Optimism on the Timeline for Extending Human Lifespans by 20 Years or More
In the interview noted here, Aubrey de Grey of the Longevity Escape Velocity (LEV) Foundation makes a bold prediction of 12-15 years as to when we might see the advent of the first therapies capable of extending the healthy human life span by a few decades, allowing older people to live long enough to benefit from following improvements to further extend their healthy life spans. It is worth bearing in mind that the creation of novel therapies doesn't mean widespread use or even easy availability of those therapies. Further, it is unlikely that we'll know the effects on human life span of any given combination of novel rejuvenation therapies until at least ten to twenty years have passed, particularly if the therapies are not widely used.
As they say, it is hard to make predictions, particularly about the future. Is 12-15 years an unreasonable prediction? If we think that senolytics are going to be effective rejuvenation therapies in humans, and we believe that one or two of the other more advanced lines of work will be equally effective, then maybe this will pan out, subject to the caveats above. Those other lines of work might include partial epigenetic reprogramming, mitochondrial transplantation, telomerase gene therapies, that sort of thing. But expect surprises and delay! Biotech as a field tends to excel in the production of those two line items. We'll have to look back 30-40 years from now to see where the first rejuvenation therapies worthy of the name actually came into being.
One might think that there would be a rush to use any rejuvenation therapy with compelling data in mice and good safety data in humans, but that hasn't happened for the senolytic therapy of dasatinib and quercetin. Some unknown number of people are in fact using this therapy, given that numerous anti-aging clinical practices now offer it to their patients, but beyond that only a few slow-moving and small clinical trials have taken place. One might also consider the use of rapamycin as a point of comparison, where it is possible to find a few hundred self-experimenters to report on by asking for respondents, but there is no good human data on effects on life span, and nor is there likely to be in the near future. At the present pace of adoption another few decades could pass and we'll still not have access to good data that will tell us anything about effects of early therapies on late life mortality and life span.
Ambrosia Path Interview with Aubrey de Grey
Can you explain the concept of "longevity escape velocity" and its significance in the pursuit of extending human lifespan? When do you think we will reach longevity escape velocity?
LEV is defined as the minimum rate at which medicines need to be improved in order that people receiving the latest medicines can avoid age-related chronic conditions indefinitely. The reason why that rate is finite is that these medicines will be ones that reduce biological age, rather than just slowing the rate at which biological age rises - in other words, each incremental advance will buy time to develop the next one. LEV becomes initially achievable when we have medicines that postpone aging by around 20 years, and I currently think we have a 50% chance of reaching that point within about 12-15 years from now.
Do you see anything being commercially available for longevity/treating aging in the next 5-10 years?
Yes and no. Because aging is not one process but a bunch of only loosely communicating processes, we will address some parts of it sooner than others. So at this point, treatments for some of the easier parts are already in clinical trials and will very probably hit the streets in only a couple of years. But it will probably take a decade longer for enough of the parts of aging to be addressed that we see bona fide postponement of all chronic conditions of old age, which is what most people mean by treatments for aging.
Are there any developments (research, startups etc) that have excited you recently? Any potential up and coming therapies that you find interesting/think more people should know about?
Of course! The field is exploding right now. I'll just pick one: THIO, which is a new anti-cancer drug that kills cells which are making large amounts of telomerase, which means 90% of all human cancers and basically no non-cancer cells. It's in a phase 2 clinical trial being run by MAIA Biotechnology.
Meanwhile they found plastic in arterial plaque. Sorry to be a downer.
"LEV becomes initially achievable when we have medicines that postpone aging by around 20 years." I never understood how slapping an ETA on "LEV" makes sense: there will be no population level LEV for many decades and children have probably reached LEV already. LEV was a good tool to get people interested in longevity but it's grossly misused.
Indeed, knowing when to attempt a therapy is challenging. While wasting finite money is a concern, the main worry is always that a particular therapy could have a negative effect of lifespan. (like megadosing with some antioxidants did for experimenters in the past).
The calculus all depends on the age you are when you first attempt a therapy. If I were in my 60s or above, I'd probably be trying every early therapy mentioned in this post, but since I'm younger, I'm waiting to see what the science shows.
It'd be good to have as much data from self-experimenters as possible, put together in one place, or a few places, to help us all make such decisions. (I don't know if this already exists) But as Reason says, lifespan data is much harder to come by.