EP #17 David Sinclair’s AMA: Age Reversal Breakthroughs, FDA Approval, and Living Forever

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Yeah, we are kicking the can down the road, but that's the point. Life is wonderful and the more times we kick the can down the road, the more life and wonder we have. And so yeah, that's what it is. I think that we're going to be able to kick the can down the road for an infinite number of years based on technology that I can foresee in our lifetime. Now, I could be wrong because I didn't foresee reprogramming as effective as it has become and age reversal. So I'd never say never. But given my viewpoint right now, I think that 150 is achievable in many of our lifespans, but not immortality.

And a massive transform to purpose is what you're telling the world. It's like, this is who I am. This is what I'm going to do. This is the dent I'm going to make in the universe.

Hey everybody. Welcome back to another episodes of Mindsets and Moonshots. My name is Nick, I'm Peter's producer and we have today here Peter and David. Hey guys, how are you?

Hey, Nick. Hi, Nick.

Cool. So we have fielded hundreds of phenomenal questions over the course of the past day from both David and Peter's Twitter. And I'm going to be the lucky one fielding through them and picking and bopping. So let's start off with some fun ones. David, I'm going to direct this one at you fans want to know why has David not had a podcast since February?

Well, I'm writing my second book. I'm editing a paper that's going to come out in a big journal that's going to be high impact and I'm working on making my podcast even better, better produced. And so trust me, it's coming. I know that there's a lot of demand for it and I thank everyone for their patience.

Cool. That's a fair answer. All right, let's dive into one that we had a bunch of and I'll read it verbatim. This one is from Tony and Megan. They asked, and I'm going to ask it to both Peter and David. Why is it taking so freaking long to have meaningful longevity therapies come to market? I feel like we're not making any meaningful headway and we're stuck taking supplements that give us five to 10 years if we're lucky. Where are the breakthroughs? When are they coming?

Well, some of them are already here, in my view. We've got some drugs already, metformin, rapamycin, that I strongly believe can slow down aspects of aging. So we already have some technology. It's not evenly distributed. It's not available to everybody because most doctors are unaware or unwilling to prescribe these medicines to people who are healthy. But the data looks good. Now, what about the new medicines that are in development? Well, one of them that I'm developing, actually a few of them at Metro Biotech, a spin out from my lab from 10 years ago, is pretty advanced. We're actually in phase two studies. We've had some positive data we're looking to publish now. We've written up the manuscript that is a study and a company that looks at nad boosters for pharmaceutical use for diseases of aging. That one, if all goes well, it's probably two, three years away. That's the good news. Also, reprogramming of the eye to cure blindness, which we did in mice a couple of years ago. We're in non human primates and that could go into humans as soon as next year. Now the question is why isn't it quicker? Well, it's because drugs are hard, super hard. What industry can spend 400, $500 million and still fail? Not that many. That's what it's like to develop drugs. And there's a lot of safety and efficacy that needs to go into these products, thanks to the oversight of the FDA here in the US and other countries under different auspices. And there's a high, high hurdle, rightly so. We don't want something that doesn't work or can harm people getting on the market. But to get over that hurdle takes time and a lot of money.

That's a fair answer. Peter, I'd love your take. And in your take, I want to include your opposing, somewhat opposing thoughts to David on how you feel about the FDA and bureaucracy.

Well, so listen, the reality is what we're talking about is a radical departure from traditional Medicine. Medicine has been, you know, you go to. We've all come to expect. We go to our doctor and we go for our once a year physical, if we're lucky, and that doctor will listen to your lungs, your heart. And it's expected. You know, old age is something we come to expect. And we don't fight against it. We expect it. We try and do a gentle landing, if you would. And the FDA is an organization built around safety. What I mean by that is they will value the lives lost if they approve a drug that kills people. Those lives are much more valuable than all the lives lost by not approving a drug. It's just the way it is today. And so until the science is rock solid, they're going to be hesitant to approve something. And it takes a huge amount of capital investments, billions of dollars, and sometimes decades of time. The reality is even the world of stem cells, Stem cells, We know that we exhaust our stem cell population, that when we're young, we have 100x, 1000x number of stem cells in different pockets of the body, from, from fat to muscle to neural stem cells. And they reduce. And we can supplement our stem cells. But today you have to go outside the United States to do that because the science isn't there to have proven its efficacy and its safety yet. And we're going to get there. But until it's rock solid, you're going to a different jurisdiction to get those treatments. It takes time to be available. What we saw, I remember I was in Richard Mulligan's lab, David, back in the 80s doing early gene therapy work. And gene therapy was imagined back then to be an extraordinary technology, and it was. But when it was first applied to the first patients, it caused the death of a number of children and it stopped the entire field for decades. So people are cautious about taking shortcuts.

David, do you have any pushback there? I mean, your interfacing with the FDA over the years is probably more than most people will ever experience in a lifetime. Given your career, are you friends? And I have to find the way to word this, so excuse the way I'm wording it. Are you friends of the FDA in the sense that you're happy with how they work? Does it frustrate you at times that they move slow? Are you in alignment with Peter that there is a increase or there should be an increase in speed of how they approve things coming up, or what's your take?

Well, the FDA was surprisingly receptive to the idea that aging can be treated with a medicine and they are still of the opinion that if we can show that aging is slowable with a treatment, that they would strongly consider approving that medicine for the treatment of aging. I didn't realize that that was true. But what the individuals at the fda, the human beings in this bureaucracy as it is, have to deal with a big organization with lots of rules and procedures. And those rules dictate how quickly we can move. Their mandate is to protect the public so that there's not as much incentive to. To get a drug on the market as there is to protect them. And that does lead to this being rather a slow process, that's for sure. Now, what I would love is if there was increased public opinion, pressure from all places, from politicians, from grassroots, to increase the dialogue and help the FDA find a way to make it easier for us to get a drug on the market that's based on aging research. Right now, we cannot make a drug for aging because aging isn't a medical condition. If it were, we'd have a lot more investment and a lot more success.

You know, David, one thing I hope for in the future is a right to try strategy. Right? In other words, I almost call it an accredited patient program where if as a patient, as a subject, I get permission from my physician, my husband, my wife, my kids or whatever, that I want to try a treatment that isn't FDA approved. But, you know, I've got this disease called aging, and I want to try this even if it's, you know, to be a subject. I think, reinventing how we do this now, we do have investigation, new drugs, and we do have, you know, experimental protocols and so forth. But how do we make it more agile in that regard?

Peter, I love that idea that you wouldn't be able to just go online and order up an experimental drug. Right. That's too free, because there could be accidents and there's maybe abuse of that system for monetary reasons. That said, if there were a certification, whether it's an MD or something an MD can get, that would allow the use of experimental drugs. Right? Now, that is possible, but it's not widely used. It's generally frowned upon if it was more widely available. If you have a terminal disease or something that doesn't have any current cure, why not try something that is at least already shown in phase one to be safe?

Exactly. In fact, David Fagenbaum, I don't know if you know David, he's. He cured his or didn't cure. He's treating his Kasselman's disease using rapamycin the numbers are interesting. There are 3,000 FDA approved drugs and there are 12,000 diseases. His work right now is saying, can we fund looking at which of those 3,000 drugs might have a dual use for the 9,000 diseases that don't have a treatment? They're already on the market, they're already in production, they're already shown to be safe in humans. And so rather than developing a brand new treatment, so his efforts called EveryCure, and he just announced it at the Clinton Global Initiative a couple of weeks back.

David and Peter, what is your personal preference to. When you feel comfortable enough to try something? David, you probably have a lot of exposure to this because you're constantly testing things in the lab. When do you say, okay, you know what? I'm good enough to put myself on the line here. And Peter, likewise. I'd like to know for you.

I consider myself a chief guinea pig for a lot of what's out there. Tony Robbins, who's a dear mutual friend of both of ours. And I think about that all the time. It's like, huh, interesting. So listen, if it's. I'm probably not likely to be the first human ever to take something, but I will be an early user of it. Let's leave it at that.

Yeah, I'm the same. I'm an experimenter, I'm a scientist. I also feel that if I'm going to be talking about something, I need to have experienced it myself. I would really never talk about something unless I tried something. And so I never recommend anything. I'm not even an MD. I'm a PhD. But I will talk about my own experience in a way that will allow others to think about it themselves.

I do find same. Yeah, I think it's important. I think it's important as we are speaking about this field and what's becoming available to explain either that it's something I do do or the reason I haven't.

Right. And actually, a New York Times article was written about my lab and me, and they said, I think it was posed to the effect of. Well, David, you're conflicted because you're studying this molecule in the lab and you're taking it. Aren't you going to be biased and if there's something bad, you'll hide it. And I'm. I'm thinking to myself, I want to be the first person in the world to know that there's something wrong with this molecule because my father's taking it, I'm taking it, and I will tell the whole world to stop Taking it. If I see something and I want to be that person defined it asap. So it's actually. It's flipped. Is that I'm looking for problems with these treatments because if I'm taking them or I tried them, I need to know if there's a problem. And so, you know, you can trust me that you'll hear from me first if there is something that's negative.

Yeah. I'm Ahmed Formin. I've just started rapamycin, 5 milligrams, for my own body weight. And I did a lot of research and talked to a lot of physicians about it and felt that the, you know, it's always a risk reward situation. And I just felt like at this point, the reward side was higher than the risk.

Oh, for sure. And the older you get, the more so. But we tend to underestimate the risk of aging. We don't think about it as much as we should. Aging is really, really risky. In fact, we.

It's.

No, it's known to cause death. Yes.

It runs in my family.

David, do you mind if I cut in? I build off of that for a moment. So one of the questions that came in was, let me find it here. It was, are we effectively. I'm gonna shorten what they said, but are we effectively just kicking the can of dying here? And are we just Prolonging it, say, 120, 500 years, whatever the case may be? Or is the proposition that we're going to live forever? And what's your take? And, Peter, what's your take?

All right. Yeah, we are kicking the can down the road, but that's the point. Life is wonderful. And the more times we kick the can down the road, the more life and wonder we have. And so, yeah, that's what it is. I don't think that we're going to be able to kick the can down the road for an infinite number of years based on technology that I can foresee in our lifetime. Now, I could be wrong, because I didn't foresee reprogramming as effective as it has become and age reversal. So I'd never say never. But given my viewpoint right now, I think that 150 is achievable in many of our lifespans, but not immortality. Peter?

Yeah, so most definitely kicking the can down the road. The analogy is, I was on a vacation with my family, and we're having so much a fun time. It's like, let's stay an extra week if you're enjoying life, adding decades to it. But let's not forget we're in the steepest part of the exponential curve in terms of what's coming in. AI and robotics and quantum computation, that's just on the edge of our capabilities. I may not want this mortal body five, you know, not five, 50 years from now. I may want a upgraded body, but the idea of being able to see my grandchildren, my great grandchildren, to go to the moon, go to Mars, to see what happens next is extraordinary. I don't. You know, Ray Kurzweil talks about the singularity, right? The point at which the speed of technological changes is so rapid that we're unable to predict what's next. That number is circa the early 2000 and 40s, let's not forget that's 20 years from now. I mean, it's not like 100 years, it's 20 years from now. Part of what we're talking about is intercepting the technologies that will give us longevity, escape velocity, but beyond that, the technologies that will allow us to connect our minds to the cloud. Maybe it's uploading ourselves. I'm not a huge fan of freezing myself. Are you, David? I definitely want to get immortality, or at least extreme longevity.

Is that a real bunker? Like an Austin Powers freezing yourself thing?

Yeah, sure, there's a lot of people. Yeah, Cryonics is the technology. It's the notion that if I freeze myself and I don't rupture the cells, and there are ways to do that, that hopefully technology, super advanced technology, you know, 100 or a thousand years from now will be able to bring me back and restate my neural structures and my memories and so forth. But that's. That's a subject for another conversation.

Hold on. I have a question. David, have you ever visited. Or, Peter, have you guys ever. This is a very interesting question. Visited a facility where people are frozen? I mean, is this a. I thought this was all hearsay.

I have not either, have I, but there are a number of them. And people. I mean, the first person. I just saw an article about this. The first person frozen was about 50 years ago. And there are companies today that you'll wear a bracelet. And at the moment of death, when your body, when your brain function ceases, they will come in and they'll pull out your blood, replace it with, effectively, an antifreeze and freeze you. And you can have the choice of freezing your entire body or coughing off your head and just freezing your head because it takes less energy to do that.

It may actually work. I didn't think it would, but actually, given that we can now reset the age of cells. I can imagine that you can quickly unfreeze a person and get their cells to begin the rejuvenation process that we seem to be able to control now. And yeah, so I think it. I wouldn't do it myself, at least currently, but I think that it's not as crazy as it once seemed. But I would rather stay alive by being alive. And I think the technologies to do that are increasingly here.

It's a fun subject to think about, but I'd rather put my energy and focus into extending the healthy human lifespan.

You know, Peter and I are very much into democratizing technologies and cryonics is not going to be for everybody. It's a very, very small few people, number of people that can afford this. So that's again, not a good reason to focus our energies on those kind of technologies.

I have a lot of deep appreciation for that answer. I have a great one I want to end it with. But Peter, this one was directed at you. Somebody wanted an update on. I didn't even know this was public yet. The Age Reversal Prize. And I'm not sure if David, you know about the Age Reversal X Prize, but obviously. And let me just cue this up for everybody listening. David's efforts are substantially documented, realized and very public right now. He's, in my opinion, the leading world expert on anti aging at the moment. And Peter, I think that you're now going to actively join this fight through one of your efforts. Do you want to share how?

Yeah, sure. And David is very much involved. He and George Church are my co conspirators, if I would, our scientific co chairs of a $101 million age reversal X Prize. And the question we've asked, I mean, we've been talking about, the idea is could we do. And it's not launched yet. To be very clear, we're majority funded. David and I have been having a conversation every few days on the rule sets and getting them really honed in. I hope to launch in the early part of 2023. But we talked early on about a longevity prize. But the problem with the longevity prize, like can you add 30 healthy years in a person's life, which we will, is you have to wait 30 years to see if you have a winner. But can you in fact reverse aging in someone? In this case, the rules we're thinking about is can you give a therapeutic that lasts for less than a year, but reverses biological age by 20 years or more? David, do you want to add your thoughts there?

Yeah, the goal is to inspire companies and labs, individuals to work on methods to safely reverse aging in multiple tissues and organs to rejuvenate the body and make it function better. And this kind of prize money will be a huge incentive. I think it's going to have a big impact on the field and drive innovation in the same way other xprizes have done so. And so I'm super happy to be involved.

We're looking at, we're trying to decide what the focus will be. David and I are honing in on cognition, on muscle, on skin, on immune system. These are the things that as you age, you want to look good, you want to move well, you want to think clearly, you want to have people, to have a good immunity in a world of COVID and influenza. But, you know, this is about getting the smartest people on the planet to focus on one of the biggest problems, one of the biggest grand challenges on the planet, which is extending the healthy health span. And David, on a previous episode, you mentioned the economic impact for adding one healthy year on a person's life. What was that number again? It was staggering.

Well, for the US alone, it's $86 trillion in the long run of doing that.

So, David, where should people go to find you?

Well, I'm active on social media, so find updated news there. My podcast is still available and I'm working on season two and that's on all podcast outlets. My book, I think a lot of people got inspired by, and I was inspired by yours too, Peter. My book is called Lifespan why We Age and why we don't have To. And I didn't get to talk a lot about what I do on my in my daily life, which supplements and that kind of thing. But that is outlined in large part on page 304 of Lifespan. So check that out. That's the cheat sheet. But please do read the science as well. And all of the future that's coming. So that's where to find me. That is a good spot. Other than that, I'm working on it on a TV show that I'll let you know how that goes. I do want to be able to show people the insides of our bodies and how we work and how to improve our bodies in our daily lives in a way that no show has ever done before. So stay tuned for that too.

Nick, do you have a last question for us?

I do, and I'm going to direct it at David and then Peter, we'll have you recorded on this too. David, the question that came in, I thought it was novel. Is are you happy? If so, why? And was there ever a point in your life in which you weren't? And what did you do? Because I like this because a lot of your research is pending on this fulcrum of whether or not people can resolve that.

Okay.

Am I always happy? No. Most days I'm happy because I'm doing something that I dreamed of doing and I'm fulfilled. But I have down days. I have days where I get attacked by large farmer, by colleagues. I've learned to have a thicker skin so I don't get full blown depression. But it's still, it's still upsetting. But I've learned to trust in myself and be resilient and get up. I find that having teenage kids is the most challenging thing in life and I have three of those and I'm still trying to be a great dad. So I'm a struggling vegan and a struggling teenage dad. So that that's who I am outside of research.

David, thanks for being on the show. Let us know what you think. Rate, review and give us a follow. Find David across all socials. He's very active and I think we're just really blessed to have had him. Peter, do you want to share any closing notes?

David, it's truly a pleasure to call you a friend, co collaborator, co conspirator on this journey. We're ahead of. And have a beautiful day, pal.

Yeah, you too. It's great to have you as a co pilot on this final frontier of biology. Appreciate you.

Yeah, appreciate you too. Take care, pal.