I've gotten about 60 messages about Liz Parrish's outfit and the test on herself to lengthen her telomeres.
I don't think there's any substance to any of her claims and life extension.
A few very critical questions:
1/ What if anything does telomere lengthening have to do with life extension? (It's multi-factorial) Correlation is not causation.. See: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25862531
5/ How many cells had their telomeres lengthened? (I bet you it was a petty amount.....100 to 1 says they're not all that good at actually delivering genes)
There's actual chemists/biologists busting their ass at places like genentech and top research universities to solve missing mendelian inheritance the long difficult way.
They're true pioneers staring down the barrel of a gun loaded with the world's most difficult NP-Hard problems. This Parrish outfit steals their thunder.
Aging isn't something you can simply disrupt with a silicon valley mindset.
I've met organic chemists who have spent upwards of 30 years developing drugs and haven't put a single drug on the market. Their work was still super valuable.
I'm trained as a biologist and in complete agreement, this is a press stunt with no substance.
A couple further questions -
In a longitudinal study testing telomere length in a large human cohort, 44% of people had longer telomeres than when they were 10 years younger (and 10 years is a lot of aging!)
http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/jou...
...So even if her telomeres did get longer, how confident can we be that is at all related to the gene therapy?
Instrument / sample variability in SpectraCell measurements. Is there any data on this? How significant is a change from 6.71kb to 7.33kb anyways?
Aging is a medical condition. The present approaches to dealing with it are expensive and terrible, which is to say therapies that are nothing more than patches or meddling with late-stage disease state without addressing root causes, and research that is focused on creating a full understanding of those disease states by working backwards. There are other approaches that look like they could be cheap and effective, which is to say repairing the consensus root causes of aging after the SENS model, the forms of change and damage found in old tissues and that are caused by normal operation of metabolism, not by some other form of damage.
Disruption is absolutely possible in this scenario. Replace the bad old expensive approach with the much better approach, while the old guard tell you how wrong you are all the way until their positions become untenable.
It wasn't so many years ago that people were claiming SENS was nonsense. Now everyone agrees that, for example, senescent cell clearance, a part of SENS right from the outside, is great and extends life in mice, and human therapies should be developed to produce rejuvenation as a result of clearing these unwanted, damaging cells.
There are startups right now working on SENS and SENS-like approaches to repairing the damage that causes aging, technologies that can be realized for a fraction of the cost spent so far on mapping the biochemistry and genetics of metabolism and aging. That looks a lot like disruption under way to me.
The notion that Aging is a medical condition or disease seems murky enough. We should really wait on the Metformin trials to be completed before making such bold statements.
"Barzilai and other researchers plan to test that notion in a clinical trial called Targeting Aging with Metformin, or TAME. They will give the drug metformin to thousands of people who already have one or two of three conditions — cancer, heart disease or cognitive impairment — or are at risk of them. People with type 2 diabetes cannot be enrolled because metformin is already used to treat that disease. The participants will then be monitored to see whether the medication forestalls the illnesses they do not already have, as well as diabetes and death.
On 24 June, researchers will try to convince FDA officials that if the trial succeeds, they will have proved that a drug can delay ageing. That would set a precedent that ageing is a disorder that can be treated with medicines, and perhaps spur progress and funding for ageing research.
During a meeting on 27 May at the US National Institute on Aging (NIA) in Bethesda, Maryland, Robert Temple, deputy director for clinical science at the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, indicated that the agency is open to the idea."
Source: http://www.nature.com/news/anti-ageing-pill-pushed-as-bona-f...
Disruption is not possible in drug development. Why?
"Some of that perspective is welcome – the idea that there are always huge opportunities out there waiting for someone with enough speed and nerve to go after them, for one. That’s very Silicon Valley (and it’s also very American) and I think it’s great. But if along the way you pick up the idea that the world of apps, code, and processor speed is the default setting for the world, you can start to see everything that doesn’t advance that way as defective. That’s the Andy Grove fallacy, as I’ve called it (referenced in those links above), the idea that understanding human disease and its treatments should be pretty much like designing a new chip or writing a new app.
There’s another problem that’s not unique to the Valley, although it does tend to give people a bad case of it. That’s the “Clearly I’m smart and successful, so clearly I have something to offer in this other field over here” one. We all succumb to that one now and then; it’s human nature. You can watch Mark Cuban display it here, with respect to medical testing.
But here are a couple of recent examples of the more localized problem. Iwrote last year about Emerald Therapeutics, an outsourced-lab-assay company backed by Peter Thiel (who may also be interested in their antiviral therapy ideas). Here’s another article on them, and it asks, in so many words, “Why is new drug development so comparatively torpid when app development is so torrid?”. I couldn’t provide a more succinct version of the Silicon Valley/biopharma disconnect if I tried."
"How is it possible that the technologies that most people think are important for drug discovery have become hundreds, thousands, or billions of times cheaper, while the cost of R&D, per drug discovered, increased roughly 100 fold between 1950 and 2010?" - Jack Scannell
Missing Mendelian Inheritance was the Pandora's Box of problems that we now face after the Human Genome Project. Sure we have an idea of which proteins are created by which genes, kind of, but figuring out how proteins work has been a complicated problem that can't be brute forced.
In the last 50 years, speed improvements:
1000x faster xray-crystallography protein mapping.....
300x larger protein databases....
10x cost reduction in High throughput testing...
800x number of compounds...combinatorial chemistry...
Nah, it's all good. These random people have their place. I think the problem isn't so much Liz and her friends but rather that people take them too seriously.
I think for the most part, they're doing great work and the world would be less of a place without them. Just we shouldn't expect so much.
It's like VC. Only about 1 in 100 actually go somewhere big.
You should read the last book of Maria Blasco [0], arguably the best (or at least in the top 3 researchers in the telomeres/telomerase field), and main author of the science that has inspired BioViva's work. The book is titled: "Morir joven, a los 140" (english: "Dying young, at 140") [1]
I'm going to take the time to paste here a brief excerpt translated into english:
"Is aging mandatory? Until recently, serious science did not deal with that question. After all, having ailments is normal over the years. However, what is normal today, may not be tomorrow. Mankind has grown accumulating victories against natural and normal phenomena, like high infant mortality. Fact is that more and more scientists say that not only aging can be combated, but we also must: prolonging youth could be the way to prevent cancer, Alzheimer's, and age diseases as a whole."
> Aging isn't something you can simply disrupt with a silicon valley mindset.
Usually I listen to people like Maria, who's been at it for 30+ years (not to random people in the internets with marketing and sales background). It's inspiring reading works of scientists and people so open minded, which is IMHO the essence of Silicon Valley.
> I've met organic chemists who have spent upwards of 30 years developing drugs and haven't put a single drug on the market.
Maybe because it costs a minimum of 1 billion and 10+ years of approval (plus the consent of the gatekeepers)?
> [...] don't criticize me for asking valid questions
Your questions are misplaced and have been probably answered before [0]. I'm just astonished by the fact that you are dismissing decades of research by some of the best and most awarded oncologists in Europe. You can't just say that "Manipulating telomeres to investigate aging sounds like a joke", when evidence (98% of the research in the field) points to the contrary.
Maybe you don't not agree with Bioviva's highly dangerous and non-standard methods for circumventing slow and expensive trials (I do not either), but that's another whole issue.
> I can share deep insights after talking to over 100+ people in the pharma industry, visiting labs, and much more.
Thanks but I have a well formed opinion about what happens inside the industry. I've also worked in the space for some years.
> It does not cost a minimum of 1 billion [...]
Current average seems to be $2.6B. Could you share your sources?
#1 - we already know that telomere lengthening is required for life extension, but it's definitely not the only factor. The effects of short telomeres are rather bad:
I don't think there's any substance to any of her claims and life extension.
A few very critical questions:
1/ What if anything does telomere lengthening have to do with life extension? (It's multi-factorial) Correlation is not causation.. See: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25862531
2/ Why did she use a lab that's on quackwatch to do the tests? (http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRela…/…/nonstandard.html)
3/ Haven't we already proven telomere lengthening and muscle hacks in animal models?
4/ What type of AAV is she using to transfect her cells with telomerase? (Take a look at the animal studies: http://www.nature.com/mt/journal/v18/n3/full/mt2009286a.html, http://virologyj.biomedcentral.com/…/10.1186/1743-422X-10-74)
5/ How many cells had their telomeres lengthened? (I bet you it was a petty amount.....100 to 1 says they're not all that good at actually delivering genes)
There's actual chemists/biologists busting their ass at places like genentech and top research universities to solve missing mendelian inheritance the long difficult way.
They're true pioneers staring down the barrel of a gun loaded with the world's most difficult NP-Hard problems. This Parrish outfit steals their thunder.
Aging isn't something you can simply disrupt with a silicon valley mindset.
I've met organic chemists who have spent upwards of 30 years developing drugs and haven't put a single drug on the market. Their work was still super valuable.