at worse actively harmful to progress. Supplements as marketed over these past four decades do nothing for longevity, do nothing for aging, and participants in this market have used their advertising megaphone to convince the world that anti-aging is a sham, a joke: pills and potions that do nothing. It is an industry built on self-evidently false claims. Yet the Life Extension Foundation uses the proceeds from that business to fund some degree of meaningful, useful research into aging and means to treat aging and age-related disease. They also clearly support better paths forward in medical science. It is my hope that working rejuvenation therapies and biomarkers of aging will drive out the fraud and the lies and the nonsense in the years ahead, but don't ask me to approve of the state of this market today.

Bill Faloon has pursued immortality for decades. Now he's got lots of company. What does science have to say?

At 63, Bill Faloon is old enough to remember when talk of life extension labeled you a kook or charlatan. In the late 1970s, he co-founded the Life Extension Foundation, a nonprofit promoting the notion that people don't need to die - and later started a business to sell them the supplements and lab tests to help make that dream real. Nowadays he also distributes a magazine to 300,000 people nationwide and invites speakers to monthly gatherings at the Church of Perpetual Life, billed as a science-based, nondenominational meeting place where supporters learn about the latest developments in the battle against aging. Their faith is in human technologies that might one day end involuntary death.

After an hour of mixing, we all head to the second-­floor nave and fill the pews for the evening's event. Several rows back sits a beer scientist. Next to me, two women in dresses and heels. At the front, an elderly gentleman with hearing aids. Tonight's speaker is Aubrey de Grey, a biomedical gerontologist and chief science officer of SENS Research Foundation, a Mountain View, California, outfit that studies regenerative medicines that might cure diseases associated with old age.

Today, it is easy to locate university-affiliated labs at places such as Harvard and Stanford investigating their own interventions in the process of growing old. Since the National Institutes of Health established its Institute on Aging division in 1974, scientists have dedicated more and more resources to the challenge. Over the past dozen years, the NIA's budget has doubled to more than $2 billion. Faloon predates them all. These days, the several ­hundred people who regularly attend events at the church are personal validation for Faloon, who thinks that anyone his age and younger, given the proper physiological tweaking, could live to a healthy age of 130. The hope is that, by then, new solutions will make death truly optional. Yet no amount of self-tinkering can assure him and his followers that day will ever come.

Across all these potential aging interventions, there is one common denominator, and that is their fallibility. The medical community doesn't know what slows or reverses the process in humans, let alone what might cause harm. For that reason, researchers caution against the kind of self-experimentation Faloon practices. "We're playing with a new treatment paradigm," the Mayo Clinic's James Kirkland says of their research. "I've been around long enough to know there are going to be unpredictable things that happen as we get into people."

Faloon believes he faces a bigger risk from waiting than from being his own guinea pig. "I'm afraid that with aging research, some of the people don't have a sufficient sense of urgency," he says. He continually incorporates different interventions into his life-extension regimen. He restricts his calories to some 1,200 a day, about half what the average man consumes. He also ingests more than 50 medications daily, including metformin and Life Extension's own concoctions of nutraceuticals. "Anything that might work, I am doing," he says. Because he's impatient for clinical trials to yield ­conclusive results, Faloon gives about $5 million a year in profits from the buyers club to underwrite medical research. So far, the data from two recent studies on NAD+ and rapamycin that he backed are unpublished. "If we don't accelerate all these different projects, I'm not going to make it," Faloon says.

Comments

>. Supplements as marketed over these past four decades do nothing for longevity, do nothing for aging...

Do they at least improve the quality of life or reduce morbidity?

What about rapamycine and NAD+ boosters?
What dues the self tiring crowd say?

Posted by: Cuberat at June 15th, 2018 10:49 PM

This is what worries me. The time it takes for regulators to approve these types of therapies and it could be decades. Tbh bio hacking seems like a viable option especially for people who can't Afford to hang around and wait for the FDA etc to pull their fingers out their backsides. And there are some useful supplements that show promise for longevity. Mitochondria targeted antioxidants and NAD modulators etc.

Posted by: Scott emptage at June 16th, 2018 3:27 AM

This applies to other indications as well. Many suffering and waiting for a cure for their disease. And everyone should work with urgency to improve the regulatory process.

Posted by: Norse at June 16th, 2018 5:14 AM

It may not be entirely scientific, but I think that a lot of serious Life Extension followers are half way to LEV. I think anyone who makes it to 130 which seems to be their goal, is more than half way to LEV.

Posted by: Biotechy Marcks at June 16th, 2018 7:24 AM

@Biotechy Marcks
> I think anyone who makes it to 130 which seems to be their goal, is more than half way to LEV.

I am in my early forties. If in make to 130 us that word be almost 100 years from now. There's a plausible chance that nanotech and n
bio technologies will diseases and aging of we don't move to transhuman form

Posted by: Cuberat at June 16th, 2018 8:03 AM

@ cuberat, the studies showing no benefit from "supplements" are focused only on the popular antioxidants that have been available for decades, and are for the most part added to fortified foods anyway. I take about $180/month in supplements. I am not sure they help, but my thought process is I have more money than time, and I am making a calculated wager.
@biotechy, a couple weeks ago you referenced a Mercola post refuting the findings of a meta study on supplements. I could never find it, please post a link

Posted by: JohnD at June 16th, 2018 11:26 AM

@JohnD: The article was published on Dr. Mercola's site on June 3, 2018, but I cannot find it again either. Maybe Mercola has an archive for his published articles.

Posted by: Biotechy Marcks at June 17th, 2018 5:59 AM

"The number of new therapies reaching the clinic falls."

Do you have any numbers to support that?

Posted by: Antonio at June 17th, 2018 6:44 AM

Who cares how everyone/ anyone 'feels'?
When you are serious about creating a sustainably-for-profit, long-term, large-dispersion business model that 'reasonably' assesses funding requirements; research, development, and roll-out horizons; potential customer demographics; and the regulation/ staffing potential of a programme that is measured in the 10s of $Billions and 20-50+ year range you contact a company like Accenture and its ilk. They have assessed pie-in-the-sky ideas such as space tourism, asteroid exploitation, new transportation tech, new energy tech, and other such otherwise-unquantifiable business opportunities. Otherwise, age-mitigating therapies' industries will continue to remain a charity, cause, hobby, trend, cult, following, etc.

Posted by: Jer at June 17th, 2018 8:39 AM

JohnD: You wrote: I have more money than time. That was the logic I also started with but after donating to SRF and supplements I had more time than money!

Posted by: Quaker at June 17th, 2018 9:35 AM

@Reason: I use Evernote Webclipper to save sites.

Posted by: Gekki at June 17th, 2018 11:52 AM

@Antonio: This and its data sources might be better to mine, though it only covers a section of the problem period:

https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt.2786

I would say that it is a major issue that we are not seeing a growth in new therapies and reduction in cost of new therapies that reflects the growth in capabilities and falling costs of biotechnology in general. That is the important point to take away from this.

Perhaps I should have employed a phrase to better indicate the growing disconnect between what can be achieved in practice, and the falling costs of that achievement, and what is approved. What can be achieved is on an upward curve. What is approved is, at best, flat.

Posted by: Reason at June 17th, 2018 2:00 PM

I hope everyone here subscribe to Diamandis Abundance newsletter. Today it was interesting about bio/pharma industry, exponential drug discovery and LEV.

Posted by: Gekki at June 17th, 2018 4:40 PM

The healthy human metformin trials underway or soon to be underway will advance the cause considerably. There is zero point in talking about LEV because we won't know we are close until you start seeing the number of super-centenarians increase by a large number.

The decreasing cost of computing power and the soon to be meaningful AI will get us there but it is only real when there are a lot more old people around.

To realize how far we have come so quickly please remember that the first iPhone is just barely over ten years old.

Posted by: Lee at June 18th, 2018 7:50 PM

Is the TAME trial funded? I have not seen any updates

Posted by: Chris at June 19th, 2018 1:33 PM
Comment Submission

Post a comment; thoughtful, considered opinions are valued. New comments can be edited for a few minutes following submission. Comments incorporating ad hominem attacks, advertising, and other forms of inappropriate behavior are likely to be deleted.

Note that there is a comment feed for those who like to keep up with conversations.