To longevity escape velocity

Longevity escape velocity is the idea that our life expectancy (and healthspan) increases faster than the passing of time.

Will this happen soon? The more time I have spent in the aging science field the more I am optimistic about our chances for this happening in the next few decades.

There are many tailwinds, and of course headwinds. There are three horizons of anti-aging therapies: horizon 1 are lifestyle improvements already available, horizon 2 are new repair therapies coming soon, and horizon 3 are cellular rejuvenation technologies in development.

AI/ML + big biological data means progress is now exponential. Already, AI/ML is becoming an equal partner in biological research. Soon, it will be the driver.

We are spending more than ever on R&D (2x growth in the U.S. in constant dollars from 2010 to 2021). We are rapidly growing our spend on general venture capital and biotech venture capital. Much of this investment will ultimately go towards helping people live longer and healthier. Our aging population will demand this.

What can we do to bring this future?

I believe it's mostly inevitable, but that we should work to speed it up. To make it happen faster, we need our first anti-aging drug wins. We need FDA approvals for safe, effective drugs that target diseases of aging. Even better, we need rejuvenation therapies (that's what we're working on at Junevity). We need people to see and feel the benefit in their grandparents, parents, and themselves. We need to look in the mirror and see it happening. We need to be inspired. This will drive even more money and talent to create even better rejuvenation therapies.

Stay healthy so you live long enough to participate in this fantastic future. Support R&D funding and startup/pharma development. Invest your time, money, and talent in horizons 1, 2, or 3.

Goals for 2033

In 2033, I’ll turn 50. How do I want to feel? Look? What do I want to be able to do?

By 50, much of the damage that portends age-related disease has already happened for most people, even if it's not quite visible. How can I avoid that damage?

Goals for 2033

  1. Look, feel, move, and do activities like I’m closer to 40. In other words, I have dramatically slowed my rate of aging.
  2. I know and monitor in near real-time my risk for general aging and each major disease. I know how to balance lifestyle and pharmaceuticals to keep this risk low, with close to real-time updates. As a result of this monitoring and intervention, my risk is very low.
  3. I take the first of various FDA-approved therapies to slow and reverse aging for various organs/systems. Eventually there will likely be therapies for muscle, bone, brain, heart, blood, liver, skin, etc.
  4. Most people around the world can will be able to do this within another 5-10 years because these technologies are safe, approved by regulatory agencies, accessible, and affordable. 

What do we need to make this a reality?

  1. Data-driven real-time monitoring of aging and disease risk
  2. Data-driven, personalized real-time interventions to reduce this risk
  3. FDA approved therapies for cellular rejuvenation across various tissues
  4. Improved fundamental understanding of aging biology

What is the current situation?

  • Fundamental understanding of aging biology is rapidly improving. There are probably 100,000s of researchers working on this around the world from various angles. Trends and demographics suggest this will be millions of researchers soon.
  • Rapid AI progress + data growth are making data-driven monitoring and intervention in aging much more feasible. Aging science can ride these two exponential curves.
  • It is still unclear how much lifestyle changes + known drugs/therapies can slow aging. That said, if I had to guess, known technologies could make average lifespan more like 100-110 if they were rigorously applied with personalized measurement and interventions. But, they will not “rejuvenate” our bodies, or at least not that much.
  • FDA approval of rejuvenating therapies is a big question mark. Early clinical trials are started and on their way. The first approvals will really speed this up. We need fast progress here!
  • New drugs are typically very expensive. For anti-aging drugs, there will be a strong incentive for governments to subsidize these drugs to reduce the cost burden of age-related disease. Hopefully this will help adoption and affordability.

First research paper: unsupervised machine learning for rapidly creating brain maps

I posted my first research paper with Abbasi Lab and a great team of collaborators: "Unsupervised pattern discovery in spatial gene expression atlas reveals mouse brain regions beyond established ontology."

Here's the link: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.03.10.531984v1.full.pdf)

In this manuscript, we show that unsupervised machine learning (ML) can rapidly create maps of the brain based purely on 3D gene expression data. We demonstrate this in the adult mouse brain that goes beyond established ontology. Existing maps are typically hand-drawn, and can take years of person-hours to complete. By contrast, this method (osNMF) can run in a few hours on a MacBook Pro and is potentially less biased. It is applicable to any tissue or organism. Tissue maps are important. They help us understand function, development, disease, and aging.

This new method is just one of the countless examples of the powerful combination of ML + new data generation methods. Together, they are increasing the pace of biological discovery. Ours was a relatively basic ML approach––and it leads to orders of magnitude improvement in generating tissue maps. This improvements are happening all over the place.