Three New Longevity Startups
leafscience.org
leafscience.org
To touch on a couple of the other points that have been raised here, no our drugs aren't enzymes. We at SENS were working on an enzymatic approach for many years. There is still potential to engineering enzymes for this, but I designed our cyclodextrins to be a faster/cheaper/easier path to the clinic. Well, not that much cheaper. It's still very expensive. And yes, we are well aware of the hearing loss issue. It's avoidable, we believe we understand what caused it, and we're engineering around it. We'll be able to test whether we are successfully avoiding hearing loss in a very sensitive system in the next 9 months.
How long will we last? 16 more months with our current funding and burn rate. By then we need to have moved into series A so if anyone has any pharma VC contacts I'm definitely looking for warm intros :)
Is there a chance that you are developing CD that target 7KC but at the end of the day, it dissolved chol-containing plaques inherently and that's where you'll derive the benefit from?
"We've taken a well-known and extremely safe compound, and have created novel derivatives that can specifically target the toxic biomolecule that drives the development of atherosclerosis, the cause of most heart attacks and strokes."
I'm excited for this one. Seems like a reasonable possibility for success addressing a huge killer.
The thing is cyclodextrins have been linked to causing deafness, in as little as a week. As per https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5676048/ and https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/deaf-or-death-in-drug-trial...
Heart disease or hearing – tough trade-offs. Here’s to hoping that they’ve engineered a novel compound without any of the downsides.
Many people would give up their entire life fortune, any inheritance to their children, just to live for a few more years. People have been killing and dying searching for the fountain of youth for centuries.
Everyone is going to die eventually, yet the extremes people go to extend life is unlike any normal supply and demand curve.
I'm not sure there's anything more overestimated and over-hyped than longevity.
You're very much mistaken.
The National Institute of Health gets $31B of government funds every year for research. The NSF gets $8B, NASA gets $20B, and DARPA gets around $3B. So healthcare research gets roughly 50% of the entire U.S. public research budget, and that's not including private investment.
It's difficult to pull accurate numbers, but meat substitutes, VR, and even super-hot AI get far less every year, it's nowhere near healthcare research.
Extending life has been a priority of the US government for many years, largely because it's politically popular. Everyone rich or poor wants to live longer.
This is very different from what longevity research (like in the article) is tackling, and almost non of that money (public or private) is invested there.
If you're searching for a cure for cancer, heart failure, or any of fatal health ailment, you are by definition trying to extend people's lives. The entire purpose of healthcare is to extend both the length and quality of people's lives.
Many people, however, won't even do something simple and enjoyably like frequent moderate exercise to improve their longevity.
The poster I was responding to claimed "yet the extremes people go to extend life is unlike any normal supply and demand curve. I'm not sure there's anything more overestimated and over-hyped than longevity." -- and I think the is transparently untrue because a great many people do not act as though it is incredibly important to them.
I run a sperm freezing company (YC S19) incubated at Harvard and we've always thought about freezing sperm as an extremely logical pairing with any life extension technology; sperm can be frozen indefinitely with no loss in quality (as far as we know), you could have 30-year old sperm frozen for us when you're 130.
Since sperm develops mutations over time (~1 every 8 months) and DNA fragmentation is associated with all manner of congenital conditions like autism, younger sperm is generally speaking healthier.
Just wanted to share since it's something we talk about internally quite a bit. What does it mean to live forever if you lose all your family members along the way? How will society change to accommodate?
I agree with everything else you've said, but the jury is definitely out on this one.
Life expectancy for Hong Kong is 84.7 years. [2]
Based on a comparison of 158 countries in 2013, Maldives ranked the highest in fish consumption per capita with 166 kg followed by Iceland and Hong Kong [3]
Hong Kong also beats most countries in beef consumption, out-eating Americans by nearly 50% per capita. [4]
So of the countries in the top 10 for life expectancy, we see a lot of meat in the diet. India has the most vegetarians of any country (at 38%). And their life expectancy ranks 133rd at 69.4 years.
[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/ISL/iceland/life-expec... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expe... [3] https://www.helgilibrary.com/indicators/fish-consumption-per... [4] https://beef2live.com/story-world-beef-consumption-per-capit...
An alternative is to do something like follow second-generation Western people of Indian origin. I know at least one study of Tuberculosis in the UK tested the effect of vegetarianism there and used the British Asian sub-population to do so, so there's probably some info there too.
I don't know of any other large vegetarian groups.
Hong Kong’s beef consumption doubled since 2003. I’d wager your average elderly American ate more meat in their life than your average Hong Kong resident.
Source: https://medium.com/@ecyY/meat-consumption-growth-in-hong-kon...
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/HKG/hong-kong/life-exp...
If you look at the article I linked to, it shows relatively flat beef consumption until the mid 2000s.
I’m not saying beef will kill you, but picking two or three rich countries that eat a lot of meat — and have a huge amount going for them in other ways — and comparing them to India is not science or a statistically significant thing. It’s like comparing teacher salaries and alcohol prices in the 1970s and saying one causes the other when they’re both the result of inflation.
You can look at the entire top 10 list of countries by life expectancy. They have plenty of meat consumption. There are no clinical studies implicating meat in shortened lifespans.
But people blindly spout off that a plant based diet is supposedly healthiest for you. There's no evidence to support that.
> AGEs can also be encountered in foods, particularly foods that have been exposed to high temperatures, such as in grilling or frying.
I wonder if non plant based diets promote more grilling and frying hence the bad wrap.
From what I read physical fitness correlates much better with it than mental fitness.
Without the corrosive influence of social media, you might also be more likely to live a more authentic life that you find personally meaningful.
That said, I doubt everyone has the same relationship with social media that I had. I found myself influenced by it even in small doses, and it always felt like it was detracting from my wellbeing. Going cold turkey ended up being a life-changing decision for me and I wouldn't dream of going back.
Am I quite alone in this?
I sure hope so.
But, to take your line of thinking further, what are the odds that we are currently at just the right lifespan for humans? If you are against increasing human lifespan, you should also probably be in favor of decreasing it, unless you think we are at very special point in time in entire human history.
I am also seeking to understand if others feel as I do on this subject.
To even Aknowledge that it might be possible could lead to false hope and disappointment. I think thats the main reason many people are instinctively against it
The mind basically tries to protect them from fighting against the impossible and earning nothing but dread and disappointment.
Religion perpetuated the notion that living is inherently better than death despite suffering and we are stuck with it everywhere.
Rationally, is it true that someone can be better off dead? No. For something to be better, it requires comparison of former with later state. Since you won't exist, there is no state to compare. No one dead can feel sadness. (of course that's relying on there being no after life or reincarnation)
Flip that switch, is it true someone can be better off living? No. For the same reason, you have to presume continued existence is good since you can't rely on comparing states.
How do you know continued existence will be good or better?
That you can't. You can make a guess based on data relying on hedonism but that's all there is. No one agrees on what good continued existence is either so people in part are using their experience and values to judge which doesn't make sense if you allow individuals to have freedom of deciding their own values and life.
I say, we stop extending life expectancy and focus on cutting off the problems that make existing existence a pain even if for majority, happiness or society outweigh it. There are many useless things people waste their life on currently, why do they need to?
For instance, there's worry that life extension will vastly worsen economic inequality. Another problem is that a lot systems in society (e.g. retirement, insurance) is implicitly based on current average lifespan, and a sudden extension of it could cause such shockwaves in the economy that it would create more suffering than it would save.
I mention these two because I acknowledge them as real risks, but despite them, I'm 100% in support of life extension. I sincerely hope that one day humans will be able to extends life indefinitely, while retaining full capacity (i.e. no everlasting life in a body of a 90-years-old).
So, it's less a question of what drives the search for longevity than what we'll do with it once it arrives.