The Future of Longevity

Foreign. Tell you about what I've been doing the last couple weeks was traveling around the country and finding out what scientists are doing on the forefront to try to extend health span or the period of life that you're healthy. And we can think about longevity or anti aging. Those are words that nobody knows what it means exactly. But really it's about how do you have a longer life where you're on your own, loving your family, enjoying life. And there's obviously the building blocks that I'm not going to talk about, like eating well and taking care of yourself. And I was in San Diego, San Francisco and Arizona. I was at the Buck Institute in San Diego, where it's really like an area where they're doing a lot of experimentation, have a big endowment to this study what impacts healthy aging. Scientists from all over the world, but particularly in this case on the west coast, presented what their companies were working on. A lot of these companies are founded by tech billionaires that give huge endowment, some cases up to $3 billion. This is studying aging and what can be done to extend people's healthy lifespan, impact humanity. If we look at adding say one healthy year to everybody in the world's life, economic impact of that is massive because we could be living longer on our own, staying out of nursing homes, having less impact on the healthcare system, even working longer. So a lot of people think about aging as, you know, I don't want to get old because I don't want to be all decrepit. But this is the idea is how do you get it when you're older chronologically, internally, you're actually younger. We can look at some things that are making your organs better from, you know, reversing some arthritis, reversing vascular disease, reversing obesity, and it's concomitant, you know, metabolic syndrome. When people age and their hormones decline, reversing that with certain medications. Reversing sleep apnea was something we're really passionate about. We have a treatment for that. These are all impactful for extending life. For example, if somebody has sleep apnea and they have severe sleep apnea, reversing that adds about 6.4 years of lifespan. Somebody has knee arthritis and they're obese, reversing both of those reduces their actually adds 3.6 years over their healthy lifespan. Then we can look at preventative strategies such as looking for cancer before it occurs with advanced imaging, such as mri. Looking for cardiovascular disease before it occurs with advanced imaging, such as a carotid intermediate thickness test, CIMT of the outside of the arteries or a special CAT scan called Clery of the heart. Even looking at the age of the brain within what's called neuro quantitative imaging of the brain, which is an mri, you an idea of where your brain's at. I can pick up Alzheimer's 20 years in advance. These meetings I went to are more about what's in the forefront from genetic engineering, programming cells. And it's, it is coming, this, this stuff is coming in the future. It's not available now. The places I went to a lot more than the very early stage where they're trying to just figure some things out. They got big grants either from the government or from these tech billionaires and there's, right now there's a big X prize. I was with the founder of the X Prize, Peter Gimandes in California and they actually have $110 million prize for the group that comes up with the therapy that works, that has the most additional life years, healthy life years to a human. They have about 400 entrants right now. These are companies from all over the world. I think 23 countries are involved and they're looking at things that either alter our genetic expression of aging genes or alter the genetic expression of genes that slow down aging or reverse aging. So so far our scientists have been able to take a cell from the skin and program it all the way back to an embryonic cell. So that's actually happened and there was actually an FDA approved study for cardiovascular surgery in babies, newborn babies that have a congenital heart defect where they actually repair the heart with these embryonic program cells. There's vectors that can carry gene sequences into somebody's genes and alter expression of certain genes. A good example would be sickle cell anemia. Recently an FDA approval for a drug that is actually a gene editing drug to edit people who have sickle cell anemia that gives them a basically a fetal hemoglobin so they can survive a longer period of time. There was a genetic engineered treatment approved in November 2019 for a certain rare form of leukemia. These children get it at a young age and they die from it. This is a one time medication that can reverse that condition. A lot of work on the CRISPR CRSPR technology, which is a technology allows us to take and insert a gene into abnormal gene code. There's a place in Roton, South America where they take plasmids that are gene edited to make thylistatin which inhibits another thing in your body called myostatin, interacts with actin as well. These cause People to build muscle, lose weight and also has other favorable effects on their bodies. This is actually happening outside of the United States, not in the United States just yet. And I think we'll see in the next three to five years of some preliminary drugs being offered to that have, have, do have some benefit for long longevity. Rapamycin is being studied for that right now. That's kind of a hot one. It has not been shown to extend life in humans, but that trial is ongoing. It has been shown to extend life in every other animal it's been tested on. There's drugs called senolytic drugs, which are drugs that kill off old cells in your body and old cells in your body when they're senescent, that means they're no longer multiplying. They inhibit other, other cells, such as your gum cells, from growing and replacing them. Your cells are supposed to turn over and then die. In some cases it becomes senescent. They just kind of lay there. Acetolytic drugs clear those out so young, healthy cells can start growing again. That's promising. There's a few genetic pathways that do stimulate or inhibit aging. One's called MTORs, and when MTOR gene and proteins turn on, it accelerates growth. It also accelerates aging. And that's something we can actually inhibit it with a certain drug. There's a pathway called ampk, and this pathway seems to create youthfulness when it's stimulated. There's drugs that seem to turn that switch on. There's another pathway called sirtuin, and this seems to cause longevity when it's stimulated. There's currently an investigational new drug study being done looking at turning sirtuin n and how it affects physical performance, performance, aging, frailty. And that'll probably be a drug in three to five years available, not ready yet. And I'm just kind of keeping pace on keeping pace with what's going is what typically happens is between drug discovery and approval and widespread adoption, anywhere from 10 to 18 years is how long it takes. Now, some have been faster than that because they were so incredibly potent. And some paradigms just take a long, long time to change. Even though we have some weight loss drugs that have been amazing and a lot of doctors are skittish about it because they haven't really read the studies. They're not that familiar with them. So they're not maybe offering to the patients when they can really be beneficial. So as I'll keep you posted of what I'm seeing, this last meeting I was at, there was not a whole Lot of actionable items, more about stuff that's happening in either three to five years or 10 to 20 years. There's one thing I'm kind of excited about. I bought this suit called a bot stim suit BOD stem and it has been shown to stimulate the production of Clotho K L M T H O which is a very strong anti aging compound. So I'm going to do a Clotho test, blood test, hard to get those and do six weeks of this Clotho suit and retest it. So that's kind of exciting. I am currently exercising with a catalyst suit. This goes from elbows to knees and basically Lycra for lack of a better term. It stimulates all muscles, muscle groups and we know that muscle muscle mass and VO2 max, which ability to create exercise predicts longevity. And I've been using the catalyst suit for the last two months and I've gained over 10 pounds of lean mass. Lean mass would be fat free mass. So it's made me more strong, muscular. It's hard, it's something that it's definitely exercise, it's hard to do but these things work. And we know that as an anti aging strategy sleep is very important and there's a lot of research on sleep now most of them search sleep has been drugs which I think are really not where our head's at. But we have devices that help people sleep better. They're making these things that transmit those signals to the brain, put your brain at rest when you go to sleep. There's one called Somni S O M N E E Matt Walker, he's a famous sleep study doctor, he's heading that group. I use an eight sleep bed which is this device on my bed that cools a mattress down. It gives me more deep sleep. My deep sleep went up substantially when I started using the eight sleep bed, up about 20, 30%. We know that deep sleep is associated with longevity and of course we have the night lays treatment for reversing sleep apnea which gives people more deep sleep. So over time I'm going to keep researching what's going on. I'm out with several groups, meeting with several scientists to see what's on the forefront and as these become available we'll update you. Right now, nothing really earth shattering from these last two weeks worth of meetings. I went to more about things that are coming out in the remote future. But if you don't die of something that is preventable in the next 10 years, your chance of having a longer lifespan of health goes up. Exponentially. So keep on living. Thank you very much.