Jim Mellon is a billionaire investor in antiaging companies. Jim has made several investments in antiaging companies and as one of the leading investors in the field gets pitched almost all of the antiaging companies. Jim thus has a unique perspective on what the latest developments are with anti-aging technology. Jim predicts that average life expectancy will be 115 years by 2050 while today it is about 80 years. Gene therapy will extend that to 150 years. He predicts there will be significant new developments in the next few years alone. Jim predicts that in ten to fifteen years cancer will mostly become a manageable chronic condition in the cases where it is not completely cured.
Jim predicts there will be a large improvement in overall public health from a wave of new biotech treatments and drugs within the next five years.
There will also be a larger improvement in health from gene editing, stem cells and full tissue regeneration, organ transplantation from animals into humans.
The past six years has seen the emergence of the cure for hepatitis C, cancer immunotherapy, curing leukemia, and CRISPR CAS9 gene editing.
Jim Mellon spoke at the antiaging conference Raadfest 2018.
Jim pointed out that the current global market for anti-aging products is about $140 billion but nothing actually works in terms of extending lifespan. He predicts that there will soon be effective life-extending products and treatments. This will cause the biggest stock market mania in history.
Juvenescence (aka antiaging) will become the biggest industry on the planet.
Jim and his partner Al Chalabi wrote a book called Juvenescence: Investing in the Age of Longevity.
Jim has a positive view of metformin and vitamin B12, rapamycin, NAD+ restoration (through nicotinamide riboside and other similar NAD+ precursors) and the senolytic combo of dasatinib and quercetin.
SOURCES- Raadfest, leafscience, youtube
Written by Brian Wang. www.nextbigfuture.com
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
Known for identifying cutting edge technologies, he is currently a Co-Founder of a startup and fundraiser for high potential early-stage companies. He is the Head of Research for Allocations for deep technology investments and an Angel Investor at Space Angels.
A frequent speaker at corporations, he has been a TEDx speaker, a Singularity University speaker and guest at numerous interviews for radio and podcasts. He is open to public speaking and advising engagements.
Conceded.
But that lobby power will not last, at least in a few countries, against an informed electorate – one that knows (or believes, no difference) that curing aging strategically supplants (ethically and economically) bandaid treatments like cancer treatments.
The forcing function there will be government policy that’s savvy to the fact that a triple digit healthspan population is overly competitive to double digit equivalents.
This, regardless what stupid marketing it’s wrapped up and sold in. E.G. some divine QED bullet points, or that it makes Gaia happy, or that it allows whatever perennial underdog society to finally come of age in geopolitics.
Once the horse is out of the barn it will multiply.
It would be nice if the world worked that way – supply and demand and all that. But Pharma suppresses cures by buying out companies, and even pays Generic manufacturers not to manufacture so they can keep their expensive monopoly longer. They lobby for longer patents. They plow more than 100% of profits into buybacks instead of R&D, even going into debt to pay their wealthy CEOs a bit more in stock options.
That’s why the anti-aging pioneers aren’t from Big Pharma. They’re all startups and many are struggling for cash.
We should have had these cures long ago. It isn’t that people don’t want them, it’s that they have no control.
“The infection with Adv36 accelerates differentiation and proliferation of the 3T3-L1 human preadipocytes into adipocytes [27,43,44] and increases the concentration of lipid content in fat cells.”
Fat cells don’t like to be small. By causing them to divide, signals are created that make you more hungry and you eat more to fill those cells. Or at least, I think that is how it works.
The mechanism does not matter a great deal. They have shown that animals get fat when they infect them with these viruses. These viruses also persist in the body and are concentrated in the fat tissue. We need to develop cures to these things. Wipe out those viruses.
You can smoke if you have the right genes, same for drinking. Most people don’t have them. They have identified some of these genes. I did the 23andme thing and uploaded my DNA to Promethease and it shows that I don’t have these protections. https://www.snpedia.com/index.php/Promethease
Very cheap to get this health data. I am allergic to cigarette smoke, so avoiding that was a no brainer.
I never drank either. My family didn’t and grandparents’ family. I later learned my great grandmother was part the temperance movement which is probably why there was no drinking. Quite possible that saved my life.
Different things tend to kill you at different ages. Just 4.1% 100-year-olds die of cancer. 2.8% die of chronic respiratory diseases: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/dvs/LCWK1_2015.pdf
Heart disease is the big killer there: 34.2%
It still doesn’t feel like a real world scenario. Because in the real world curing aging is as much of a crowd pleasing notion, something that will be in demand should it materialize, that whether (the collection of things and people we could simplify to) “big pharma” likes it or not, the wave is coming.
They can surf it or be left behind. I don’t see them being left behind. Not when enough of the public recognizes that aging is mere illness, not cosmic obligation, and “big pharma” is not supplying the treatment that the public demands.
Just like today people will not vote for a politician that promises zero govt help. And obviously that refers to the general trend for govt protection of whatever flavor pleases whatever specific sub-group of the electorate. Welfare, corporate tax breaks, *whatever*.
Which leaves out true anarchists which are not a majority at all.
So in effect the real world implication of the above is that some societies will adopt anti-aging more than others. Some may be very opposed to it.
Who will get the last laugh? I’m betting on whoever lives longer. A country whose policy is to promote the curing of aging will not help something like a Big Pharma set of actors that act counter to that policy. Just like the govt of many countries does not help the spread of HIV, but rather the opposite.
For the good of its people. I mean, we’re talking basic civics here, right?
So in fact more like various waves, and a surfer having to ride the right wave combination, from combination peak to combination peak, as the various waves move (types of aging damage – various wave heights and speeds), to come out ahead.
LEV isn’t even required. Aging only needs to slow down enough for enough people to live long enough on the bandwagon for a cultural shift to bake in. For the status quo that aging is as much of an unnecessary contrivance as death, bondage, and sadness (life liberty happiness – that fundamental notion); like the mere illness it is.
No one even thinks that cleft palate or polio or HIV or bubonic plague or ingrown nails or whatever, is some natural order of things. Not curing aging is like not “curing” someone born perfectly “normal” except missing hands.
—
Was wondering if this has an approximate answer: in a hypothetical scenario where some country (ceteris paribus, not a perfect country, but one that:) genuinely accepts the notion that curing aging is national priority 1.
If this is a first world country (e.g. one of the G8, or an alliance of), would a flagship program be better than 50/50 odds of getting the snowball going?
Sci/Technologicall and socially (electoral/funding support).
Sure, but it is not as simple as being the right age to take advantage, you have to be lucky and not have much of the forms of aging they take longer to develop an effective solution for.
It is like a bunch of surfers catching a wave, some won’t catch the wave at all, others will fall, some will intentionally stop and only a few, if any, will ride it all the way in.
There are so many ways we age. You need to fix them all. That is a tall order. I think people are assuming that as more of these are solved the strength of the ones that are left to kill you will be diminished and you will get increasingly more time to solve those. But I see no reason that should be true. You might look perfectly healthy on the outside but still die in your sleep from some aging thing.
When they cleared the senescent cells from the mice, they still aged, they just aged differently.
re: adenovirus theory of obesity its the chicken/egg scenario – does the virus infection lead to changes in gut flora & cell metabolism OR does the poor metabolism lead to increased risk of adenovirus infection b/c the cells cannot protect themselves or immune system becomes compromised due to poor cellular metabolism
I agree with too much exercise – moderation is the key, although as I get older I have taken up some weight training to help bone density & muscle mass
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4066461/
Unfortunately, I think genetics is significantly more important than diet/environmental factors (I had a grandfather who smoked like a chimney yet lungs were fine, no bronchitis & he died in his late 70s due to extreme overweight & poor diabetic control) – so all I can do is wait for science to reach a level that may help and in the mean-time stay as healthy as possible
see metformin study on rats that were fed a “decent” diet
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2854888/
most studies on rats feed them crap diets – https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3736576/
but this article shows that these studies have several issues
http://roguehealthandfitness.com/is-metformin-really-an-anti-aging-drug/
see below for study on primates re: CR
summary: CR led to healthier monkeys but lifespan was unaltered
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature11432.epdf?referrer_access_token=kESC413inUFs_xjwXM40DNRgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0N3Ruru5LK0r1WnzdPyYi8-5-nfiKBtpYl-oKUj0R3j3eW7yK7Jz_tdZK-2-Wlq8an-2k2a9SHQnokO10wZ0N2aNO2WKPLwdcM7MshIeI2u3_5aTQBJp8n-c22q0R8vJueZYpttUv51oTM9sdUiei6oir0NOA5PkFoPRHmYq56RioT6KozbLCKVBGNOmDyBkF2IimlMj_KX_9p0b4WpjvmMl25Ug–TGduEjjIIZEK-T0h7yh-qqeAPPXd0dbNp6v8qyChS4cW84Varj96MPwpk&tracking_referrer=www.scientificamerican.com
“We must wait for the results.” An thus my comment about the DEA blocking any research into marijuana. If they did not do that, we would have much more definite results. Maybe they are afraid that the medical researchers would gleefully run down to the nearest grade school with a set of scales and baggies once they got their research marijuana supply in?!? 🙁
As long as the DEA has this level of control, there will never be definite answers, just suppositions like you made with nothing but personal opinion to back it up. There is no way you can compare marijuana smoking as causing cancer like cigarettes do until this research has been done. We don’t need any studies, however, to know that inhaling radioactive particles into our lungs is BAD, REALLY REALLY BAD for our health. Environmental radiation usually doesn’t make it past the skin, unless you put it in your lungs of course where the skin cannot protect us from it or we leave the Earth’s surface and get closer to space.
“Lung cancer is down 45 percent since 1990 among men and down 19 percent since 2002 among women” NBC News Jan. 4, 2018
Agreed. As I posted elsewhere in the thread, I think the extracellular treatments (senolytics, stem cells, clearing extracellular cross-links and aggregates) are more immediately important, and should have a big impact just on their own.
Studies were stopped because they were, in effect, condoning the commission of a crime, and supporting an illegal industry.
“conclusively causes lung cancer”. Not my statement, mine was future looking…and thus speculative. But scientificly smoke causes cancer. Smoke from pot qualifies as smoke, thus it is very likely they will recognize it causes cancer.
It is not something they can demonstrate in humans in one year.
There really is no reason to think it does not cause cancer. It makes smoke. Carcenogens have been identified in the smoke at high levels…
Maybe that is more logic than science. We must wait for the results.
Smoke is carcinogenic period. Were cigarettes made worse than they had to be? Yes! Absolutely. They dry the stuff with diesel exhaust, and put all kinds of chemicals in there. They even had asbestos filters for a while.
But, there are also known carcinogens created during combustion demonstrated well in animals…and well documented in humans.
And burning at lower temperatures, as is common with cigars and pipes, is generally safer like a bicycle is safer in traffic than roller skates…but both carry a great deal of risk.
And believe it or not our bodies are designed to deal with low level radiation. We have several DNA repair mechanisms to protect our tissues. Though radiation probably does contribute to the overload of DNA damage the system fails to keep up with.
“as soon as people realize it causes lung cancer…” That is a scenario…a risk…a likely one, in my opinion. As it makes far more of those PAHs than tobacco does when each are burned. If you want to say I said so…fine…the difference is subtle enough.
We already know PAHs cause cancer and burning pot produces large quantities…but if you insist it has some magic Rastafarian Tinkerbell molecule that protects the user and the second hand users, you are welcome to your motivated delusion until proven scientifically over and over again for 25 years while millions mysteriously get lung cancer…and die…Whatever.
https://www.lung.org/stop-smoking/smoking-facts/marijuana-and-lung-health.html
And yes, the neurological effects are fairly well demonstrated; I mean 64,000+ brain scans. How many do you recon you need?
https://www.amenclinics.com/blog/largest-brain-study-of-62454-scans-identifies-drivers-of-brain-aging/
That’s not what OP said. Mindbreaker said cannabis gives you lung cancer. Here, I’ll copy and paste:
“as soon as people realize it causes lung cancer…”
To your point, most people I know don’t smoke it. And even if they did, OP presented zero evidence to support the statement.
Anyway, like I said, you people have no problem being scientists when it comes to things you’re more or less agnostic about, but when the topic is something that *matters* to you you have no problem making assertions without evidence to support them.
You’re moving the goalposts. Your original assertion was that cannabis conclusively causes lung cancer. Now you’re asserting that if you smoke cannabis, you will contract lung cancer. Plenty of people use marijuana regularly and don’t smoke it. Moreover, there are no studies anywhere that show regularly smoking it definitely raises your likelihood of getting lung cancer.
I thought you people were supposed to be scientists?
I reckon we should only “worry” if clearly we’re going to significantly suffer from something like methylation soon enough that technology won’t have caught up.
Not everything needs to be solved right away, right?
Well the arithmetic is there, misnamed as it might be. More years of damage removed per year of existence is a meaningful notion.
Too wasted from work to reply now.
Will say though that IMHO the memory part is not an issue. Memories worth keeping are usually refreshed chronically. At the other end of the possibility spectrum (optimistic to pessimistic), maybe that’s just a quirk of being merely human – we can deal with it. I don’t think it’s e.g. a sign that we’re not really ourselves anymore after a certain length of being alive and our biological river being discontinuous and therefore a different person.
I think that argument/POV has merit but I don’t think it’s a real issue nor an issue specific to aging/not aging.
Yep.
I don’t have enough brain for economics to hit bullseyes. I try to work from very general approx and then add details. Above I put it all as “big pharma” but it’s obviously not that simple and not just pharma companies nor just businesses.
There’s not much that wouldn’t change in the whole world after the dust settles on major anti aging developments.
Just one or two problem with your hypothesis that I see. Tobacco is loaded with radioactive materials and marijuana is not. Tobacco picks up polonium-210 from the soil because the plant is so low to the ground, while marijuana is a tall plant and does not. The tobacco companies knew this, and it is the reason they got slammed so hard by the government. They could have washed it out of the leaves, but not without interfering with the nicotine necessary to get people hooked on their tobacco products. Because tobacco causes the alveoli in our lungs to contract (why runners do not smoke before running) the radioactive material gets trapped there. It explains why people who quit smoking decades before can still get lung cancer from it, or second hand smoke.
Also, it has been shown that elements in marijuana kills cancer cells, and we would know a lot more about it if the DEA did not ban most/all research into the plant. This was not found out until Reagan spent money trying to prove that marijuana causes cancer, and they found the opposite to be true.
Cancer drug costs are rising, not lowering, and at a faster rate too: https://prescancerpanel.cancer.gov/report/drugvalue/Part1.html
Big Pharma will not introduce a therapy that competes with its own pipeline any more than an oil company will market new ways to split water into hydrogen (and oxygen) to run cars. Yes,the margins might be higher for a cheaper anti-aging regime, but generally someone else – insurance companies, government – is paying the high prices for cancer and other treatments, and overall profits are still higher than a lower cost regime with higher percentage margins.
Why wouldn’t they get away with it in this field? How is it different?
If they buy up the competition, then they’re free to sell the treatments at whatever price they want. They may delay it for a while to pay back their current investments first, but after that, the point is that anti-aging treatments can be at least as profitable as cancer etc, likely more. So I see little reason for them avoid this market in the long run.
(Btw, meanwhile, cancer treatments are getting better, and may get cheaper over time, so it may not stay as lucrative a market as today forever.)
With decades long patent protection,drug companies are exploiting their monopolies by charging many factors more than the drugs cost to make, even factoring in R&D, much of which is covered by the NIH and other gov’t agencies anyway. That was one of the points of the article, and also some research by economist Dean Baker.
The prices for these drugs is a tiny fraction in sub-Saharan Africa, as NBF points out in another post today. Even if the U.S. is subsidizing the world, there is evidence of price-gouging, even collusion.
I don’t think they can get away with that in this new field, but they might, as you say, buy up the competition, and then suppress the treatments with endless “research.”
I think if they miss the boat, they won’t be able to inflate prices simply due to the competition. But that would also mean they failed to stop the competition from emerging, so no problem there.
On the other hand, if they do manage to capture the market, then they’re more or less free to set whatever price they like, give or take price elasticity considerations and regulation.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they try to obtain as a much of a monopoly as they can, including by buying out any competition, and then try to coordinate prices with whoever remains.
Also keep in mind that high price (= cost to consumer) of cancer etc treatments doesn’t necessarily imply high profit margins. If anti-aging treatments can be manufactured at less cost, there is potential for higher profits (even more so with government with subsidies).
I was talking about the costs to the consumer, which may even be covered in part by gov’t. The consumer costs of all the diseases that are more likely because of aging, has got to be much higher than the consumer costs of taking an anti-aging regime, even a multi-treatment plan. Plus, of course, the great bonus of not being sick.
Now, whether drug companies will be able to get away with inflating their drug prices for anti-aging therapies the way they do now for anti-disease therapies remains to be seen, but I suspect they won’t, because the true breakthroughs will come from non-mainstream companies specifically because the profit motive isn’t there for Big Pharma already.
Cost and price aren’t the same thing. Even if it costs less, they can still price it high enough to make sense for them. And you’ve got it backwards: higher cost usually means lower profit margins, since profit = price – cost.
With SENS, old cells are removed when they become senescent, and replaced by new cells, at least some of which come from newly-implanted stem cells. The stem cells would likely be rejuvenated before implantation to maximize their contribution. That rejuvenation process involves resetting epigentic markers, which should include methylation. Epigenetic resetting of stem cells has been demonstrated. So over time, your methylation patterns would get reset as new cells displace old ones.
Even if we can’t remove methylation when rejuvenating a stem cell, it should at least be possible to prevent it from being copied when the stem cell is expanded before implantation – similar to what happens during embryonic development.
The neurons issue is more difficult, but that depends on where and how memories are stored. Neural stem cells do exist, so just slowly replacing old neurons might be good enough. Or maybe replacing support cells combined with intracellular SENS for neurons might keep them in good shape. Or apply the cellular rejuvenation techniques that were shown with stem cells to existing neurons. Just need to tune it to not rejuvanate too much – they need to stay differentiated (btw, that could also be used to reset methylation elsewhere in the body).
Finally, when we develop BCIs (I don’t think it’s an “if”), we might be able to bypass the problem by backing up memories outside the brain. Then simple slow replacement of old neurons may be more practical.
I think there is a weird unspoken assumption being made here.
That “big Pharma” will make decisions as a whole.
But they don’t. Pfizer makes decisions to benefit Pfizer, J&J make decisions to benefit J&J, etc.
If overall spending per person drops from $50k/year down to $10k/y because people aren’t turning into feeble wrecks. BUT now instead of getting 1/10th of that total (50k x 1/10 = 5k) Pfizer is getting ALL of that $10k because they are the company selling youth pills, then Pfizer goes right ahead and maybe short the other companies on the side.
We saw the banks face the decision of do they chase short term individual profit even if the long term is bad for the industry as a whole. They all chose to chase short term individual profit.
Calorie restriction works on all kinds of animals. You will have to site a study good enough to call into question the other dozens that have shown advantage.
I don’t think it is optimal or preferable…but it does work.
Nearly fasting every other day seems to be the best so far: 500-700 calories every other day depending on your gender and size…where you are free to eat whatever the other days. Somewhat awkward as we have 7 days in the week, and fasting days would be out of sync. 4-3 or 5-2 is probably a better fit. People pick 3 fasting, and 4 free eating, but the other way makes sense too.
I tried a 4 day fasting mimicking diet…with my own spin…700 calories for me, very low protein, super low AGEs. I did get quite hungry. I felt superb and alert the first day off. I just wanted to clear out some of those old cells. I think my vision is slightly sharper too. I think I will try it again very soon. I am sure there are many more bad cells where those came from. I plan to combine it with fisetin to accelerate the removal of those senescent cells. There are probably diminishing returns, if done repeatedly. I lost over 9 lb in just those 4 days. I assume that means my body was digesting a lot of cells rather than much fat. If it was fat, the loss should have been smaller as fat is more calorie dense.
Metformin is supposed to have a similar effect. But I suspect there is more going on than meets the eye…and there are probably still advantages to doing the fasting.
Yes. Escape velocity is a misleading metaphor that doesn’t follow because we aren’t dealing with a friction free momentum. Instead we are dealing with pushing a natural system further and further from its current state. Almost the exact opposite situation.
I think we are healthier than many populations in the past. Certainly a larger fraction of people are reaching 80, 90, and 100.
Are we overweight? Yes, but I think that is mostly caused by Adenoviruses 5, 36, and 37 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4517116/
Dirty air, dirty water, exposure to heavy metals, pathogens, alcohol, tobacco, some drug side effects/interactions (and recreation ones), some botched/unnecessary surgeries poor auto safety and homelessness, I think, are the main obstructions to better health in the US. Exercise is modestly overblown. Too much can cause high levels of free radicals and joint damage. Of course, that should not be taken as an endorsement of sitting on your duff all day. HIIT exercise is particularly good. And I think core strengthening is very good but that is my bias. I just feel more balanced and capable when my core is strong. Started exercising core to relieve back pain. It worked. And I found I really enjoyed having a strong core. If the US, in particular, was really bad healthwise why are we near the top in people reaching 100 years?: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centenarian#Centenarian_populations_by_country
And a lot of the people who are reaching 100 today lived through poor air quality (including lead which causes high blood pressure and other health issues). Though there were advantages too. Prohibition doubtless helped health, and calorie restriction during the depression helped extend lives (strong evidence there).
Started taking carnosine for my eyes, but I noticed that it helped my nerves a little…good stuff…I think. Less tingles and random short spikes of pain from no obvious cause.
some work I did along time ago on AGEs using carnosine to prevent AGE-related crosslinking in humans – – Summary: extent of cross-linking was significantly reduced (yay!) BUT products formed were still not native, they did not work as well (i.e. reduced function) and were more easily able to disrupt metabolic pathways.
Neither metformin nor caloric restriction extend the life span of mice that are healthy to begin with. Both regimes will work for “normal” 20th century humans who are metabolically inactive and generally not very healthy.
I am not yet convinced of escape velocity. The more we look at aging the more forms of aging we find. And while some might be dealt with, others may prove very hard to deal with. Consider DNA Methylation…how the heck do you undue that? That would probably require billions of nanobots. And how long can you extend the lives of old neurons that make you, you? I don’t know. Some people can’t remember back before they were 5 or 6. In the future, maybe you would not be able to remember things before you were twenty or thirty.
Along with government programs, since governments stand to gain from a healthy population. In isolation but also competitively with the rest of the world.
No argument that it’s rotten.
I do expect that that won’t hold when most people know that aging can be undone in significant amount and that there’s more healthspan to follow, provided funding.
Which then looks like the same kind of dynamic that has most of the world’s population voting for varying but always substantial amounts of govt provided welfare and healthcare.
Aging therapies will be as taken for granted as any major quality of life programs like welfare and medicaid and medicare, because they will effectively become one and the same ( they always were, except as a matter of perception).
Then it won’t be if, but when and how. People will not stand by and let only some cream of the crop live arbitrarily long, when the therapies can be afforded for something on the order of a few coffees per day, whether paid cash or credit.
And those are only one of many changes that will not be avoidable once the cat’s out of the bag.
NBF and other sites have a number of articles arguing/detailing how slow but steady senescence is more expensive than perpetuated healthspan. I’m all ears if those are wrong.
I’m assuming that any costs for anti-aging drugs, nanotech, etc., would be less than the cost/year for treating conditions of old age, at least cumulatively, though cancer alone is enormously expensive and coudlitself be more costly than all anti-aging treatments combined, and hence more profitable for the drug companies, particularly if they already have patented drugs in the pipeline.
If you read the article I originally cited way at the beginning of this thread, you’ll see that Pfizer and Merck, named in the article, are buying innovation instead of innovating themselves. The, where are all these new drugs? Why is it still poison, burn, and cut to treat cancer? Something is rotten in the reward system, including the incentive to spend more than 100% of profits buying back stock.
Right. I am working on another unspoken assumption – that we’re arguing strictly within the first transition period that’s within the predictability horizon. What happens first; how it starts.
However, genetic treatments can be permanent. So if George Church et al make progress on their genetic approaches, there could emerge options that don’t require repeated treatments. There could also be other developments down the line, like maybe nano-medicine.
The problem with making financial predictions about anti-aging treatments, associated credit schemes, and so on, is that too many conditions and assumptions can change in 50+ years.
From a for-profit company’s perspective, they’d probably want a combination of both: sweetspot the price to maximize short-term profits, and provide credit schemes to capture additional market. But “price” here can also refer to the monthly premiums on those credit schemes. And they can tailor them based on different market segments’ financial abilities.
I see the misunderstanding :
The implicit assumption I was arguing was like Michael K refers to, that
1) Pharma *wouldn’t* neglect to offer their own antiaging therapies (both early (~40) and late (70+)) concurrent with the rest of the industry, and
2) that people *wouldn’t* be able to have something like a 100-150 healthspan *without* those therapies (whether they start early or late) — meaning they’d be regular consumers for at least 70 to 125 = 55 years, plus any terminal treatments as today.
What you seem to be missing is that the extended lifespan requires constant treatment, at least under currently proposed SENS schemes.
People may not be paying for cancer treatments and other traditional diseases of aging, but more people will be paying for the anti-aging treatments over a longer total period.
If big pharma can grab that market, it makes sense for them to go that way, at some appropriate price point.
But it won’t really work that way. Right now, there are a lot of sick people because that last 10 years is roughly 1/7th of the human lifespan. If that shrinks to just 1/14th, that is a lot of potential money lost. Plus, someone else is making a bit of money who owns the patent on life-increasing drugs, even if the profits are less than all the combined drugs for things that mainly effect old people.
Doesn’t the assumption that sales are only relatively instantaneous payments (instead of e.g. some credit scheme), exclude a large number of potential consumers?
What I mean is why would Big Pharma (really simplifying to mean the whole ecology – commerce, industry, politics, etc) pass on offering treatment for that whole span of time, starting at the moment it departs from normal aging.
Normal aging starts at 40, 60 tops. The new healthspan from that 40-60 margin to whatever much further extremity is roughly 100 years; *that* healthspan from ~50-100+ doesn’t happen without some kind of treatment.
Then as you say, the far end of that healthspan has a relatively short margin of much more intensive therapy (because it’s at the leading edge of available technology), something like the current very old age regimes.
Overall that’s an increase in total demand for pharma & co.
It was covered by NBF about a week ago, so at least most of the regulars have probably seen it.
I agree that it can help speed up research, but for age treatments I would prefer to use my own cells to generate stem cells. Such treatments will eventually end up replacing most of my cells, so I’d rather not do that with someone else’s DNA (though I wouldn’t mind making adjustments here and there).
Aging is slow, so there’s enough time to prepare stem cells from your own tissues. And we know we’ll need them, so they can be prepared in advance.
The fault in your numbers is in assuming a stretched out old age – 50+ to 150. That would be a nightmare. No, longevity researchers want to extend healthspan, so you would not get the diseases of old age until the last 10 years or so, just like today, but they would start at 140, not at 70.
I am not in favor of using olive oil, even though those using it tend to live longer. That is because it has a lot of AGEs (Advanced Glycation End Products). I think the best is to use oils with less AGEs like Avocado oil, Flax seed oil, and Pistachio oil, and just take an olive antioxidant supplement instead. I ordered this one: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0763RYWCH/ref=ppx_od_dt_b_asin_title_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 Can’t say if it is any good, ordered it yesterday. I don’t use butter at all. That has very high AGEs. Some AGEs your body can deal with as long as levels are low, but at least one it cannot remove: Glucosepane https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glucosepane And they have nothing that can get this out of your system. The wiki article put out some hope for Alagebrium (ALT-711), but it has been tested and doesn’t work: https://www.fightaging.org/archives/2014/01/further-confirmation-that-age-breaker-alagebrium-has-no-significant-effect-in-humans/
Prevention is the best course of action so far which means supplements that obstruct the formation of AGEs in the body. I take Vitamin C, benfotiamine, pyridoxamine (P-5-P), alpha-lipoic acid, taurine, carnosine, and metformin to reduce the formation of AGEs. As well as reduce my intake by cooking most foods in a little water in the bottom of the pan (you don’t need much, you can keep adding it as it boils away). And I am eating more soup.
I have to ask not out of snark or anything but geniune curiosity, what the numbers actually are.
In my non-economist mind (never had the patience or interest for it), the proportion of profits from :
1) (the current status:) a population of +-80yr lifespans that purchases occasionally till age 50, and then regularly purchases for their last 30
seems smaller than the proportion of profits from
2) (anti aging available:) a population of 150-200yr lifespan that purchases occasionally till age 50, then regularly from age 50 till age 150.
More people buying product for longer. Where’s the fault in the above logic? Or do the numbers for the above (or a more accurate model) not actually add up to more profits?
The claim that nothing works that is being sold is dubious at best. Sure we can’t show that anything is making people live much longer, but that is partly because by the time you know that you should have taken it, you are dead of old age.
NAD+ boosters probably work. By the way, Cromadex (CDXC) is cheap today $3.65 at the moment…I bought more. They make NR.
Metformin has been shown to extend life of diabetics longer than normal life. I think that it would be absurd if it did not also increase the life expectancy of people without diabetes. Fisetin probably both extends life and extends healthspan when you take 500mg for 5 days, every year or every 6 months or something like that. The telomere extenders probably work but just on the immune system…still the immune system is often the weakest link in the very elderly. Why they often die of flu and respiratory diseases and other things going on in the lungs.
And the antioxidant in olive oil, the antioxidant in green tea, and various ones in berries, grapes and chocolate probably give you another 5-10 years.
Absolutely. It would be fantastic to live a “bonus lifetime,” but it would interfere with Big Pharma execs actual cash bonuses if old age diseases were pushed back 100 years or so. I could imagine them going bankrupt in the interim and being much smaller than the new longevity businesses that take their place. They won’t take that lying down, and it may be the reason already that the FDA will not classify aging as a disease, even though it’s responsible for more medical fatalities than any other single factor.
You end up with greater earnings of you can sell to 100,000,000 people at $4,000, than selling to 100,000 people at $40,000.
You also make it very attractive for counterfeits that might be 100% identical. In fact, at $4,000 it would still be very attractive to manufacture without license…and smuggle it.
I think you want to aim at about $1,000 per person, per year, beyond cost. Then you can probably sell to a billion or more people.
Guessing “everybody over” is missing an age threshold.
I reckon a significant proportion of people will pay half or more. If there’s any credible prospect of something like longevity escape velocity.
A few decades of servitude seems like a small price if it eventually buys you multiple centuries.
<<This means that way more than half the planet does not get a morning “pick-me-up” at Starbucks, nor will they be doing much in the way of getting their lives extended. >>
Maybe offer the therapies to those countries in exchange for “extended” EULAs. It’s not like the world isn’t running on credit already.
Also the conjecture has to cover the other consequences, e.g. the cost of those poorer populations’ lower health and wealth, versus the cost of them being more autonomous because of the therapies.
<<And yet people currently spend money on things that they know will shorten their lives, like smoking and drinking etc.>>
Most likely because of the absence of the possibility of triple digit life expectancy. Add an extra choice to that drug lifestyle, where they can *also* choose to live 100 extra years. It’s hard to see how at least a large minority wouldn’t opt for 2x the lifespan.
<< Also, what if it costs far less to produce a pill/shot that prevents aging than it does to treat cancer or other diseases, which currently have treatments that can cost over $100k/year? Will Big Pharma say “Oh, this is good for humanity, so we’ll forgo most of our profits instead of charging per disease?” >>
But it’s more than that:
People living to (e.g.) 200 means that any profit you could have from a classic 80 year lifespan can (ceteris paribus) be had more easily from a 200 year customer arithmetically (same payment over longer time) and psychologically (you just bought someone a potential ticket to eternity); and then more so because as mentioned it’s not just 200 years lifespan, but a chance to live long enough to reach longevity escape velocity.
With direct consequences as the money bags they are to profit-seeking businesses.
It can’t be understated how much of an improvement it is for humans to wake up every day knowing that their death, repressed out of conscience, is effectively a whole bonus lifetime away.
IANAE, but:
Living >1.5 centuries has to provide some fairly profitable scenarios. If you’re 40, purchase a policy for 100 years thence, and 75 years later add an extra 25 or 50 years, and maybe choose a balloon payment scheme, doesn’t that still add up to some serious profits overall? Meaning even if a non negligible fraction dies or otherwise defaults.
Never mind the inhumaneness of effectively selling your lifespan to a business.
Curing aging is such a timeless thorn in the human condition that I reckon it will effectively never be abandoned. More likely it retreats to animal trials.
A higher animal living twice its natural age would motivate at least a few fringe labs to translate it to human longevity.
The implications are too important.
In the unlikely event that ‘Big Pharma’ was able to keep an anti-aging treatment secret. The top management at major pharmaceutical companies would start having suspiciously long lives.
Keep in mind that the man with all those anti-aging investments is not exactly an unbiased commentator; so there’s that.
What he is not saying is what happens if most people (who can afford it) can make it to the low end of that spectrum (115 years old). For a sixty year old today, that’s 55 years away, in the year 2074. Frankly, if they haven’t rolled lifespan limits back another 55 years by then it’ll be because the limits will have become completely unknown, probably with some serious rejuvenation thrown in.
Either that or the survivors in that era are too busy hoarding guns and canned goods.
As for cost? 4k a year is about $10 a day . . . about the price of caffeinated drink and a scone at Starbucks I’m guessing, since I don’t actually go there often. According to Gallup, in 2013 the median per-capita household income was $2920. This means that way more than half the planet does not get a morning “pick-me-up” at Starbucks, nor will they be doing much in the way of getting their lives extended.
Looked at in a very cold-blooded way. It will still be incentive for most people to have less kids and focus more on upward economic mobility. Meanwhile, the minority, primarily in the industrial countries (although with the household median in the US being 59k, it won’t be universal), will be the ones best able to afford living longer, and also the ones which society has invested the most resources into, in terms of education and training.
And yet people currently spend money on things that they know will shorten their lives, like smoking and drinking etc.
Also, what if it costs far less to produce a pill/shot that prevents aging than it does to treat cancer or other diseases, which currently have treatments that can cost over $100k/year? Will Big Pharma say “Oh, this is good for humanity, so we’ll forgo most of our profits instead of charging per disease?”
I don’t see it.
I’ve posted this elsewhere, but it seems relevant enough to repeat here:
IMO, SENS can consist of (in approximate order of importance):
(1) Senescent and cancer cell clearance.
(2) Replacement of lost cells with rejuvenated stem-cells.
(3) Breakage of protein cross-links.
(4) Clearance of other extracellular junk.
None of these require genetic manipulation, other than stem cell generation. (1), (3), and (4) can be performed by suitable medical agents (small molecule drugs, macromolecular drugs, enzymes, etc) and/or immunotherapy. (2) is stem cell therapy.
The remaining categories of damage can probably be left untreated, since they deal with intracellular problems, and damaged cells will eventually get replaced anyway by the above.
The one place where the intracellular treatments may be important, is the brain. But other than that, this would mean that whole-body gene therapy and exporting the mitochondrial genes into the nucleus are not likely to be critical for SENS’ success. Moreover, with the mitochondrial genes, even if exporting some of those genes proves necessary, it may not be critical to export all of them.
Regardless of the implications for medical success of SENS, I agree that failures in these early programs can negatively impact public views. But currently, most people aren’t even aware of SENS at all, so it may not matter that much.
Demand elasticity. Much larger market at $4K/yr than at $40K/yr. The price will likely settle on wherever the profit is maximized, which usually isn’t where the price is maximized.
I guess almost everybody over would gladly pay 10 to 25% of their disposable income to not age any more…
I don’t see it. Anti ageing is the biggest market of all. Big Pharma is drooling at the prospects. 100% of the population will pay every dollar they have to stay alive (at least after the rest die off).
Likewise. I get the articles just fine.
I am going to assume that the one currently fashionable plant will not prove to be the only source of combustion smoke in the world that turns out not to cause lung disease if you breath the smoke repeatedly.
…and yet, American longevity is actually declining now, with opiod abuse and suicide among the leading causes. First, people have to WANT to live longer.
We on the NBF list probably do (I’ll be 92 in 2050), but we’re exceptional people 🙂
Also, the Big Pharma industry is completely corrupt and will buy out and suppress true anti-aging cures, in favor of expensive drugs already on the market under patent protection, in order to reward shareholders and CEOs. They already spend all their profits and more buying back their own stock: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/26/opinion/drug-pricing-senate-hearing.html
I don’t know if any of you saw it but they just had a MAJOR BREAKTHROUGH in stem cells. They can now make stem cells so they can be used universally on people with NO auto immune system rejection/response.
That will speed up stem cell research substanaly and put the cost much much lower.
<<
Jim pointed out that the current global market for anti-aging products is about $140 billion but nothing actually works in terms of extending lifespan. He predicts that there will soon be effective life-extending products and treatments. This will cause the biggest stock market mania in history.
Juvenescence (aka antiaging) will become the biggest industry on the planet. >>
Antiaging is to big pharma, as BEO ISRU/ECLSS is to human industry.
If today pharma companies get away with fleecing humans with barely 100 years to live, what will they want for a means to live 5x, 10x, 100x that long? Especially when those same profiteers are not likely to miss out on said therapies.
4k$/yr to live >120 will not come without other strings attached.
The overall system is seriously broken and will need complete reframing as soon as something like longevity escape velocity merely begins to be feasible. Not only big pharma or healthcare as a whole, but all of society.
Feasible LEV is to humanity, as the intended USA originally was to western society.
Being that it was illegal, and many people that smoked pot also smoked cigarettes, nothing approaching the quality of the cigarette studies has been done.
People have been smoking tobacco for thousands of years also. Yet they had no evidence that it caused cancer until 1950, and that was weak. It took decades to make the case iron clad.
Motivated belief should not direct your reasoning.
The same chemical in auto exhaust, coal exhaust, charred beef, and cigarettes is created by burning Pot.
It is the temperature…unavoidable…unless you want to vape pot.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polycyclic_aromatic_hydrocarbon
And here is the evidence for brain health issues: https://www.amenclinics.com/blog/largest-brain-study-of-62454-scans-identifies-drivers-of-brain-aging/
Only the comments load slowly on my mobile.
Remains to be seen that it would work out that way, instead of the current status quo where big pharma keeps the racket going.
My hypotheses can be easily tested. Put naked mole rats in an incubator that is the same temperature as ordinary rats 7/24 (or whatever is required to keep their body temps at the same level as ordinary rats) and see if half die by the same time as a population of ordinary rats would be expected to.
I suspect it will be close.
You’d think that, in the three thousand years people have been smoking marijuana, someone would have been able to prove conclusively that it causes lung cancer.
I guess I just find it hard to believe the rest of what you’ve written based on that first sentence?
Funny. And here I thought it was because they figured it wouldn’t be as profitable for $4100 or $3900. But I guess if there was room to shoehorn in a feeble jibe at government regulation, you were gonna take the bait!
TWo big potential stumbling blocks to widespread public acceptance of an anti aging future would be failure in either of the two SENS Research Foundation projects necessary for robust mouse rejuvenation. The maximally modifiable mouse project using germline CRISPR to enable simple gene therapy in every or most cells in a mouse could fail. Also the MitoSENS project to express all 13 mitochondrial protein coding genes in the nucleus could fail.
Also the NBF site is treckle slow on mobile/iOS. Any tips on how to speed things up without buying new hardware or a laptop?
The usual reason is because someone else is charging $4200/yr. And they are only doing that to steal market share from someone charging $4500/yr. And they did so to get customers from the $5000/yr dealer etc etc.
As long as nobody convinces their favourite government minister to ban competition in the market to “protect the consumer and ensure high quality”.
I think cannabis is going to be a terrible investment, as soon as people realize it causes lung cancer and brain health issues. That could take time to play out, but I think that is what will happen. Vaping is going to be the best in that area, but will probably require some regulation to insure safety.
On the topic of aging as presented, I think he is way off in naked mole rats. I think the only important way they differ in regards to longevity is body temperature. They are effectively cold blooded. And it is that lower temperature that is responsible for their enhanced longevity vs ordinary rats.
Borrowing a few genes that have nothing to do with their temperature, will likely do squat.
Actually, changing our temperature is really difficult. We are the temperature we are, because the enzymes we use for metabolism require that range or they become ineffective…and we die. Transforming the enzymes can be done with genetic modification and mitochondrial transplant from say Bowhead whales. That would likely push human longevity to well over 200 years, and reduce caloric requirements. But there are myriad complications. We would be susceptible to a completely different set of pathogens, and pregnancies between people with the modification and those without could be problematic. It is also likely that the modifications can only be done (at least before we get nanites) at the embryonic stage.
Why on earth would anyone charge $4,000/yr when they can charge $40,000/yr?