Jim Mellon and high-profile partners roll the dice on an anti-aging upstart | Hacker News Reader

Jim Mellon and high-profile partners roll the dice on an anti-aging upstart

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121 pointsdiscombobulate65 comments

An interesting area investment wise. Really don't know what to make of it as I do see a great deal of risk in these companies personally, that somehow others are happy with.

No real products, no real roadmap. Jim has also made some very bad pharma calls in the past and had some very clueless people running his pharma companies. That said he looks to have done some real research.

> The primary game plan at Juvenescence, explains Bailey, is to come up with various operations engaged in developing new anti-aging drugs

> Juvenescence Bio will be charged with building the pipeline, says Bailey, in part with the molecules that will be identified through the AI venture.

To me that's a warning sign. I like the ambition. This is Elon Musk level stuff. But he isn't crazy enough to deal in unproven potential outcomes. He knew rockets can go to space, he knew electric cars can drive, he knew batteries can store energy/money. He knew what he could sell when he solved the issues

Here i'm not sure they know what they will have in the end and that would scare me off.

The theoretical rewards though...

Indeed. And he has the money to spend and he knows how to get "friends and family" involved.

Furthermore, only one or two of the ideas have to be marketable to make a valuable pharma property. I wish i was able to burn ten,twenty million finding out if I was right or not!

Scare you off from what? From reading about it?

investing hard won £

I can see why a billionaire would need your help on that. I guess he needs to up his game.

this is the difference between basic and applied research - Musk is doing great work in the applied research space. taking proven models and bringing them to market, bringing down costs, etc.

anti-aging research is still in the basic phase - it might be decades before techniques can be applied with any sort of scale. in that sense you really do need huge institutions (or in this case, billionaires) to fund it all. retail investors like you (assuming) and I really can't get involved at the scale or timelines these sorts of ventures require.

Indeed. Very pleased of course someone is willing to take risks.

This is how we ended up with railways, undersea telegraph, commercial commodotised flight and so on.

The old quest of pharmaceutical industry of one small molecule for each disease is largely over. There are perhaps different kind of strategies. For example having a symbiote organism in our body. A very simple one, the baker's yeast, which is used since centuries by women to have a good look, can generate precursors of nicotinamide riboside, and mammalian cells can take up extracellular NAD+ from their surroundings [0]. It is far from being a silver bullet, but it works. There is a long record of modifying Saccharomyces cerevisiae genome, so designing a much more effective S. Cerevisiae is not an unreasonable bet. After that it is a question of customer education, about what they can expect and not expect from a product.

[0] https://umm.edu/health/medical/altmed/supplement/brewers-yea...

I don't feel that ambition and risk is a bad thing. Elon Musk is crazier than you give him credit for. He started Neuralink, which is even more of a moonshot biotech company. I think that starting a new car/rocket company was riskier, back in 2003, for economic and political reasons.

However, I agree that Juvenescence has too much hype and not enough detail. Musk talks big but gives detailed arguments about why he can succeed. Here they seem to just want to get their name out. I'm particularly concerned that Mellon is running a biotech VC fund, juvenescence.life, which incentives PR over substance.

All I've read so far is that they want to apply ML to improve the drug pipeline and discover better drugs. It's not a new idea. There is existing research on using neural networks to predict drug effects, and more broadly many are working on high throughout screening for drug candidates, fully robotic wet labs, etc. But aspects of drug discovery are poorly suited for AI: it's a complex, heterogeneous process requiring logical reasoning and modeling on top of immense structured domain knowledge. The burden is on Juvenescence to make a convincing pitch.

Tiny nitpick; Musk didn't start Tesla Motors (now Tesla Inc.) He joined in an early funding round. He did some work with the Roadster and took more control during(?) the recession. Maybe just prior to it, I don't recall the dates.

Err... I was an early investor, not long after their IPO. So, I've paid a little attention.

This is an interesting case where it's hard to separate rationality from human nature. On the one hand, people don't want to lose their investment. On the other hand, people really, really don't want to die. So as billionaires get older, they are going to feel a lot of psychological pressure to believe life-extension startup stories they might not find as credible in another context.

I think one nice way to solve this is to require a small, objective proof of concept for startups claiming to have a rejuvenating technology.

I propose they solve baldness. It will not only demonstrate the technology, but remove the funding problem entirely.

It also removes 99.9999% of the reward :)

Moonshots should be moonshots

> This is an interesting case where it's hard to separate rationality from human nature.

The Roman Catholic Church has had this thing sewn up for at least a millennium. Giving large amounts of money to the church on your deathbed is a surefire way to open the gates of heaven, or so I'm told.

Maybe in the time of the Medicis. The Roman Catholic Church doesn't give much of a fuck whether you give them a dime today. It's not that kind of organization.

Haha. That's so funny. You should have been around when my grandmother died. They took her for a pretty penny. Not that I care because I didn't want any money from her anyway but they sure know who their marks are.

In Poland just about every interaction with the church has a price tag attached to it, ditto in Spain. There's a reason the Vatican is lined with gold and it has precious little to do with the Medicis and everything to do with tithe, real estate, compound interest and outright scams.

I can't speak to the Catholic church in Poland; if you say so, I believe you. Then I'd just say: you mean the Polish Roman Catholic Church, not the Roman Catholic Church in general.

I feel confident that old ladies in Poland are not gilding the Vatican, which, FWIW, is worth less than 1/8th a single Jeff Bezos. (I, too, would be happier if that number were even lower, since it contradicts some of the better-known values of the religion).

Bezos' worth is paper, the Vatican has billions in cash, that's outside of all its other holdings in stocks, real estate and so on.

They pull in 100's of millions per week, now obviously lots of that is spent again but plenty of it flows upwards.

I don't think there is any proper accounting of the true worth of the Vatican other than what slips out and the official reporting by the Vatican bank.

Personally I'd be happy if the whole thing went bust but they keep finding new people to fleece so it will be a while. Get them while they're young... It's remarkably effective, once brainwashed as a child it takes a very strong person to break out of that stuff.

It's interesting how accidents of birth tend to tie people to some religion (or none) and then that becomes a defining part of their identity to the point where they can no longer separate from it. And so if you're born in Pakistan chances are large that you will feel like the Muslim religion is the one and true and when you're born in Ireland it will likely be Catholicism or Protestantism (but the dividing line between those two is - unless you're part of either - for non-religious people roughly the same as between Orthodox verions of that same religion, in other words, all followers of Jesus in some variation).

Born to Jewish parents Judaism is very likely to be your religion and so on. That alone should make you wonder how much of this is free choice and how much of it is indoctrination. Maybe we'll kick the religion virus one day but I'm not too hopeful it will happen.

Then a whole bunch of old guys in robes and people speaking with great authority on subjects they could not possibly know anything about will have to find some new way of conning people.

I don't know what most of this is meant to persuade me of, but I will say that when people estimate the value of the Vatican, they're not just basing that on the cash in the Vatican Bank.

jacquesm is right, the Polish church is a complete racket. A small example—my father wanted to be buried in the family crypt in Warsaw. This meant having to pay off his parish (he was not a churchgoer, but everyone is assigned a parish), and then pay off the parish the cemetery was in to allow the transfer (in addition to all the regular burial fees).

The most popular conservative priest in Poland drives a Maybach.

Priests in Poland will go door to door once or twice a year basically collecting envelopes. Not paying them complicates your life.

That is deeply fucked up.

Not as bad as in Romania, but there it is the Orthodox church rather than the Roman Catholic one. They're spending 100 million euros fleeced from some of the poorest people in the EU on a new church right now just to it will be the biggest in a country that could really use that money in better ways.

https://www.romania-insider.com/romania-peoples-salvation-ca...

Not bad, money straight from the Romanian government to the Church to build more churches.

http://www.ibtimes.com/why-poverty-stricken-romania-building...

Is baldness linked to premature death?

Baldness is fundamentally about cellular senescence. If you are arguing your startup can solve a major problem in getting you (and your cells) to live longer, solving baldness would be a great, objective proof of concept.

If Juvenescence puts serious effort into senolytics, then this will be useful. The more the merrier in that field to join Unity Biotechnology, Oisin Biotechnologies, SIWA Therapeutics, etc.

Everything else outside the SENS portfolio that can be accomplished via drug discovery to alter the operation of metabolism, focusing on known targets such as mTOR, is most likely a pointless waste of time and energy. It has been a pointless waste of time and energy for the past two decades, and I don't see that changing any time soon. The approach of trying to mimic calorie restriction or upregulate autophagy or mess with growth hormone/insulin metabolism or mimic exercise has very definite upper bounds on effectiveness.

The longevity dividend promise of "spend billions to add a couple of years of life expectancy by 2040" is underwhelming, and anyone out there talking about drug discovery to alter metabolism to slow aging is in that camp.

If billions are to be spent, then use them to follow the SENS approach of damage repair, not tinkering the system to slightly slow down the pace of damage accumulation. Only damage repair, such as via senolytics to clear senescent cell accumulation, can in principle produce rejuvenation of the old and greatly extended healthy life spans, more than just a few years.

It is not a coincidence that senescent cell clearance has in a few short years, just as soon as people started to try it in earnest, proven itself far more effective and reliable and useful than the past 20 years of people trying to mimic calorie restriction or boost autophagy.

I think most of this money would be better spent focused on reducing the cost of life extension research, like essential tooling, not spelunking through combinatorial search space for drugs. Granted, this is more of an engineering approach, so I could see why biologists might prefer tinkering with oxidation pathways. If a synthetic genome costs $40 million then how are you going to try out 1,000 low-aging variants of the genome without spending an impossibly large amount of money? The cost centers need to be ruthlessly attacked-- sequencing, synthesis, combinatorial array testing, scale-up of arbitrary biomolecule production, debugging methodologies (optogenetics has been a tremendous success), etc.

$40 million times 1000, is forty billion dollars. This is less than half the networth of Bill Gates.

If a single-mans fortune could potentially fund the entire thing, then for sure a coalition of wealth could easily fund it if there was even a mild guarantee for success.

Well, low-aging phenotypes (and genotypes) have already been discovered in the population. Doesn't make you invincible, of course. How mild of a guarantee are you looking for, again?

It's great how trying to live forever went from being considered impossible to something that Google and many billionaires are investing a lot of money into. I think Aubrey de Grey had a lot to do with this by making the SENS approach which has helped properly characterize the types of cellular damage attributable to aging.

Anti-aging research has little, if anything, to do with "trying to live forever". It has more to do with "staying forever young", i.e., staying healthy and strong and good-looking until death. Aging increases the organism's fragility and makes it prone to getting ill, and trying to slow down this process is, of course, a meaningful and venerable goal. Living forever, on the other hand, is impossible in principle, unfortunately - for at least two reasons: the limited capacity of our brain and the mean time from birth to a fatal accident being around two hundred years.

If you didn't age you would reduce the risk of fatal accidents.

You simply can't reduce it to zero. Around 200 years, nearly everyone will have at least experienced a near fatal accident, statistically. If you're 40, you probably already know someone who has.

That's at current levels of fatal accidents. Some kinds of accidents have already been significantly reduced, others probably will be.

You are assuming that everyone leads an equally-risky lifestyle when that is clearly not the case.

Statistics are useful for large numbers, but can be quite misleading for individuals (especially for people as divergent in behavior as human beings).

Just a guess, but I would bet that avoiding drunk driving (or being on the road at times that drunks are likely to be driving), taking care with prescription drug use, avoiding swimming pools, and changing your smoke detector batteries regularly would double that 200 year span, at least. Maybe more.

> You are assuming that everyone leads an equally-risky lifestyle when that is clearly not the case

No I'm not. Everyday risks, like slipping in the shower, or getting in a car accident, or falling down the stairs, are common and fatal enough to nearly kill everyone before 200 years old.

Certainly risk factors change all the time, and that might get slightly extended, but life is inherently risky.

"Everyday risks, like slipping in the shower, or getting in a car accident, or falling down the stairs, are common and fatal enough to nearly kill everyone before 200 years old."

I addressed car accidents (those are going to go way down in the future anyway).

Can you show me the actual calculation that demonstrates that "nearly everyone" will die in an accident within 200 years?

According to https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/accidental-injury.htm

the annual accidental death rate in the U.S. is about 42.6/100,000 population. Now, that's going to go up to some extent in an elderly population (though maybe not that much, since we're positing therapies that keep one healthy into advanced age). Let's double the rate. The annual probability of dying an accidental death would then be 0.000852.

That does not appear to be consistent with "nearly everyone" (say, >90%) dying within 200 years.

>90% is a little high. Nearly everyone would experience a near fatal accident, as I initially said; many would die by 200 years, not all. If I said nearly everyone would die, blame that on hyperbole due to cellphone access.

> the limited capacity of our brain

That's both fixable and already something we have mechanisms to cope with. You already remember the highlights of your life, not every single waking moment.

> the mean time from birth to a fatal accident being around two hundred years.

I've seen various statistics for that, but in any case, all the more incentive to fix that, too. We don't avoid curing a disease just because other diseases still exist.

Any finite sized brain will eventually repeat itself or halt, is probably the main point. This is probably not something we can work around.

That's an entirely separate issue, and one to be filed under "problems we'd love to have to deal with". Fairly sure it's lower on the priority list than "heat death of the universe", which we'd also need to deal with.

There is nothing new about rich people pouring massive resources into promises of immortality.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qin_Shi_Huang#Elixir_of_life

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_pyramids

Yes indeed. Florida got discovered that way I believe.

Don't forget Gilgamesh, possibly the oldest work of fiction in existence, has a living forever theme.

If I had a dollar for every time someone on HN mentioned Aubrey de Grey or SENS in an aging discussion or Haskell or Lisp in a programming language discussion I'd be rich. Like Satoshi rich.

I've always thought Aubrey de Grey was a fountain of nonsense hiding behind complexity. He's like the nonsense research paper that gets published because it sounds smart and no one wants to admit they can't understand it.

I've had my immortality rings from Alex Chiu for years now. They should just talk to him.

http://alexchiu.com/

:) I forgot about that. Yeah, he needs some serious backing.

tl;dr

British billionaire Jim Mellon wants to launch a company named Juvenescence with plans to make a big splash in anti-aging research.

Tier 1 entrepreneur gives the masses what they want. Tier 2 gives the masses what they should want, and makes them want it. Tier 3 saves their lives so they have time to learn to want better things. Med tech is best tech. It also relies on much of the fun tech.

I'm worried about my brain more than the other parts of my body. I can do something to stay relatively health but my brain will shrink into a raisin no matter what I do.

Nothing new here. The rich always fund the search for the fountain of youth, and yet they always die.

Thank goodness.

I would spend half a billion and for myself first and foremost, why would I save money for, to be the richest guy in the graveyard.

Death will become optional at some point. But it will be only for the rich. Death was always this great equalizer. With that not being the case there will be a revolt on the size and proportion humanity would not have seen. how do we deal with that?

Technology is going to force us to deal with some age old questions. There is a line I remember from Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" that goes something like "There is neither art nor skill at arms which will protect one man from one hundred of his fellows." In context, it's referring to the fact that even Roman emperors could be murdered by a relatively small coalition of men. No matter how rich and powerful a person is, a few people working together and willing to sacrifice can kill that rich and powerful person.

Technology seems to imperil this age old truth. What about an immortal billionaire with drones, AI, and a robot army?

The coming elite will have power that no human individual, or even organization, has ever had. We should figure out how to deal with that - but I don't really expect the common folk will. Instead, we may just have to hope that our future billionaire deities are benevolent.

Could the rich raise armies and hold off the rest of the world? Yes... but only if the rest of the world has no technology or monies of its own, and additionally none of the 'rich' are in opposition that that single renegades plan.

Human history seems to prove that over time, any billionaires heirs will eventually drain the money away.

I see this happening a few different possible ways.

1) You give it to everyone.

2) You make it expensive, but not prohibitively. Maybe out of reach of the lower class, but obtainable to the middle.

The latter is more likely. Though if we're looking at the emerging markets with automation, we see that #1 isn't out of the question. If you're making money from people, the amount of people helps you make money.

In reality I think it'll take quite some time to get to either of those points. Because in the beginning this technology is likely to be extremely costly. And I worry that this fact (I'm predicting the common s-curve) will prevent it from becoming cheap.

I'm with team death on this one. I don't think we'll find a fix.

I agree with you that a situation where a real life extension technology was available but costly—especially if it required tissue from young people—would be pretty terrible.

> I don't think we'll find a fix.

I hope we don't find a fix. The last thing this world needs are immortal god-barons running around extending their greedy agendas.

Immortal god-barons would probably care a lot more about sustainable practices and the environment at least, since they could live to see the consequences.

> But it will only be for the rich.

Why? Because of big pharma?

People sacrifice their lives for their children, do you think the law will really restrict people from saving/improving their children's lives. You think the law would be enough to stop you from saving/improving your own life?

1. Insurance. As soon as it is cheaper to keep people young as compared to keep elder people healthy/alive, insurance companies will hand out these procedures like candy.

2. Medical tourism. IP is only valid within a certain jurisdiction. Reverse engineering a cocktail of molecules is not easy but well within reason. Manufacturering said molecules is ridiculously cheap. Even training professionals in other countries is relatively cheap.

3. Black market. If any white hat leaks these formulas or recreates them. If I chose to I can buy clean heroin from a reputable dealer online. You think I wont be able to get a life saving drug for the cost of manufacturing+tiny margin?

FWIW, this is already commonplace for a lot of poor people and their "restricted" access to expensive drugs.

> Death will become optional at some point.

There are people who'd like others to believe this. There is money to be made as long as people hope death can be avoided. What's the evidence that this will ever be true, that it's even possible?

Let me make a bold prediction. Death will not be overcome. Maybe, the eta will be increased, like the situation in the West where life expectancy is higher.

Anti-aging is for future. For now

ban smokes/alcohol tax fat/sugar

for those causing accidents, make them pay the hospital bills and eliminate unemployment. Law cannot stop injustice, which reduces quality of life, but can make people feel that someone is by their side, which increases quality of life.

> ban smokes/alcohol

That didn't even work with a Constitutional amendment. If culture doesn't change, you'll have to live with it - there's no legal remedy.

> tax fat/sugar

Risky, given the track record of nutrition science, but better than outright bans. Why don't we start by not subsidizing sugar.

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