Reporting on the Systems Aging Gordon Research Conference
Alex Zhavoronkov, who these days is as much interested in accelerating progress in cryonics as in translational research for the treatment of aging, here reports on his time at the recent Systems Aging Gordon Research Conference, one of a growing number of new conference series serving academic efforts make headway in the matter of treating aging as a medical condition. As a general rule, more successful conference series tend to indicate a larger and more successful field: more researchers, more funding, more attention from the world at large. The proliferation of conferences focused on aging is a good sign.
With Vadim Gladyshev serving as chairman and Steve Horvath as vice-chairman, the conference set the stage for the field, paving the way for the development of interventions to delay and reverse aging. Both are world-renowned researchers, and spoke and led the discussions at the conference. The conference was attended by a number of prominent researchers from renowned institutions; such as Cynthia Kenyon of Calico Labs, who discussed about interventions that slow aging, Morten Scheibye-Knudsen of the University of Copenhagen, who talked about modulating DNA repair for healthy aging, and Emma Teeling of the University College Dublin, who spoke about the genetic basis of exceptional longevity of bats.
Day one was about "Delaying Age," and was led by Steve Horvath as the discussion leader. On this day, Cynthia Kenyon, Richard Miller of the University of Michigan and Inigo Martincorena of the Sanger Institute presented. Richard and Inigo presented on drugs and mutations that slow aging in mice, and somatic mutations and clonal expansions in aging, respectively. Day two was all about "Epigenetic Reprogramming and Rejuvenation." It was led by Joe Betts-LaCroix of Retro Biosciences. Manuel Serrano of IRB Barcelona started the day with a talk on understanding and manipulating in vivo reprogramming and its effects on aging. He was followed by Vittorio Sebastiano of Stanford University, who spoke about transient reprogramming for multifaceted reversal of aging. Jacob Kimmel of NewLimit Research followed Vittorio with a talk on reprogramming strategies to restore youthful gene expression. Then came Morgan Levine of Yale University, who discussed DNA methylation landscapes in aging and reprogramming.
The first discussion topic for day three was "Epigenetic Biomarkers," with Kristen Fortney of Bioage leading the discussions. First to the podium was Nick Schaum of Astera Institute, whose discussion topic was "rejuvenome: toward a functional and multiomics understanding of aging and rejuvenation". He was followed by Riccardo Marioni of University of Edinburgh and Ake Lu of San Diego Institute of Science, who discussed about epigenetic clocks and universal DNA methylating age, respectively. "Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning" was the first subject matter for day four, which was moderated by Marc Kirschner of Harvard. Sergiy Libert of Calico started the day with a talk on construction and analysis of the physiology clock for human aging. I took to the podium next and discussed applications of deep aging clocks in clinical practice and drug discovery. I was followed by Kristen Fortney of Bioage and Albert-laszlo Barabasi of Northeastern University, who discussed data-informed drug discovery for aging and the dark matter of nutrition, respectively.
Over the course of the five-day event, presentations covered many topics, like delaying aging, aging clocks, longevity intervention, and so much more. Many organizations like MIT, Stanford, and Yale were represented. It was truly a great opportunity to network with peers. With this successful conference on aging, the GRC has now plans the second Systems Aging meeting in 2024.
I've listened to a couple of interviews with Alex recently. My impression is that I seriously doubt InSilico's ability to get so many different things done at the same time. He said they have 31 drugs in trial. He is building a purely robotic lab.... He is using the most recent AI techniques.
And BTW, running deep learning algorithms cannot be done without a lot of money to spend on big computers.
To me, this reeks of a big donor / investor and Alex's willingness to promise the moon.
I hope that I'm wrong or that InSilico can manage at least one big advance, but I do wonder about a company simultaneously tackling multiple extremely complex and unrelated items.
Replying to Matt here just because I follow FightAging.org since its inception.
Happy to hear this skepticism about "doing too many things at once". It is great. In 2015-2016 no big biotech investor believed it is possible and we should specialize, in 2017-2018 end-to-end became a source of competitive advantage and we were always oversubscribed since then.
We are actually pretty transparent and you should check the announcements and the timeline. So far I raised around $380 million from some of the world's most prominent investors in multiple rounds. And it is not easy to invest in the company as it has strict criteria for who is it taking money from.
The reason for this success is strict policies in hiring, we only hire the "doers" and if you don't know your pathways and medchem, you will not be able to join the discovery team regardless of how many years of experience in pharma you have. And AI team members usually publish at top-tier AI conferences and the core team joined through competitions many years ago. We also sit on top of ~80 CROs where we have our own people.
The pipeline is here:
https://insilico.com/pipeline
Would love to see another company that discovered a novel target, designed its own chemistry, and took it all the way to humans in <30 months. You can see the process here:
https://insilico.com/phase1
And we publish from time to time to the extent that is appropriate for a biopharma company. Just some papers where I contributed:
https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=8Icccp0AAAAJ&view_op=list_works&sortby=pubdate
To avoid naive comments and learn more about the field, you should come to http://www.AgingPharma.org, it is now the largest in the field, and meet the community.
The lab is real and should go live in a few months. Took 2.5 years to build.
Cryonics is still a weekend hobby and I only put my own money into this. No tangible POC to talk about yet. And my approach may never work.
Of course, the elephant in the room (not discussed/ presented formally enough) is: navigating the regulatory environment: what you can and cannot do in the G7 countries' medical practice industry. How many of these promising interventions will need to be forwarded through 'under the radar', self-testing, medical tourism, and other non-FDA/EMA pathways? I have seen increasing interest in medical cruises and other well equipped off-shore facilities to skirt the timelines and expectations of clinical trials, etc. At some point, any discoveries/ interventions will need vetting.
I have been following Insilico since many years. There has been a moment, maybe 3-4 years ago, when I feared them defocusing on aging and follow a more traditional path of pharma research and insurance reimbursement models but I must say this did not happen and still see them focused to advance the field and also collaborate with academia. It must not be really easy having pioneered the rise of money in the longevity field. Now this starts to be a given when really big shots and money have entered. And btw, if someone will start to champion also serious research in cryonics, I can only be happy. I am pretty sure this will happen too as it did for aging when 20-30 years ago the latter was just a laughable effort.