Moonshots with Peter Diamandis - David Sinclair on the Longevity Pill, Age Reversal Timelines, and Updated Protocols | EP #250

Episode Date: April 27, 2026

This episode was filmed at the 2026 Abundance360 Summit. Learn more at https://www.abundance360.com/ In this insightful interview, Dr. David Sinclair discusses groundbreaking advancements in longevity research, including epigenetic reprogramming trials, the potential for extending human lifespan, and accessible therapies. He shares his personal protocols and the future of anti-aging science, emphasizing the importance of innovation and community support. Get access to metatrends 10+ years before anyone else - https://qr.diamandis.com/metatrends   David A. Sinclair, A.O., Ph.D., is a tenured Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and a serial biotech entrepreneur.  Peter H. Diamandis, MD, is the Founder of XPRIZE, Singularity University, ZeroG, and A360 – My companies: Apply to Dave's and my new fund:https://qr.diamandis.com/linkventureslanding      Go to Blitzy to book a free demo and start building today: https://qr.diamandis.com/blitzy   Your body is incredibly good at hiding disease. Schedule a call with Fountain Life to add healthy decades to your life, and to learn more about their Memberships: https://www.fountainlife.com/peter  _ Connect with Peter: X Instagram Connect with David X Instagram  Website Listen to MOONSHOTS: Apple YouTube – *Recorded on March 9th, 2026 *The views expressed by me and all guests are personal opinions and do not constitute Financial, Medical, or Legal advice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This feels like another Wright Brothers moment. Once you can fly, everything changes, and I think we're about to learn whether we can fly or not. I'm pretty sure we can. The news du jour, you are days away from the first human epigenetic reprogramming trial. Three of the Yamanaka genes, a subset of them. They're going into the eye of a patient shortly to see if we can cure blindness. We find that every tissue that we go into as a field, we see benefits. Brain age reversal, improvement in memory, motor neurons, so ALS, the immune system, muscle, kidney, mentioned liver, skin.

A true longevity therapeutic, when given, would work throughout the entire body. And that's the objective here. Is there an upper limit to how long humans can live? I'm not saying that, but I am saying that. David, please, I grab my hot water and lemon. What are you drinking? Coffee. Coffee, all right. I couldn't find any match. Well, you know, I mean, coffee actually is good for you.

The studies show caffeine is, you know, I probably do about three cups. And I think it's also that decaffeated coffee, it's all the other molecules in the cocoa in the caffeine bean. Yeah. Coffee comes in and out of fashion, but the fashion is definitely in the positive right now for longevity. It's not a bad way to start the day. Caffeine's fine. People ask me, is it okay to drink caffeine?

and Serena and I drink tea all day pretty much until, you know, we can't take any more caffeine, but it is good. And we're going to talk about your longevity protocols as well, but what I'm excited about is to give everybody an update on our approach towards longevity singularity, to add that term together. The moment in time that we really know that we're extending the healthy human lifespan. Let's begin on the news, DeJure. You are days away from the first human epigenetic reprogramming trial. Tell us about that. Well, if you've been under a rock, let me tell you that we've worked out, maybe we can talk a bit about the science behind it, but we have a drug candidate that came out of my lab.

It was published first in 2020 on the cover of Nature magazine, and the title on the cover was turning back time. And we reported, and I want to give big credit to my student, Wang Cheng Lu, who worked for many years to try and find certain genes and combinations that could safely reverse aging, but not go so far that you could cause cancer or lose identity of the cell. And he found it. It took a long time. And in retrospect, it looks easy because we now know the answer, but it was tough at the time. And he was ready to quit. He was in my office almost crying, and I said, you've got to try. I have a good feeling. And so he found three genes, three of the Yamanaka genes, a subset of them. These Yamanaka genes, I think you all know,

what we use to make stem cells. But we don't want to use the technology to make stem cells. If I turned you all into a giant lump of stem cells, that would not be good. And mice die within two days if you use all of Yamanaka's genes. So anyway, we have three of the genes. We call them OSK for short. They're going into the eye of a patient shortly to see if we can cure blindness, having succeeded really well in mice and monkeys to cure their blindnesses. So life, yeah. I know a number of you are investors along with me in life biosciences, so super excited about that, heading towards reversing blindness. what would be in success and fingers crossed,

where would you head next? Which organ systems would you go after after that? Yeah, so what's remarkable about the technology is we didn't choose the eye because we thought it would work best. In fact, I was recommending against it because the eye, curing blindness is not something that's easy. I thought the liver would be a good way to go. And that's probably the next place we go in the human body.

what other labs and ours now are showing, and seemingly now every month or so another lab publishes on this technology, so it's not just my lab, it's great, it's being reproduced and expanded now, that we find that every tissue that we go into as a field, we see benefits. And so it's not just the eye. We see benefits, well, I'll just list my lab's work. Brain age reversal, this is all in mice currently. Age reversal, improvement in memory, in old age and Alzheimer's models. Motor neurons, so ALS, which is clearly an incurable disease currently,

but we think we can help there. The immune system, muscle, kidney, mentioned liver, skin. The list goes on, and the liver joints. A new paper came out from a different group just last week that I tweeted about. And so, yeah, we all experienced some kind of back pain or joint pain in our lives. And there's not much you can do. This technology seems to regrow the joint and the cartilage and even the bone, which

really important point here. A true longevity therapeutic doesn't just work in one cell type. It doesn't just work in hepatocytes. A true longevity therapeutic, when given, would work throughout the entire body. And that's the objective here. It definitely is that that's really our goal. The reason we're going off to one tissue at a time is because it's untested technology in humans and the FDA just recently allowed life biosciences to go into the clinic.

But if we'd said we're going to inject this technology into the whole body, the FDA would have been, I think, a lot more cautious. So we're going tissue by tissue now. But I don't see a reason why, as we learn more and we see more safety, that we couldn't go intravenously, we need some technologies to be developed. Right now we're using viral-like particles to target the eye and the liver. Those are great for targeted, but a whole body is either going to require something like the lipid nanoparticle or even a chemical small molecule. Let's talk about that. So the current therapy that you've developed, and it's using an adeno-associated virus, an A.V, and these gene therapies have traditionally been expensive, anywhere from like a half

million dollars to two million dollars per treatment. Is that a rough order magnitude? We want to treat millions of patients, actually. We're going after glaucoma. So I hope it's not that expensive. But my goal is to bring the price down as fast as possible. And towards that end, I'm very excited about the other. So just to lay it out, right, the current treatments that are going into trials are using these adeno-associated viruses, which are an expensive mechanism for delivering the OSK. But you and your amazing graduate students have actually developed an alternate, and I think it's your entry into the longevity X prize as well,

into the HealthSpan XPRIZ, which looks to be, you know, I don't call it magical, but the potential of it is extraordinary. Could you speak about what you've developed? Sure. So we developed this current technology that's going into humans shortly. In fact, patients are being recruited right now,

So it's imminent. That technology for us in the Sinclair Lab is 2017 technology. And actually quite literally, I like to point out to my students that what we published is literally what's going into humans, which I've said to you separately, that's really rare that your PhD student makes a drug that goes into humans, but he did it. But yeah, the point is since 2017, we've been working. in my lab on bringing the price down, finding new ways. And the cheapest is a small molecule. Small molecule can be made potentially for a few cents, a pill. And we find that the dosing,

even with ER 100, which is the viral candidate drug going into humans, you only need six weeks. So, you know, in six weeks, some doctor may even know the answer whether this works in humans, because it's going to be fairly obvious if someone can see again or not. We'll see better. These chemicals could be very cheap. We've been working on them. We've been using mostly artificial intelligence to screen billions of molecules in silico. And we're now at the stage where we're in the lab using AI and visualization, machine learning,

to tell us whether cells from old humans, 92-year-olds, their skin cells can be reversed back to a 20-year-old. And we know OSK works, the gene therapy works, and we're looking for molecules that do that. And I can say we already have a proof of concept, which is a cocktail of molecules that, some of which we published on already a couple of years ago. And those we hope to put into a clinical trial, into humans, within the next couple of months as part of our XPRIZE competition. Amazing. And how much might that cost, just to give people a sense of the price point, while the edge of the edge of the edge of, Aetno-associated virus gene therapies are in the hundreds of thousands to low millions.

How much might a, you know, three-mole pill that you're taking cost you for treatments? Well, yeah, right now it is a three-mole cocktail. Ultimately, if it reaches the market, it will be one. I don't plan on taking three to market. There's all sorts of reasons, including the FDA makes it very difficult to make cocktails. and they make you test each one and the combinations, which is, we will find one. But the three-factor molecules,

they're expensive to make. They're hundreds of thousands of dollars right now to make it in the kilograms scale. But that doesn't have to be. With scale up, it really could be a lot less. I don't want to say how much, but one day I hope it'll be like metformin, which is pretty cheap.

Anyone on the planet could afford it. When we were on moonshots, pod together and I encourage you guys to see that episode. It's an amazing dive that I did with David. You know, you predicted a couple hundred bucks a month as a potential range. So I just, it's really important to understand that this longevity revolution we're about to hit is not just for the ultra wealthy. I mean, one of the precepts of the HealthSpan X Prize that Dr. Jamie Justice runs is that we are encouraging the development of therapeutics that are accessible to 8 billion people, right? We uplift humanity as we as we do this. And so, you know, I like to say that when technology first

comes out and it doesn't work well, it's the wealthy who experiment with it. And by the time it works really well, it's available to 8 billion people. And that's going to be true here. It is. I always talk about the Wright brothers, because this feels like another Wright brothers moment, that if it works, maybe even bigger than that. But the Wright brothers, people said it wouldn't work, this will never happen. New York Times a few weeks before. Wright brothers took off, said, it'll be a million years before humans fly, and then they did it. And then suddenly, everyone said it can be done.

But it wasn't for everybody. It was for the wealthy to fly initially in the early part of the 20th century, and even up until the 60s and 70s. But it'll happen faster than that. I can see a future where, certainly within our lifetime, we'll have these pills available. And the important thing is I'm not the only one. I may be most advanced in the work that we're doing,

but there are lots of people and lots of money behind us. So even if we deviate or things hit a snag, which I don't expect, but that could happen. It's going to happen. So that's the real point here is 20 years ago, I didn't know if it was going to happen in our lifetimes. I was trying to go as fast as possible and trying to get the word out to raise awareness

and bring in really bright students into the field. That mission, it's still ongoing, but I would say it's been successful. And now I think the wave is such that it's going to happen in our lifetime. That's something that would be crazy if it didn't. And it may be sooner than we think. it may be 2026 is the year we learned that age reversal is possible in humans. Yeah, this is part of our singularity, folks, part of this incredible moment of everything all

at once, everywhere, getting reinvented. And it's speed running every speed running Star Trek, as I like to say. I do want to say something about Peter is, you know, he does a lot of good for the world and he's unique in doing that. One of the things that he's done among many for the field of longevity, the X-Prize with Jamie Justice, and if you've donated to that prize, thank you. It's a wonderful cause. And I can tell you that I would not be putting our chemical cocktail that we've now tested extensively

in animals into people if it weren't for the X-Prize. We're trying to accelerate the future. Yes. Thank you, buddy. Thank you, Peter. Couple of points to pull out. We could spend days on stage together, but trying to consolidate. I think people need to understand as well that the conversation around longevity and the

pioneering work that you did early on had a lot of pushback. A lot of people, there was a negative stigma against doing work in this field. And yet you saw the potential and you persisted, which is what the great scientific and thinkers do despite what your fellow scientist or, you know, and so I just want to thank you for that. It's not easy. I've been on the inside. You're a dear friend, and I've heard the trials and tribulations, and you've persisted with serena's support, nonetheless. And thank you for that.

A couple of key questions here, and I just want to pull these out. Is there an upper limit to how long humans can live? You know, is it just 120 we're aiming for or 130 we're aiming for? You know, people say, okay, well, we might extend health span, you know, those extra few decades, but, you know, we're going to time out. What do you think? How do you answer that? Well, as I wrote in Lifespan, the book, there is no law that says,

we have to age, that anyone who says that there is a limit doesn't know what they're talking about. It's doable, right? We can live hundreds of years. That's already happening in the animal world. And, you know, some people live into their whale beyond 100, up to 122 is the maximum. So there's a lot of room to go with what we already know is possible. Now, can we go beyond that? Can we go beyond a whale even? Well, I don't see any reason biologically or, you know, looking at physics, why there is a limit. It feels weird to say we can live hundreds of years, maybe thousands of years. And I don't know yet how we're going to get there.

But what I've seen in the last five years has blown my mind. The fact that there's a reboot system in the cells that can, not just make a cell healthier, but literally reset it, so it is young. Not just behaves young, which is what we did for the first 20 years in the field, is young, and stays young. It's reprogrammed, literally. The fact that there's a backup copy, and that we now know you can reboot the cells over and over again. Over and over. We don't know how many times, because the mice actually, we did it multiple times in the eye,

and then the mice died of old age, but they had really good eyesight. So we want to try and do this multiple times in a whole animal, and we're working on that. So I don't see an upper limit, and often I'm quoted out of context saying, oh, we can live forever or that kind of thing. And I'm not saying that, but I am saying that the mere fact that the Wright brothers could fly, we could see that one day there would be the Concord jet and going to the moon. The same with longevity. Yes.

Once you can fly, everything changes, and I think we're about to learn. and whether we can fly or not. And I'm pretty sure we can. Yeah, and at the speed at which science is going, right, the work that we just saw from Lila, the work we're going to see from other speakers, the whole field of AI is, you know, there's this accelerating future in which the added time

brings us all these additional breakthroughs that gives us added time, and the exponent goes greater than one. I want to go back to that, Moonshot podcast we did because there are a number of members in the room here who are part of fossil FOSL. It's Friends of Sinclair Lab. So when I interviewed David, God, I don't know, it was a year ago. It feels like ages ago. It's a year ago, I think. And my Moonshots podcast studio here in Santa Monica, David was glum and I was like, what's going on? And he was like, our funding just got cut

because of the battle between the White House and Harvard. And I have to let all of my graduate students go. My dean has said, you got to let him go. And it's like, WTF, what? No way. And I mean, it's like whenever, I mean, hopefully this is your judo move. When you see a problem that exists, your answer is no, I'm going to solve it. And so at that moment, we sort of, I sort of spun up.

I said, okay, listen, I'm going to. going to, let's create something called Frenzac Sinclair Lab. I'll contribute the first 50K, but let's ask the Moonshot audience to participate. And we announced it. Max Song spun up a few QR codes and a website instantly. Thank you, Max. And the outpouring of support was, was nothing less than extraordinary. I think, you know, your budget, the budget you were getting from the government was how much that got canceled then how much per year it was it in the millions all a million two three million something like that yeah including the fellowships that my scientists had brought with them yeah their career got cut short too at the time and we were able over the course the next few

months to bring in i think on the order of six million dollars of private annual support was amazing thank you all now Now, I just want to hit on this because there's a perversion in the way we fund science, which is when you write a scientific, I'm going to say this for you so that you don't have to say it and get dinged by anybody, but this is my understanding and experience of it. If you're trying to propose something radical for a grant, the people reviewing it don't want radical science, they want predictable science that they know the answer is going to be there. and you're writing a grant for something that might take a year or two to get funded.

It is retrospective. It's reactive. It's backwards. And there's a 10% chance you get it. And the 10% chance you're going to get it. So what I love is that through the Friends of Sinclair Lab, some of people have given us 50K. And I don't see any of this. All of this goes to his research.

I'm so grateful to all of the Friends of Sinclair Lab. Some have given up to a million. And it's a, it's this, this money goes directly to, to David and his grad student's genius. Like, where the highest signal is right now, let's do that experiment. Let's do that experiment. Let's do that experiment. It unleashes you to do work on the cutting edge. It has.

We're actually in better shape now, thanks to you and all of the friends than we were a year ago. And we can actually go so fast. It's, it blows my mind. We used to be limited by, by these grants. And I was spending half my time writing grants. literally it's a lot for scientists and the system's broken clearly it's a huge waste of capital we've got PhDs professors some of the smartest minds in the country who just are at their computers typing grants all day instead of doing the work but yeah it's

really changed how we do science we're going so fast now an example of that is so we have these bi-monthly every second month we have a Zoom call and the friends get together And on the last one, so my student was presenting her data, and she said, sorry I couldn't present last time. My kidneys are failing. I had dialysis today. I need a new kidney. And then one of the members. Brett Blundee, who's a member of our community here, he's one of the benefactors for the health span prize, one of our benefactors at the X Prize as well.

Brett said, how fast can we cure this? I said, well, let's do it. And he goes, all right, I'll fund that project. So we can get started within weeks of an idea instead of years, if ever. It's amazing. It's the way science should be done. And what I want to do now that this model is really proven to work brilliantly, is to teach the best minds across the world that this is a much better way of doing science.

And everybody benefits. The world benefits, the members benefit. I think it's very exciting for the members because they get to. They have personal relationship with you. They really do. They're texting you and they're visiting the lab and they're having dinner with. you and Serena. Yeah, and they get the same feeling I do as a scientist. They, we make discoveries and how exciting is that to learn before humanity does about how, how the world is going to look

in the future. And that's the best part of being a scientist is learning things that you just didn't think could even be possible before everyone else. It truly is extraordinary. So I want to thank all of you who are members of the Friends of Sinclair Lab Fossil. and maybe you might even share during the Q&A here, your thoughts about it. I want to spend the last few... Oh, I just want to say about the fossil program. We have about 70 members. How many?

7-0. Wow. It's been wonderful. But we are going to limit it because if it gets too large, it's not a community. But there will be a wait list. But I think today, if you're interested, please either write to Peter, Max, and Marissa, who is down the front, my chief of... staff.

Marissa, just stand up one second so people can see you. And she'll give you your business card and you can. Or reach out to one of my team if you want to be involved in supporting. Yeah. And it's not a commitment, but we'll tell you more about what, what is involved and what the community is like. I mean, sort of like throwing yourself a touchdown pass in the longevity game. I think of it that way.

But I'm not a sports guy. Let's talk about your, let's talk about your longevity protocols, David. What are you doing right now to? maintain your boyish-like complexion and physique and head you towards longevity escape velocity. Well, thank you. I'm not sure that I deserve that, but it's kind. Definitely too many days on the road with Serena for... Yeah, so you guys run on the airplane all the time. Yeah, that's our downfall. But what I wrote about in lifespan is still holds true.

So if you haven't got the book or you do check out page 304, that is the basics. Just speed run if you would. All right. All right, but don't post this. This is between friends. I mean, I suffer from my face showing up on people's website, selling products. So this is an issue. You're not promoting any products very clear.

Yeah. And this is also for my father, who is now 86 and in perfect health. So mom, if you're listening, please, Take notes here. Yeah. The three main ones that we've been taking for over 15 years. You remember the good old story, Resveratrol in red wine? That's still a staple for us.

And we've got some really good data that we're going to submit to nature on that. So that's mixed with some olive oil or some yogurt or a small amount of something oily or protein, a lot of protein, so it dissolves. If you just drink resvertrol or take a pill, it mostly passes straight through you. So that's a good one. That's an activator of cert 1, which is a longevity enzyme we've worked on for many years. And by the way, I haven't told this publicly, but the Sertuans, if you know about them and you've read my book, we find that they're very important for the reprogramming.

So the early work from my career is all linked into the information theory of aging, which is the basis of our work now. Resveratrol. NMN. NMN is nicotinamide mononucleotide, but online it's called NMN. Don't confuse that with M&Ms. You will not live longer. And then the third one is a glucose-lowering medicine. So the one of choice, well there are two of choice, and I cycle between them. Serena and I do that. So metformin requires a prescription. That's a diabetes type. your diabetes drug, relatively safe as a medicine. We take a gram a day of that. But it can give you a stomach upset. So there's a natural version of metformin, which is known as berberine, which has a lot

of clinical data as well, that has benefits as well, including lowering of blood glucose. And actually, your glucose levels are really important. So look at glucose, look at pasta, look at carbs, especially processed carbs. If I could just add on that, one of the things that we found at Fountain Life looking at our members is the number one thing that correlates with heart disease is not your HDL, your LDL, your LPL, LPLA. The number one thing that correlates a heart disease is your hemoglobin A1C, your glucose levels. Thank you, buddy.

Yeah. Well, good. I mean, there's a whole symphony. We carry bags of supplements. So it would take a while to go through those, of course. But a new one that we've added in the last couple of years is natokinase. If you haven't heard of it, it's an enzyme. I'm sure you know.

Yeah, my father's on that now too. It's really the only thing that's been very clearly shown in large trials of thousand plus people to reverse plaque in the body. It's also natural. It's an enzyme that comes from NATO, the Japanese breakfast that smells like vomit. Oh, my God. Some people eat Natto. Serena likes Natto. I hate it. So I take the pills. And you need a fair amount. If you look at the clinical trials, I think it's at least 8,000 units of that. Know how much? 10,000 Serena's telling me from the crowd. So 10,000 units. I think if they gave them six, it didn't work. And it took a year, so you need to be consistent. But I'm doing the experiment. I'm going to have my corroded ultrasound it again to see. if my IMT, as you know, as a trained physician.

And that's also another thing. Make sure that you're not gonna die from something stupid like a stroke or a heart attack if you don't need to. So you can get a CT scan, which is radiation, which we know in my lab accelerates aging. So I prefer to, if I can help it, avoid radiation, but ultrasound's very safe,

and you can do it in 20 minutes on your neck. You guys, do you guys do it? We do, and those of you on the longevity trip every year, we'd give you a carotid scan. Yeah. Yeah. Good. In terms of food, you've gone vegan?

Well, mostly. I struggle because there's a lot of good food out there. I'm a sucker for a Japanese sushi, but it's Serena who inspired me. I always need to credit her with a big change in my life. She taught me a lot. And last night, at a gathering we had for the friends of Sinclair Lab, I freely admitted that what turned me on with Serena was her talk about nevita clax and desatineb as a senolidic. So it was like, wow, this woman's amazing.

Keep talking chemicals. It's turning me on. How do you feel about alcohol? I've changed. Again, Serena's inspiration. Before the data came in, which is now damning for alcohol, even one glass of alcohol a day correlates with a smaller brain. I stopped drinking alcohol a few months after right now. Serena. You too? No, no, I've been much much to the chagrin of someone who is my spouse who's a Somalié. Wow. Yeah, it's unfortunate, but we've got to be driven by the science, not by what we want. But I would say a few times

a year, it doesn't hurt to celebrate with a bit of alcohol, but daily is what I was doing. Serena said, what are you doing? You're eating cheese and red wine every night? And I said, it's the Mediterranean diet. What are you worried about? So she said, no, stop it. Eat this and see what happens. And within a month, my biomarkers were, inflammation went way down, so I've stuck with it. Yeah. And I think the benefit for alcohol is the social lubricant in terms of having you relax and enjoy.

I think one of the biggest challenges I have, David, and I think perhaps for you, is this pace of travel and work and stress. It's a countervailing force. It is. And again, Serena changed my life. Because I'm very hard on myself. If I'm not number one at something, I'm not happy. And so I lived most of my life until I met Serena on edge, ruminating, stressing that I wasn't good enough.

It was really a bad thing. And then she came along and she said, just try to breathe. Chill. She taught me meditation, which I'm still trying to. to work on, but I have learned not to worry so much. And it's hard to do if you're an A-type, like probably most of us in the room. But it's changed my life as well. I'm sleeping better.

I think I look better. I feel better because if you're always tense, it's going to accelerate your aging. That's proven. And the other thing that really helps, which is worth knowing, is your blood pressure and your cholesterol and your blood sugar, and your blood sugar, these are good ways to live longer. Get a pet, get a partner, but just make sure that you're socially surrounded by people who love you and you are not lonely, because loneliness will kill you.

More hugs in your life. Yep, let's hear it for that.