Aging is not mystical, a well-known researcher Aubrey de Gray is sure, perhaps the world's most famous supporter of the provocative view that medical technology will once allow people to control the aging process and live healthy for hundreds or thousands of years.
He compares aging to the wear of a car; the human body accumulates damage during normal operation, the organism easily tolerates their small level - but in the end they kill a person. According to him, the most promising way to avoid this biological reality is to
repair damage as it accumulates with the help of engineering.
The bad news is that such innovative research requires a lot of time and money, which is not always readily available, largely due to the cultural phenomenon that they call “pro-aging trance.” Culture has long considered aging inevitable; for many people, the prospect of unlimited life extension seems implausible.
But the good news for Aubrey de Gray and those who support him is that in his day, his views do not seem so radical. Academia and private business are involved in the fight against aging; his
SENS Research Foundation , for example, founded
five different companies . “Overcoming aging,” he says, “is not just a matter of the future; now it is an industry that will be both beneficial and very beneficial to your health. ”
De Gray shared with LeapsMag Chief Editor Kira Peykoff at the
World Stem Cell Summit in Miami about his work.
Interview
Kira Peykoff : Since your book
Ending Aging was published, ten years have passed, scientific breakthroughs in stem cell research, genome editing and other areas have taken over the world. Which ones influenced your research the most?
Aubrey de Gray : On the one hand, they all influenced, on the other - almost no effect. They accelerated the matter, allowed a shorter way to get where we already tried to go. But they did not make fundamental changes to the overall strategy. In the book, we described seven main types of damage, as well as specific ways to eliminate each of them, and this has not changed.
Kira Peikoff : Were there any breakthroughs that had the greatest impact?
Aubrey de Gray : These are not just obvious things, such as
iPSC (induced pluripotent stem cells) and
CRISPR (a precise gene editing tool). These are also more exotic things that apply specifically to some of our destinations, but most people do not know about them. For example, methods for controlling the
co-translational import of proteins into mitochondria.
Kira Peikoff : To
what extent will future anti-aging therapies include regenerating old tissue or growing new organs?
Aubrey de Gray : Therapies that regenerate whole new organs will probably play a role in the short term and will gradually shrink, simply because they need to use invasive surgery. We want to avoid it, but it is quite possible that, at the earliest stages, the existing methods of correction at the molecular and cellular levels
in situ will be insufficient, and therefore we need a more crude approach, such as growing a whole new organ and implanting it.
Every time when you need to replace an organ, you have the opportunity, in principle, to repair the organ without replacing it. And having repaired at the microscopic level, you could do without the operation, simply by entering the appropriate type of stem cells or other things. It would be something that can be applied to an older person, and is much safer and possibly much cheaper. The next generation of therapies can be expected to move in this direction.
Kira Peikoff : Your foundation is working on an
initiative that requires funding of $ 50 million.
Aubrey de Gray : Well, if we had funding of $ 50 million a year, we could move about three times faster than $ 5 million.
Kira Peykoff : And in 2021, you are planning to start human trials?
Aubrey de Gray : This is an approximate time limit. Remember, since we accumulate many different types of damage in the body, this means we need many different types of therapy to repair the damage. And, of course, each of these types must be developed independently. This is more of a “divide and conquer” therapy. Therapies to some extent interact with each other; repair of one type of damage can slow down the accumulation of another type of damage, but still they are all needed.
And some of these therapies are much easier to implement than others. The lighter components are already undergoing clinical trials, mainly
cellular therapies and, for example,
immunotherapy against amyloids in the brain. The third phase of clinical trials in some cases. Therefore, when I talk about deadlines, about 2021, or, say, about the beginning of the 20s, I'm actually talking about the most complex components.
Kira Peykoff : Which of the latest achievements inspire you the most?
Aubrey de Gray : Over the past couple of years, I am particularly proud of the successes that we had in the most difficult areas. If you recall the 7 components of the SENS approach, there are two among them that have stalled and have not moved anywhere for 15–20 years, and we fixed this in both cases. Our
publications two years ago in the journal Science essentially showed ways to fight against interprotein cross-links, which are responsible for such things as wrinkles and hypertension. And then a year ago we published a truly
breakthrough work concerning the placement of copies of mitochondrial DNA in nuclear DNA, modified so that they are stored in it. This idea is about 30 years old, all abandoned it, some have long been, and we have revived this approach.
Presentation of Aubrey de Gray about his work with Michael West in the ageXKira Päckoff : That's awesome. What do you think are the biggest obstacles to overcoming aging today: technological problems, regulatory framework, high price, or due to our pro-aging trans culture?
Aubrey de Gray : All together. Technological problems are one thing; it is difficult, but we know where we are going, we have a plan. And the others are strongly intertwined with each other. Many are inclined to believe that regulatory barriers will be completely insurmountable, people still do not recognize aging as a disease, so nothing will take off. I think that is nonsense. And the reason is that cultural concepts with regard to all this will be completely reversed, before the turn comes to regulatory barriers. They are turned up by the promising results obtained in laboratories in mice. As soon as we can really rejuvenate old mice, so that they live much longer and in a healthy state, everyone will know about it, and everyone will demand - it will be impossible to be re-elected without publicly announcing their intention to turn the FDA over and ensure that everything happens without any regulatory barriers.
I have struggled all these years to get some money, and all because of skepticism that it might work, coupled with pro-aging trance, the product of this skepticism, people do not want to indulge in unrealizable hope, they are looking for an excuse that aging is not so bad, there are positive aspects in it, so you don’t need to think about it. All this will literally evaporate overnight, as soon as we make impressive progress in the laboratory. Then the money will appear. This is already
penetrating , we are already seeing the beginning of the real biotechnology rejuvenation industry, which I have talked about with glory in my eyes all these years.
Kira Peikoff : Why do you think the culture starts to change?
Aubrey de Gray : Still not changing. There will be a turning point in which I spoke, maybe in five years, when we get a real breakthrough, decisive results in mice, and a fatalistic attitude to all this will simply become impossible. And now we see only the influence of traditional recurring advertising, I go and say the same thing over and over again, and no one convincingly objects to me ... And yet we are gradually moving forward, not only we, but also the scientific community as a whole. Little by little it seems more convincing that I can be right.
Kira Peykoff : I know that you don’t like it when people ask about dates, but if it’s still five years before this breakthrough in mice, it’s hard to resist and not ask how long we should wait for a treatment for a person?
Aubrey de Gray : When I call any dates, I must emphasize their probabilistic nature. In this case, I think that we are 50 to 50 to reach this turning point in mice within five years, of course, it could be 10 or 15 years if we are not lucky. Similarly, for people the probability of 50 to 50 is twenty years, and there is a 10% chance that even in a hundred years we will not get there.
Kira Peykoff : What would be the biggest benefits from a very long-lived population to skeptical people?
Aubrey de Gray : Any question about life extension is the wrong question. Because the prolongation of life, on which people are so fixed, can ever arise only as a side effect of improving health. No matter how long ago or how recently you are born, if you are sick, you will most likely die rather quickly if we cannot cure your illness. If you are healthy, you will not die. Therefore, if we succeed in the way that we conceive in terms of keeping people healthy and young, no matter how long they were born, then the side effect in terms of extending life and life expectancy is likely to be very significant. But this is still just a side effect, so the question you really need to ask is whether you want to be healthy?
So far, no one comes to me, saying that there is no need to do medicine for older people, because if it works, it will be bad. People tend to ignore this contradiction, they prefer to sweep the garbage under the carpet and say, oh yeah, aging is a normal thing, it's good.
People will never admit that they actually say: a really working medicine for the elderly would be bad, but in fact they say that.
Kira Peykoff : Let's deviate from the topic a bit, I'm curious to know which outstanding visionaries from science and technology today most admire you?
Aubrey de Gray : Good question. One of them is
Mike West . It is a great honor for me that I now work for him in AgeX for a part of my time. I admired him for the past ten years, because what he has done in the past 20 years, starting with Geron, is inconceivable. He worked in an environment where I would not have dreamed of the possibility of receiving any private money, any real investment, in something so distant, so much ahead of its time, and he did it again and again. It is simply unthinkable that he managed to do.
Kira Peykoff : What about Ilona Musk?
Aubrey de Gray : Of course, and them. He is completely immune to caution, criticism and conservatism that permeate humanity, and he continues to make these damn self-driving cars, space tourism, etc., creates all these things. We are like-minded people in fact.
Kira Peykoff : You said ten years ago that you think the first person destined to live 1000 years has already been born. Do you still think so?
Aubrey de Gray : Of course, yes. Why not? Again, this is a probabilistic thing. I said that there is a 10% chance that we will not reach
Longevity Escape Velocity - LEV for 100 years, and if so, then the statement about the possibility of a thousand-year life is no longer true. But, of course, I believe that the beneficiaries of what we can also call SENS 1.0, - the points where we get to LEV, - are extremely unlikely that these people will ever suffer because of the poor health associated with their by age. Because we will never sink below LEV as we reach it.
Kira Päckoff : Can someone born today expect ...
Aubrey de Gray : I would say that middle-aged people got a good chance. Remember - the 50/50 chance of getting to LEV for 20 years, and when you get there, you will not just stay at the biological age of 70 or 80 years, you will rejuvenate back to the biological 30 or 40, and you will stay there, therefore your risk of death for each year will not be associated with how long you were born, it will be the same as that of a young adult. Today it is less than 1 per 1000 per year, and this number will decline as we get self-driving cars and all that, so in fact 1000 is a very conservative estimate.
Kira Peikoff : So you can choose at what age you would like to return?
Aubrey de Gray : Of course, as with a car. You repair the damage, and they continue to be created by human metabolism, so you can simply choose how often and how carefully you repair the damage. And you can make a different choice next time.
Kira Peykoff : What would your ideal age be?
Aubrey de Gray : I have no idea. I do not think about it, because in the future I will change it when I want.
Translated by Nick Sestrin , SENS Volunteers Group