European startups hacking the ageing process | Hacker News Reader

European startups hacking the ageing process

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52 pointstdmckinlay19 comments

As a European, I wish we had access to services like "measuring your DNA methylation clock from a blood sample". This can be done affordably in USA / Canada, but not in the EU.

IDK if it is even legally possible to create an EU-wide consumer service like that, with blood samples moving across the borders. In some aspects, the single market isn't as single as we need.

It's amazing how much money and worry healthcare systems and people spend on age-correlated diseases without examining the underlying cause.

Or thinking about how they (mis)use the time they already have.

Healthcare spending is something of a mystery. Two examples: there's a huge epidemic of allergies happening under our noses, and no one seems to be paying it any mind. Coronaviruses were known to be problematic years ago, and no one bothered to invest in prevention.

I guess there aren't enough researches (or money) to go around...

Healthcare systems have basically been subjected to nonstop austerity since the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. We shouldn't let our governments forget how badly they underprepared us for the challenges of the 21st century by refusing to tackle the faults of the 20th-century political economy. https://www.journalstandard.com/news/20200513/sitting-in-fre...

For a fairly inclusive list of longevity industry companies:

https://agingbiotech.info/companies

>For the first time in human history, more people die from diseases that come as a consequence of old age — such as cancer and heart attacks — than infectious disease.

I wonder how they count covid deaths in this.

Maybe covid deaths with no co-morbidities = infectious, covid deaths with co-morbidities = specific co-morbidity?

The annual number of age-related deaths seems to be around 10X the number of COVID deaths (so far), so the distinction likely doesn't have any bearing on the veracity of the statement.

Global deaths by age-related issues in 2017: >20 million[0]

Global deaths due to COVID: ~2.1 million.[1]

[0]https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/causes-of-death-in-70-yea...

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:COVID-19_pandemic_dat...

Covid isn't deadly enough by a longshot. 100% of the people on this planet will die, if the entire planet got infected only 0.28% would die of covid. of the 99.72% that is not going to die of covid, 16% are going to get heart disease as cause of death.

>Just a few months ago, scientists in Tel Aviv managed to actually reverse the ageing process for the first time ever.

That's... not in Europe.

That’s Startup nation, definitely not Europe.

Is there a claim to the contrary in the article?

I'm pretty sure the article intends that to just be a demonstration of where progress in the entire field of anti-aging is at.

That being said, it's probably not in a submarine (http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html) article about European VC firms's best interest to start off by hyping an Israeli development.

> That's... not in Europe.

Israel is in the Eurovision Song Contest.

and australia IIRC

Ah yes, also known as europe down under.

And also since when did we establish that telomere lengthening equals to age reversal. Cancerous cells could also increase telomere length.

Also, there's this headline within the article itself:

> European VC is falling behind (for now)

Well observed. If you read carefully you'll see that the article is structured to first talk about progress happening around the world, then how European companies are falling behind in general, and then about which European companies are doing well.

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