🍯 Exclusive: Aubrey de Grey interview

Welcome, humans. This is Ambrosia Path, the 5-min newsletter that covers all the latest developments in longevity 🧬

Here’s what we got for you today:

• Interview with Aubrey de Grey

• Longevity Headlines

Aubrey de Grey is on the Ambrosia Path

Ladies and gentleman. Today we have another exciting guest in the house…

Aubrey de Grey!

For those who don’t know, Aubrey is…

• A world-renowned expert in aging research. He developed the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) - a detailed plan for reversing aging in the human body to prevent diseases and death related to getting older

• President and Chief Science Officer of the Longevity Escape Velocity Foundation

• The author of The Mitochondrial Free Radical Theory of Aging and co-author of Ending Aging

• Educational background includes a BA in Computer Science and Ph.D. in Biology from the University of Cambridge

• Known for his view that medical technology may enable human beings alive today not to die from age-related causes

We have 11 BIG questions for Aubrey. Ready? Let’s go.

Aubrey: I’m a biomedical gerontologist, which means I do research aimed at developing medicines that will keep people free of age-related chronic conditions for longer than current medicines can. I don’t actually focus on lifespan - that’s just a side-effect of extending health. I was inspired to work on this when I discovered, to my horror, that hardly anyone else was.

Aubrey: LEVF is the third biomedical research charity that I’ve led. At LEVF we are mostly focused on combining rejuvenation therapies that individually give modest postponement of aging in mice, even when initiated in middle age. It’s going extremely well so far - I post interim updates every month or so on social media.

Aubrey: LEV is defined as the minimum rate at which medicines need to be improved in order that people receiving the latest medicines can avoid age-related chronic conditions indefinitely. The reason why that rate is finite is that these medicines will be ones that reduce biological age, rather than just slowing the rate at which biological age rises - in other words, each incremental advance will buy time to develop the next one.

LEV becomes initially achievable when we have medicines that postpone aging by around 20 years, and I currently think we have a 50% chance of reaching that point within about 12-15 years from now.

Aubrey: Yes and no. Because aging is not one process but a bunch of only loosely communicating processes, we will address some parts of it sooner than others. So at this point, treatments for some of the easier parts are already in clinical trials and will very probably hit the streets in only a couple of years.

But it will probably take a decade longer for enough of the parts of aging to be addressed that we see bona fide postponement of all chronic conditions of old age, which is what most people mean by treatments for aging.

Aubrey: Of course! The field is exploding right now. I’ll just pick one: THIO, which is a new anti-cancer drug that kills cells which are making large amounts of telomerase, which means 90% of all human cancers and basically no non-cancer cells. It’s in phase 2 clinical trial being run by MAIA Biotech.

Aubrey: No. That’s not because I think they have no value, though - it’s because I’m privileged to have a biological age much younger than my chronological age, so the wisest thing for me to do is be conservative and stick to what my body knows.

Aubrey: There are many, many ways, depending on circumstance and other skills. One thing I recommend these days is to apply to the Longevity Biotech Fellowship, run by two great young leaders in the field, and to go to one of the retreats they run, which are the best possible way to meet others, learn more about the field and the community, and find your best way to contribute.

Aubrey: Only the probabilistic one about LEV that I already mentioned.

Aubrey: Oh, it already is - in drug discovery specifically for longevity, but also in biomedical research generally (things like AlphaFold).

Aubrey: Well, there’s our annual conference! It’s happening in Dublin, Ireland, on June 13-16, and as always it will feature the absolute top scientists in the field, as well as a great many others in the community - we emphasise the recreational aspect very heavily. It’s a fantastic place to learn about the field and become part of the movement.

Aubrey: Our website levf.org is the best place. I’m also fairly active on Twitter.

Longevity Headlines

• Bryan Johnson shared his total bone mineral density, which is in the 99.87th percentile for 30 year olds even though he’s 46 🦴

  • What he does for bone mineral density: blueprint diet, supplements: vit D, CaAKG, Genistein, K1, K2 MK4, K2 MK7

  • He was recently billed as “The Kardashian Of Longevity” but experts love him with an approval rating of 70% among PhD aging researchers

  • Bryan also invested in a robotics company, Figure, and said he was going to upload myself into many of them so he can begin living multiple lifetimes at the same time

• Neuroscience company, Matter, raised $26m to find a “biomarker for happiness” 😊

• David Sinclair’s groundbreaking LeapYears supplement shown to reverse aging in dogs 🐶

That’s it for longevity news today folks! Have a fantastic day!

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Disclaimer: This information does not constitute health advice or a recommendation and should not be considered as such