When it comes to the idea of massively improving healthcare outcomes there seem to be two strategies. One is to focus on antiaging. The other is to focus on increasing our research capability by improving the tools we have available.
When Zuckerberg went out and interviewed heatlh care experts it seems they convinced him that tool building is more promising then object level research.
How strongly do you believe object level research on antiaging to be better then tool building? What’s your argument for it?
Developing platform technologies is important in pharma and biotech, and that’s happening. But the limiting factor seems to be testing anti-aging drugs, and developing better biomarkers. There is no shortage of potential anti-aging therapies—there are hundreds waiting to be tested. The limiting factors are funding and researchers. We need more laboratories working on testing new therapies for anti-aging.
I’m just wondering about the problems with funding and researchers. One would think that plenty of money is actual around but it’s more about both awareness and some belief that a tangible return to the investors would be likely. That seems like it might be more a problem of asymmetric information as it were—or perhaps a bit of “language” between the groups. What’s your sense there?
For research is there any structure that might work a bit like various gig-econcomy sites. Basically forums that work as an infrastructure to allow a wide audience of those capable of research/analysis to form quick teams to tackle a problem. Or perhaps just do some of the initial leg work to see if some line of thinking is actually going somewhere? I have the suspicion that perhaps a lot of the effort here might be less about lab work and more about digging though the results (but that may well be completely wrong).
If both the above are kind of right and some type of open infrastructure that brings both together might be useful—though also suspect there must be a bunch of incubator type structures already in place.
I’m just wondering about the problems with funding and researchers. One would think that plenty of money is actual around but it’s more about both awareness and some belief that a tangible return to the investors would be likely. That seems like it might be more a problem of asymmetric information as it were—or perhaps a bit of “language” between the groups. What’s your sense there?
You’re 100% spot on here. ‘Curing aging’ and ‘longevity’ aren’t common ideas in biomedical research, but ‘curing cancer’, ‘curing Alzheimer’s’ and ‘curing heart disease’ are. This is unfortunate given aging is driving all of these conditions.
It can sometimes be frustrating being in the longevity field, because researchers in other fields are incentivised to remain in their silos in which the core premises (e.g. curing cancer is good and effective) are treated as dogma, rather than see the bigger picture and work on solving the problem in more efficient ways.
Once you suggest that slowing aging might be a more effective approach to extending healthy human lifespan, many researchers find it difficult to engage in the conversation. This is especially the case since education into the biology of aging is extremely poor in most biomedical and medical programs. Even in my case, I went through 5 years of tertiary education without learning the information in the OP. This information I gathered through speaking to experts in the field, reading books such as Lifespan, reading blogs like Lifespan.io and FightAging.org, reading thousands of papers on this topic and attending aging conferences. Still to this day, there are unfortunately very few channels educating people on the hallmarks of aging and the connection between these and the diseases of aging.
Most cancer researchers I spoke to know very little about the hallmarks of aging, for example, and the connection between the hallmarks and disease. This is because their work focuses on solving the problem of cancer once it arises, rather than solving it in advance by curing aging. All of their incentives (grant funding, publication opportunities) are towards trying to cure cancer, rather than trying to extend healthy human lifespan (and delay the onset of cancer, potentially for hundreds of years) by slowing or reversing aging. This is unfortunate since, as I outlined in my post, aging is by far the biggest driver of cancer (and all other age-related diseases) and rates of cancer in biologically young people are very low.
For the above reasons reason, most biomedical researchers don’t speak the language of the ‘hallmarks of aging’, and aren’t familiar with terms like ‘senolytics’, for example.
For research is there any structure that might work a bit like various gig-econcomy sites. Basically forums that work as an infrastructure to allow a wide audience of those capable of research/analysis to form quick teams to tackle a problem. Or perhaps just do some of the initial leg work to see if some line of thinking is actually going somewhere? I have the suspicion that perhaps a lot of the effort here might be less about lab work and more about digging though the results (but that may well be completely wrong).
This is a great idea, and similar to what groups such as Deep Science Ventures are doing. They are essentially headhunting top biomedical researchers and funding them to work on important problems such as aging. There definitely needs to be more innovation like this to provide ways of funding anti-aging research so the field isn’t entirely dependent upon the small pennies it receives from government research councils.
Charities such as SENS research foundation fulfil a similar role too, though as a charity rather than a for-profit. They collaborate with research groups and fund what they deem the most high-impact research, and get the best research teams they can get to do it.
rates of cancer in biologically young people are very low.
And in the OP:
Anti-aging is more feasible for extending healthy lifespan rather than solving the individual diseases of aging
Sometimes, focusing on one disease is necessary, like in the case of cancer. To reach LEV, the risk of dying from cancer would need to be zero. The only way to get there in any reasonable amount of time is to developed a way (like WILT) of dealing specifically with cancer.
Developing platform technologies is important in pharma and biotech, and that’s happening.
While it’s happening it’s worth pointing out that the article you linked says “Given that pharma companies depend on innovation, science, and research and development, it may seem counterintuitive that they lag behind the digital curve. In McKinsey’s ongoing survey to measure companies’ “Digital Quotient,” the pharmaceutical industry ranks in the bottom third of industries measured.”
It doesn’t happen as fast as it would be desirable.
But the limiting factor seems to be testing anti-aging drugs, and developing better biomarkers.
It’s my impression that SENS focuses on doing basic research and not testing anti-aging drug candidates.
If that’s how you see the current bottleneck why recommend SENS and Lifespan.io over Lifespan Research Institute which actually focuses on testing anti-aging drugs?
It could be that the problem of biomarkers is about doing a lot of measurement with our existing tools and looking for correlations. It could also be that we need tools that measure certain biometrics more accurately and cheaper then we currently can to progress. The position that we already have all the necessary measurement tools seems to me optimistic. If you hold it, why do you hold it?
I encourage you to read the full article, not just the first paragraph. Specifically:
A new breed of biotechnology firms, unencumbered by the accumulated practices and systems of large traditional ones, are pioneering impressive new digital capabilities. In the process, they are nudging the industry as a whole in this direction. This could significantly boost R&D productivity, benefiting both pharmaceutical companies and the patients they serve.
In recent years, a number of biotechnology companies have applied genetic-information-driven technologies to form “biomolecular platforms” (exhibit). These platforms intervene at different points in the information chain (often referred to as “the central dogma of biology”) to modify biomolecular processes at the source of various diseases. In that respect, they have a software-like nature, that allows for the ready design of multiple new therapies by a single platform, that provides the instructions to modify the hardware of molecular biology, that in turn addresses disease.
It’s my impression that SENS focuses on doing basic research and not testing anti-aging drug candidates.
Several longevity biotech companies such as Underdog Pharmaceuticals has been spun out of research funded by SENS. The longevity biotech companies then take the technology through clinical trials.
I encourage you to have a browse of the research they have funded, here.
LRI and SENS fulfil essentially the same role—to fund important research in this field, to increase the probability that effective anti-aging therapies will be discovered. I think LRI is also a good place to donate, though I am less familiar with their work.
There are two ways you can react to DeepMind making progress on protein folding. The one is to say: “Great there’s progress”. The other is to look at the inability of the existing companies to innovate.
When Illumina started having their monopol on sequencing technology, the cost effectiveness of the technology suddenly stopped going down like is was before.
After Theranos went bust we don’t have new companies that go after cheaper blood tests even through that would be important to reduce the costs of understanding what happens.
SENS fund basic research that leads to new approaches to anti-aging drug development.
If we live in a world where we have a bunch of promising approaching for anti-aging drug development and our problem is that not enough capital goes towards persuing them, research that provides additional perspectives doesn’t seem to be most important.
If the model is that if SENS provides more approaches Greeves or Deming can fund more startups, the bottleneck isn’t about moving exisiting approaches to trials.
Baze has technology for cheaper and more convenient blood tests. So far they’re only using it to sell vitamins. I presume regulatory obstacles are delaying more valuable uses.
There are two ways you can react to DeepMind making progress on protein folding. The one is to say: “Great there’s progress”. The other is to look at the inability of the existing companies to innovate.
When Illumina started having their monopol on sequencing technology, the cost effectiveness of the technology suddenly stopped going down like is was before.
After Theranos went bust we don’t have new companies that go after cheaper blood tests even through that would be important to reduce the costs of understanding what happens.
Sorry, I don’t quite follow—what’s the point here? That funding SENS alone is unwise? If so, I don’t think that’s the major concern, as SENS has a tiny budget (~$5 million) and have a good track record funding some of the best work in the field.
If we live in a world where we have a bunch of promising approaching for anti-aging drug development and our problem is that not enough capital goes towards persuing them, research that provides additional perspectives doesn’t seem to be most important.
By ‘approaches’ I meant, ‘therapeutic approaches’, not ‘perspectives on aging’.
What I tried to emphasize in the OP is we have a good-enough model (or, ‘perspective’) on aging which is the hallmarks of aging, and that the limiting factor now is funding to (1) develop new approaches to therapeutically addressing these hallmarks and (2) translate these findings into humans through the financing of longevity biotech startups, though (1) is the more important than (2).
(1) Having that argument between tool-spending and more application focused spending. Arguing that clash in detail is good for giving people an overview over it.
The OpenPhil report on Mechanism for Aging asks here “How likely is it that general-application tools and basic research areas that might not be thought of as part of “aging research” (analogous to epigenetics, stem cells, neuroscience, and drug delivery) will be bottlenecks to accomplishing the core objectives described above? ”
(2) On average I think that tool research is not emphasied enough in biomedicine. It frequently happens that better tools make important new research possible.
Thomas Kuhn argued that focusing to much on application usually leads to an academic field being very unproductive.
When doing academic research you never know beforehand what you will find. Sometimes reserarch can evolve into a tool direction instead of an application direction. If a person is too much committed to an application direction (towards anti-aging) they might not persue valuable research directions.
Similar things go when seeking jobs. I would expect that average person who works at DeepMind on protein folding to have a larger impact on ending aging then the average person at a biotech companies which has fighting aging as it’s mission statement.
In the large scale of funding, SENS budget is at the moment a rounding error, so I don’t think that the extend towards which it’s currently funded is a problem. I think it would be reasonable for SENS to have 10X the money it has but I’m doubtful 100X would currently be justified.
I gave a more thorough analysis of why OpenPhil missed the mark somewhat in their ‘medium-depth’ inquiry of anti-aging research in response to your comment lower in this thread, which is relevant to this point.
I’ll add a couple of points:
I completely agree with you that technology from other areas (AI, platform technologies etc.) will benefit aging research. But that’s not the point − 100,000 people per day are dying of aging and we have the tools to test a bunch of drugs, and a huge laundry list of possible drugs to test (AKG, Gemfibrozil, rapamycin, spermidine, etc.) but we don’t have the funding to do it. So, donating to SENS is important to pick the lowest hanging fruit i.e. testing drugs we are already pretty sure do slow aging. To give an analogy—you could say that given advances in materials engineering would help us get to Mars, but you also need Elon Musk (or equivalent) to put the pieces together and do the thing. Anti-aging is the same—although today’s platform technologies are not perfect (just like today’s material science is not perfect) there are so many experiments we can perform now that would save potentially millions of lives, and should be prioritized. Remember that anti-aging almost certainly will happen eventually if society doesn’t collapse, and what the field is fighting for is for this to happen sooner rather than later, so that many more people alive today will benefit.
The above is actually an additional criticism I had of the OpenPhil. It’s not that Aubrey de Grey and and others in the field don’t think advances in other areas will help (AI, etc.), it’s that there are so many feasible projects that should be funded that could potentially have a huge impact on populations today, that are not being funded. The neglectedness of the field is the primary reason SENS needs more funding, - think of SENS as funding a locus of research that has among the highest probability of progressing the field in the near future, given this research is working directly on the problem.
So yes, I agree that increasing SENS’ budget by 10-20X would probably be sufficient and that once this point has been reached, the marginal ROI would fall. However, it’s also worth considering that the type of research funded by SENS could also drastically change as the field grows, which may still make SENS donations above the 20X point remain cost-effective. Either way, SENS needs more money today.
I gave a more thorough analysis of why OpenPhil missed the mark somewhat in their ‘medium-depth’ inquiry of anti-aging research in response to your comment lower in this thread, which is relevant to this point.
I think it’s worth putting such a critique into it’s own top-level post sooner or later. It more likely engage OpenPhil.
we have the tools to test a bunch of drugs, and a huge laundry list of possible drugs to test [...] testing drugs we are already pretty sure do slow aging
And we have a very profit oriented industry that makes money with making good calls on judging which possible drugs as worth testing.
It’s relatively easy to make an argument that certain basic research that’s valuable but not directly profitable are underfunded.
The term valley of death is about drugs where we are not pretty sure that they have a clinically useful effect.
To give an analogy—you could say that given advances in materials engineering would help us get to Mars, but you also need Elon Musk (or equivalent) to put the pieces together and do the thing. Anti-aging is the same—although today’s platform technologies are not perfect (just like today’s material science is not perfect) there are so many experiments we can perform now that would save potentially millions of lives, and should be prioritized.
There’s no reason to believe that material science progresses in a way that makes building starship 10X cheaper within a decade unless people are working on the technology.
On the hand there are plenty of experiments that are run in antiaging that plausibly could get 10X cheaper through tooling improvements.
I think it’s worth putting such a critique into it’s own top-level post sooner or later. It more likely engage OpenPhil.
Will do.
It’s relatively easy to make an argument that certain basic research that’s valuable but not directly profitable are underfunded.
If it works (slows aging) then it will be profitable.
On the hand there are plenty of experiments that are run in antiaging that plausibly could get 10X cheaper through tooling improvements.
If by ‘tooling improvements’ you mean, biomarkers of aging then I completely agree with you. This is also research within the aging field that requires more funding. Besides that, I’m not sure what kind of tools you think we need. The bottom line is that we have a bunch of drugs, and we need a measuring stick (accurate biological age test) to tell us whether the drugs slow aging or not. What other platform technologies would be needed to expedite this process?
When it comes to the idea of massively improving healthcare outcomes there seem to be two strategies. One is to focus on antiaging. The other is to focus on increasing our research capability by improving the tools we have available.
When Zuckerberg went out and interviewed heatlh care experts it seems they convinced him that tool building is more promising then object level research.
How strongly do you believe object level research on antiaging to be better then tool building? What’s your argument for it?
Developing platform technologies is important in pharma and biotech, and that’s happening. But the limiting factor seems to be testing anti-aging drugs, and developing better biomarkers. There is no shortage of potential anti-aging therapies—there are hundreds waiting to be tested. The limiting factors are funding and researchers. We need more laboratories working on testing new therapies for anti-aging.
I’m just wondering about the problems with funding and researchers. One would think that plenty of money is actual around but it’s more about both awareness and some belief that a tangible return to the investors would be likely. That seems like it might be more a problem of asymmetric information as it were—or perhaps a bit of “language” between the groups. What’s your sense there?
For research is there any structure that might work a bit like various gig-econcomy sites. Basically forums that work as an infrastructure to allow a wide audience of those capable of research/analysis to form quick teams to tackle a problem. Or perhaps just do some of the initial leg work to see if some line of thinking is actually going somewhere? I have the suspicion that perhaps a lot of the effort here might be less about lab work and more about digging though the results (but that may well be completely wrong).
If both the above are kind of right and some type of open infrastructure that brings both together might be useful—though also suspect there must be a bunch of incubator type structures already in place.
You’re 100% spot on here. ‘Curing aging’ and ‘longevity’ aren’t common ideas in biomedical research, but ‘curing cancer’, ‘curing Alzheimer’s’ and ‘curing heart disease’ are. This is unfortunate given aging is driving all of these conditions.
It can sometimes be frustrating being in the longevity field, because researchers in other fields are incentivised to remain in their silos in which the core premises (e.g. curing cancer is good and effective) are treated as dogma, rather than see the bigger picture and work on solving the problem in more efficient ways.
Once you suggest that slowing aging might be a more effective approach to extending healthy human lifespan, many researchers find it difficult to engage in the conversation. This is especially the case since education into the biology of aging is extremely poor in most biomedical and medical programs. Even in my case, I went through 5 years of tertiary education without learning the information in the OP. This information I gathered through speaking to experts in the field, reading books such as Lifespan, reading blogs like Lifespan.io and FightAging.org, reading thousands of papers on this topic and attending aging conferences. Still to this day, there are unfortunately very few channels educating people on the hallmarks of aging and the connection between these and the diseases of aging.
Most cancer researchers I spoke to know very little about the hallmarks of aging, for example, and the connection between the hallmarks and disease. This is because their work focuses on solving the problem of cancer once it arises, rather than solving it in advance by curing aging. All of their incentives (grant funding, publication opportunities) are towards trying to cure cancer, rather than trying to extend healthy human lifespan (and delay the onset of cancer, potentially for hundreds of years) by slowing or reversing aging. This is unfortunate since, as I outlined in my post, aging is by far the biggest driver of cancer (and all other age-related diseases) and rates of cancer in biologically young people are very low.
For the above reasons reason, most biomedical researchers don’t speak the language of the ‘hallmarks of aging’, and aren’t familiar with terms like ‘senolytics’, for example.
This is a great idea, and similar to what groups such as Deep Science Ventures are doing. They are essentially headhunting top biomedical researchers and funding them to work on important problems such as aging. There definitely needs to be more innovation like this to provide ways of funding anti-aging research so the field isn’t entirely dependent upon the small pennies it receives from government research councils.
Charities such as SENS research foundation fulfil a similar role too, though as a charity rather than a for-profit. They collaborate with research groups and fund what they deem the most high-impact research, and get the best research teams they can get to do it.
And in the OP:
Sometimes, focusing on one disease is necessary, like in the case of cancer. To reach LEV, the risk of dying from cancer would need to be zero. The only way to get there in any reasonable amount of time is to developed a way (like WILT) of dealing specifically with cancer.
While it’s happening it’s worth pointing out that the article you linked says “Given that pharma companies depend on innovation, science, and research and development, it may seem counterintuitive that they lag behind the digital curve. In McKinsey’s ongoing survey to measure companies’ “Digital Quotient,” the pharmaceutical industry ranks in the bottom third of industries measured.”
It doesn’t happen as fast as it would be desirable.
It’s my impression that SENS focuses on doing basic research and not testing anti-aging drug candidates.
If that’s how you see the current bottleneck why recommend SENS and Lifespan.io over Lifespan Research Institute which actually focuses on testing anti-aging drugs?
It could be that the problem of biomarkers is about doing a lot of measurement with our existing tools and looking for correlations. It could also be that we need tools that measure certain biometrics more accurately and cheaper then we currently can to progress. The position that we already have all the necessary measurement tools seems to me optimistic. If you hold it, why do you hold it?
I encourage you to read the full article, not just the first paragraph. Specifically:
SENS fund basic research that leads to new approaches to anti-aging drug development. Here is a good example of this. They sponsor both intramural and extramural research.
Several longevity biotech companies such as Underdog Pharmaceuticals has been spun out of research funded by SENS. The longevity biotech companies then take the technology through clinical trials.
I encourage you to have a browse of the research they have funded, here.
LRI and SENS fulfil essentially the same role—to fund important research in this field, to increase the probability that effective anti-aging therapies will be discovered. I think LRI is also a good place to donate, though I am less familiar with their work.
There are two ways you can react to DeepMind making progress on protein folding. The one is to say: “Great there’s progress”. The other is to look at the inability of the existing companies to innovate.
When Illumina started having their monopol on sequencing technology, the cost effectiveness of the technology suddenly stopped going down like is was before.
After Theranos went bust we don’t have new companies that go after cheaper blood tests even through that would be important to reduce the costs of understanding what happens.
If we live in a world where we have a bunch of promising approaching for anti-aging drug development and our problem is that not enough capital goes towards persuing them, research that provides additional perspectives doesn’t seem to be most important.
If the model is that if SENS provides more approaches Greeves or Deming can fund more startups, the bottleneck isn’t about moving exisiting approaches to trials.
Baze has technology for cheaper and more convenient blood tests. So far they’re only using it to sell vitamins. I presume regulatory obstacles are delaying more valuable uses.
Just looked it up—looks promising. Thanks for sharing.
Sorry, I don’t quite follow—what’s the point here? That funding SENS alone is unwise? If so, I don’t think that’s the major concern, as SENS has a tiny budget (~$5 million) and have a good track record funding some of the best work in the field.
By ‘approaches’ I meant, ‘therapeutic approaches’, not ‘perspectives on aging’.
What I tried to emphasize in the OP is we have a good-enough model (or, ‘perspective’) on aging which is the hallmarks of aging, and that the limiting factor now is funding to (1) develop new approaches to therapeutically addressing these hallmarks and (2) translate these findings into humans through the financing of longevity biotech startups, though (1) is the more important than (2).
I have two motivations here:
(1) Having that argument between tool-spending and more application focused spending. Arguing that clash in detail is good for giving people an overview over it.
The OpenPhil report on Mechanism for Aging asks here “How likely is it that general-application tools and basic research areas that might not be thought of as part of “aging research” (analogous to epigenetics, stem cells, neuroscience, and drug delivery) will be bottlenecks to accomplishing the core objectives described above? ”
(2) On average I think that tool research is not emphasied enough in biomedicine. It frequently happens that better tools make important new research possible.
Thomas Kuhn argued that focusing to much on application usually leads to an academic field being very unproductive.
When doing academic research you never know beforehand what you will find. Sometimes reserarch can evolve into a tool direction instead of an application direction. If a person is too much committed to an application direction (towards anti-aging) they might not persue valuable research directions.
Similar things go when seeking jobs. I would expect that average person who works at DeepMind on protein folding to have a larger impact on ending aging then the average person at a biotech companies which has fighting aging as it’s mission statement.
In the large scale of funding, SENS budget is at the moment a rounding error, so I don’t think that the extend towards which it’s currently funded is a problem. I think it would be reasonable for SENS to have 10X the money it has but I’m doubtful 100X would currently be justified.
I gave a more thorough analysis of why OpenPhil missed the mark somewhat in their ‘medium-depth’ inquiry of anti-aging research in response to your comment lower in this thread, which is relevant to this point.
I’ll add a couple of points:
I completely agree with you that technology from other areas (AI, platform technologies etc.) will benefit aging research. But that’s not the point − 100,000 people per day are dying of aging and we have the tools to test a bunch of drugs, and a huge laundry list of possible drugs to test (AKG, Gemfibrozil, rapamycin, spermidine, etc.) but we don’t have the funding to do it. So, donating to SENS is important to pick the lowest hanging fruit i.e. testing drugs we are already pretty sure do slow aging. To give an analogy—you could say that given advances in materials engineering would help us get to Mars, but you also need Elon Musk (or equivalent) to put the pieces together and do the thing. Anti-aging is the same—although today’s platform technologies are not perfect (just like today’s material science is not perfect) there are so many experiments we can perform now that would save potentially millions of lives, and should be prioritized. Remember that anti-aging almost certainly will happen eventually if society doesn’t collapse, and what the field is fighting for is for this to happen sooner rather than later, so that many more people alive today will benefit.
The above is actually an additional criticism I had of the OpenPhil. It’s not that Aubrey de Grey and and others in the field don’t think advances in other areas will help (AI, etc.), it’s that there are so many feasible projects that should be funded that could potentially have a huge impact on populations today, that are not being funded. The neglectedness of the field is the primary reason SENS needs more funding, - think of SENS as funding a locus of research that has among the highest probability of progressing the field in the near future, given this research is working directly on the problem.
So yes, I agree that increasing SENS’ budget by 10-20X would probably be sufficient and that once this point has been reached, the marginal ROI would fall. However, it’s also worth considering that the type of research funded by SENS could also drastically change as the field grows, which may still make SENS donations above the 20X point remain cost-effective. Either way, SENS needs more money today.
I think it’s worth putting such a critique into it’s own top-level post sooner or later. It more likely engage OpenPhil.
And we have a very profit oriented industry that makes money with making good calls on judging which possible drugs as worth testing.
It’s relatively easy to make an argument that certain basic research that’s valuable but not directly profitable are underfunded.
The term valley of death is about drugs where we are not pretty sure that they have a clinically useful effect.
There’s no reason to believe that material science progresses in a way that makes building starship 10X cheaper within a decade unless people are working on the technology.
On the hand there are plenty of experiments that are run in antiaging that plausibly could get 10X cheaper through tooling improvements.
Will do.
If it works (slows aging) then it will be profitable.
If by ‘tooling improvements’ you mean, biomarkers of aging then I completely agree with you. This is also research within the aging field that requires more funding. Besides that, I’m not sure what kind of tools you think we need. The bottom line is that we have a bunch of drugs, and we need a measuring stick (accurate biological age test) to tell us whether the drugs slow aging or not. What other platform technologies would be needed to expedite this process?