Reason Magazine is running an interview with VC, trader and philanthropic investor Peter Thiel. It's of interest to those who would like more insight into the thinking that leads Thiel to support the activist outgrowth of the transhumanist community - specifically the Singularity Institute (hundred of thousands of dollars focused on development of general artificial intelligence) and the Methuselah Foundation (millions of dollars focused on radical life extension). The interview focuses far more on the former than the latter, but the reasoning is applicable across the board. On the one hand information technology, on the other hand biotechnology, both accelerating hard towards the promise of amazing future technologies:

I think [the Singularity Institute is] a group of really smart people working on an important problem. I think that the basic rule on philanthropy that I have is that I want to donate money to causes that are worthwhile but where there are no market-based mechanisms for them. There is a category of things that would benefit all of humanity but where the benefits are very diffuse and the costs are concentrated. Maybe it’s very long-term. So I focused my philanthropy on things with a 20-, 30-, 40-year horizon. The horizons are too long for a for-profit company to take advantage of, and the government and universities are not pushing things because maybe it’s too unconventional or it doesn’t easily fit into a particular political agenda or vision of the future. Those areas are probably systematically underfunded. It may be the only area of philanthropy that’s underfunded. ... I also have been doing some work on radical life extension, which I think is similarly underfunded.

...

I certainly think living longer is not a generally bad thing. I think that making sure the technology arc is positive rather than negative is not generally a bad thing. I think it probably would be somewhat mistaken to frame it in too narrowly selfish a way. It may be the case that the work being done on life extension is going to benefit people 100 or 200 years from now, but I think it still is a good thing to do it. My own guess is that I will live to age 100 to 120, so I'm frustrated that the technologies aren't going as quickly as they should because of government interference.

...

The question's not an abstract question about “Is it desirable for people to live X years?" It's "Is it good to have a cure for this form of cancer? Is it good to do something where your bodies and minds stay younger and healthier for longer than they otherwise would?" The [Leon] Kass approach encourages the rest of the society not to reflect about this. In the United States life is getting longer and longer, but we’re not thinking about it. If we’re actually going to live to age 100, the effect of Kass will be to encourage people to have a very unhealthy last 30 years because they will not have thought about and will not have prepared for it.

The future is what we make of it: either a golden era, realized through foresight and planning, or a wasted opportunity. The more people of influence to realize just how great the potential, the better.

Reason Magazine is running an interview with VC, trader and philanthropic investor Peter Thiel. It's of interest to those who would like more insight into the thinking that leads Thiel to support the activist outgrowth of the transhumanist community - specifically the Singularity Institute (hundred of thousands of dollars focused on development of general artificial intelligence) and the Methuselah Foundation (millions of dollars focused on radical life extension). The interview focuses far more on the former than the latter, but the reasoning is applicable across the board. On the one hand information technology, on the other hand biotechnology, both accelerating hard towards the promise of amazing future technologies:

I think [the Singularity Institute is] a group of really smart people working on an important problem. I think that the basic rule on philanthropy that I have is that I want to donate money to causes that are worthwhile but where there are no market-based mechanisms for them. There is a category of things that would benefit all of humanity but where the benefits are very diffuse and the costs are concentrated. Maybe it’s very long-term. So I focused my philanthropy on things with a 20-, 30-, 40-year horizon. The horizons are too long for a for-profit company to take advantage of, and the government and universities are not pushing things because maybe it’s too unconventional or it doesn’t easily fit into a particular political agenda or vision of the future. Those areas are probably systematically underfunded. It may be the only area of philanthropy that’s underfunded. ... I also have been doing some work on radical life extension, which I think is similarly underfunded.

...

I certainly think living longer is not a generally bad thing. I think that making sure the technology arc is positive rather than negative is not generally a bad thing. I think it probably would be somewhat mistaken to frame it in too narrowly selfish a way. It may be the case that the work being done on life extension is going to benefit people 100 or 200 years from now, but I think it still is a good thing to do it. My own guess is that I will live to age 100 to 120, so I'm frustrated that the technologies aren't going as quickly as they should because of government interference.

...

The question's not an abstract question about “Is it desirable for people to live X years?" It's "Is it good to have a cure for this form of cancer? Is it good to do something where your bodies and minds stay younger and healthier for longer than they otherwise would?" The [Leon] Kass approach encourages the rest of the society not to reflect about this. In the United States life is getting longer and longer, but we’re not thinking about it. If we’re actually going to live to age 100, the effect of Kass will be to encourage people to have a very unhealthy last 30 years because they will not have thought about and will not have prepared for it.

The future is what we make of it: either a golden era, realized through foresight and planning, or a wasted opportunity. The more people of influence to realize just how great the potential, the better.

What is your Real Age? From stress and environmental factors, our age may not seem to be what it is. Have you ever calculated your Real Age?

I will be 41 years old in just about a month - remember when I just turned 40? But according to my Real Age test over on RealAge.com, I am actually 38.9 years old. Pretty good.

The test took me about ten minutes and the site even gave me a little recommended plan, such as exercise more, incorporate more soy into my diet, etc.

Go take the test to see what your Real Age is.

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The latest issue of Rejuvenation Research is available online, with a strong focus on the mechanisms of Alzheimer's and other neurodegenerative processes. One of the more interesting papers describes the use of DNA vaccines in place of viral vectors in Alzheimer's immunotherapy. From Wikipedia:

DNA vaccines are third generation vaccines, and are made up of a small, circular piece of bacterial DNA (called a plasmid) that has been genetically engineered to produce one or two specific proteins (antigens) from a micro-organism. The vaccine DNA is injected into the cells of the body, where the "inner machinery" of the host cells "reads" the DNA and converts it into pathogenic proteins. Because these proteins are recognised as foreign, they are processed by the host cells and displayed on their surface, to alert the immune system, which then triggers a range of immune responses.

The early days of reprogramming our cells to do our bidding are starting to look quite sophisticated. Most immunotherapies for Alzheimer's disease (AD) seek to draft the immune system into destroying the accumulation of amyloid plaques thought to cause neurodegeneration. From the paper itself:

Although the clinical trials of active vaccination for AD patients were halted due to the development of meningoencephalitis in some patients, from the analysis of the clinical and pathological findings of treated patients, the vaccine therapy is thought to be effective. Based on such information, the vaccines for clinical application of human AD have been improved to control excessive immune reaction. Recently, we have developed non-viral DNA vaccines and obtained substantial [amlyoid beta] reduction in transgenic mice without side effects.

This issue of Rejuvenation Research is a weighty one, a little under twice as big as February's issue, and there's far too much of interest to list it all here. Head on over and take a look.

Sirtris Pharmaceuticals is something of a figurehead for the resources flowing into calorie restriction research at all levels over the past few years. As I'm sure you saw in the media, Sitris was recently acquired by GlaxoSmithKline for a fair chunk of change; in an age of oppressive regulation and the enormous investment in time and money required to satisfy that regulation, this is the preferred exit strategy for investors, as it's the only one likely to happen rapidly. Some thoughts from those who watch the industry below:

Sirtris to be acquired by GlaxoSmithKline:

Sirtris has focused on the commercial development of clinically useful sirtuin activators, which are predicted to be useful as anti-diabetic drugs. Data from academic labs have suggested they could be of even wider use, e.g., in increasing exercise tolerance or treating inflammatory disease. Underneath it all, of course, is the knowledge that the the sirtuins were initially identified as longevity assurance genes; the subtext of all discussions of sirtuin activators is that they may mediate their beneficial effects by slowing aspects of the aging process itself.

The acquisition of an small company at a large premium (the offer was more than 80% higher than Sirtris' market cap) by a pharmaceutical giant is one of the first demonstrations that the drug industry is taking seriously the idea that there's money to be made in treating aging per se rather than all of the associated conditions separately

Sirtris, as you'll recall, is centered on the exploration and manipulation of sirtuins such as SIRT1. Ouroboros also provides an overview of what is presently known about the role of SIRT1.

$720 Million Worth of Sirtuin Research:

Of course, Sirtris hasn’t officially been targeting life extension drugs, at least not in the near term. A number of these potential life-extending biochemical pathways are tied up with insulin signaling, which makes sirtuin-targeted drugs a natural for diabetic therapy as well. Sirtris has reported encouraging data for just that indication. If a sirtuin-based drug is going to make it to market, that’s a good bet for how it’ll do it. ... Once one of these drugs is approved, it’ll have the biggest, strangest potential for off-label use that anyone has ever seen. Oh, that’s going to be something to watch. GSK is well aware of this - I’m not saying that it’s part of their business plan, but when you see their head of drug discovery talking to Forbes and tossing the word "transformational" around, you know that they’ve thought beyond a replacement for Avandia.

...

That’s the truth, all right, and it’s going to be fascinating to watch things develop. As I was saying here the other day, a drug for aging is a perfect example of something the FDA has absolutely no idea of how to approach. Well, it’s not just the FDA, come to think of it: how on earth would you design a Phase II trial for life extension? How long would it take? What’s your clinical endpoint? And further on, how long will you want to monitor your Phase III patients (recall Pfizer’s recent follow-up of Exubera trial participants? How long will it take before you could be sure that some horrible bargain wasn’t struck along the way?

Notice that the largest problem for the future of longevity medicine in the established research and development community is the FDA and its heavy-duty, risk averse structure of trials after trials after trials. The cost is immense, and in most cases utterly out of proportion to any rational cost-benefit analysis of a new medical technology. So those technologies simply aren't commercialized, joining the vast sea of wasted potential that attends all imposition of regulatory cost.

The simple answer to the questions in the quote above is that you don't run a Phase II trial for life extension strategies. It doesn't make sense to talk about these structures and strategies rigidly applied to this case, but the present weight of regulation doesn't allow for the sort of free competition and innovation under pressure that always produces working, practical answers.

Since the FDA will never approve an intervention into the aging process - as aging is not recognized as a disease, and the FDA only approves treatments for disease - the underlying technologies are not applied to that end. No-one invests in medicine that cannot be sold due to government prohibition. Instead, the promising science is diverted into the same old process of patching up the very end results of age-related damage. It's that simple and that wasteful.

Absent a very overdue revolution, change to this sorry state of affairs will be slow and expensive, a matter of lining the pockets of politicians to re-order some of the destruction they've caused. A part of that long change process is the assimilation of potential new longevity science into organizations large enough to influence the FDA's mandate. Here, we see one of the first acts in that play.