Moonshots with Peter Diamandis - EP #17 David Sinclair’s AMA: Age Reversal Breakthroughs, FDA Approval, and Living Forever

Episode Date: December 22, 2022

In this Ask Me Anything session, David and Peter discuss the latest age-reversal breakthroughs, getting approval from the FDA, and the possibility of living forever. You will learn about: 01:54 | Where are the breakthroughs & when are they coming? 06:46 | David Sinclair’s experience dealing with the FDA 19:16 | How are David & Peter going to reduce aging? David Sinclair is a biologist and academic known for his expertise in aging and epigenetics. Sinclair is a genetics professor and the Co-Director of Harvard Medical School’s Paul F. Glenn Center for Biology of Aging Research. He’s been included in Time100 as one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World, and his research has been featured all over the media. Besides writing a New York Times Best Seller, David has co-founded several biotech companies, a science publication called Aging, and is an inventor of 35 patents _____________ Resources Read David’s book, Lifespan: Why We Age- and Why We Don’t Have To Levels: Real-time feedback on how diet impacts your health. levels.link/peter  Consider a journey to optimize your body with LifeForce. Learn more about Abundance360. Read the Tech Blog. Learn more about Moonshots & Mindsets.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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that they're not alone. Help CAMH build a future where no one is left behind. So, who will you rise for? Register today at sunrisechallenge.ca. That's sunrisechallenge.ca. Yeah, we are kicking the can down the road, but that's the point. Life is wonderful,

and the more times we kick the can down the road, but that's the point. Life is wonderful, and the more times we kick the can down the road, the more life and wonder we have. And so, yeah, that's what it is. I don't think that we're going to be able to kick the can down the road for an infinite number of years based on technology that I can foresee in our lifetime. Now, I could be wrong because I didn't foresee reprogramming as effective as it has become and age reversal.

So never say never, but given my viewpoint right now, I think that 150 is achievable in many of our lifespans, but not immortality. And a massive transform to purpose is what you're telling the world. It's like, this is who I am. This is what I'm going to do. This is the dent I'm going to make in the universe. Hey, everybody.

Welcome back to another episode of Mindsets and Moonshots. My name is Nick. I'm Peter's producer, and we have today here Peter and David. Hey, guys. How are you? Hey, Nick. Hey, Nick. Cool.

So we have fielded hundreds of phenomenal questions over the course of the past day from both David and Peter's Twitter. And I'm going to be the lucky one fielding through them and picking and bopping. So let's start off with some fun ones. David, I'm going to direct this one at you. Fans want know why has david not had a podcast since february ah well i'm writing my second book i'm editing a paper that's going to come out in a big journal that's going to be high impact and i'm working on making my podcast even better, better produced. And so trust me, it's coming. I know that there's a lot of demand for it. And I thank everyone for their patience. Cool. That's a fair answer. All right, let's dive into one that we had a bunch of. And I'll read it verbatim. This one

is from Tony and Megan. They asked, and I'm going to ask it to both Peter and David. Why is it taking so freaking long to have meaningful longevity therapies come to market? I feel like we're not making any meaningful headway and we're stuck taking supplements that give us five to 10 years if we're lucky. Where are the breakthroughs? When are they coming? Well, some of them are already here. In my view, we've got some drugs already, metformin, rapamycin, that I strongly believe can slow down aspects of aging. So we already have some technology.

It's not evenly distributed. It's not available to everybody because most doctors are unaware or unwilling to prescribe these medicines to people who are healthy. But the data looks good. Now, what about the new medicines that are in development? Well, one of them that I'm developing, actually a few of them at Metro Biotech, a spin out from my lab from 10 years ago, is pretty advanced. We're actually in phase two studies. We've had some positive data. We're looking to publish now. We've written up the manuscript um and so that is a a study and a company that looks at nad boosters for pharmaceutical use for diseases of aging and that one if all that all goes well it's uh probably two to three years away so that's uh that's the good news also reprogramming of the eye to cure

blindness which we did in mice a couple of years ago. We're in non-human primates, and that could go into humans as soon as next year. Now, the question is, why isn't it quicker? Well, it's because drugs are hard, super hard. What industry can spend $400, $500 million and still fail? Not that many. And that's what it's like to develop drugs. And there's a lot of safety and efficacy that needs to go into these products,

thanks to the oversight of the FDA here in the US and other countries under different auspices. And there's a high, high hurdle, rightly so. We don't want something that doesn't work or can harm people getting on the market. But to get over that hurdle takes time and a lot of money. That's a fair answer. Peter, I'd love your take. And in your take, I want to include your opposing, somewhat opposing thoughts to David on how you feel about the FDA and bureaucracy. Well, so listen, the reality is what we're talking about is a radical departure from

traditional medicine. Medicine has been, you know, you go to, we've all come to expect, we go to our doctor and we go for our once a year physical, if we're lucky, and that doctor will listen to your lungs, your heart, and it's expected, you know, old age is something we come to expect and we don't fight against it. We expect it. We try and do a gentle landing, if you would. And the FDA is an organization built around safety. What I mean by that is they will value the lives lost if they approve a drug that kills

people. Those lives are much more valuable than all the lives lost by not approving a drug. It's just the way it is today. And so until the science is rock solid, they're going to be hesitant to approve something. And it takes a huge amount of capital investments, billions of dollars, and sometimes decades of time. The reality is, you know, even the world of stem cells, we know that we exhaust our stem cell population, that when we're young, we have, you know, 100x, 1000x number of stem cells in different pockets of the body from fat to muscle to neural

stem cells, and they reduce and we can supplement our stem cells. But today you have to go outside the United States to do that because the science isn't there to have proven its efficacy and its safety yet. And we're going to get there, but until it's rock solid, you're going to a different jurisdiction to get those treatments. It takes time to be available. And what we saw, I remember I was in Richard Mulligan's lab, David, back in the 80s doing early gene therapy work. And gene therapy was, was imagined back then to be an extraordinary technology. And it was, but when it was first applied to the first patients, it caused the death of a number of children and it stopped the entire field for decades. So people are cautious about taking shortcuts. David, do you have any pushback there? I mean, your interfacing with the FDA over the years is probably more than most people will ever

experience in a lifetime given your career. Are you friends, and I have to find a way to word this, so excuse the way I'm wording it. Are you friends of the FDA in the sense that you're happy with how they work? Does it frustrate you at times that they move the sense that you're happy with how they work? Does it frustrate you at times that they move slow? Are you in alignment with Peter that there is a increase or there should be an increase in speed of how they approve things coming up or what's your take? Well, the FDA was surprisingly receptive to the idea that aging can be treated with a medicine. And they are still of the opinion that if we can show that aging is slowable with a treatment, that they would strongly consider approving that medicine for the treatment of aging.

And I didn't realize that that was true, but what the individuals at the FDA, And I didn't realize that that was true, but what incentive to get a drug on the market as there is to protect them. And that does lead to this being rather a slow process, that's for sure. Now, what I would love is if there was increased public opinion, pressure from all places, from politicians, from grassroots, to increase the dialogue and help the FDA find a way to make it easier for us to get a drug on the market that's based on aging research. Right now, we cannot make a drug for aging because aging isn't a medical condition. If it were, we'd have a lot more investment and a lot more success.

You know, David, one thing I hope for in the future is a right to try strategy. Right. And in other words, I almost call it an accredited patient program where if as a patient, as a subject, I get permission from my physician, my husband, my wife, my kids, whatever, that I want to try a treatment that isn't FDA approved, but I've got this disease called aging and I want to try this, even if it's to be a subject. I think reinventing how we do this. Now, we do have investigation new drugs and we do have experimental protocols experimental protocols and so forth but how do we we make it um more agile in that regard peter i love that idea that that you wouldn't be able to just go online and order up an experimental drug right that's that's too free because there could be accidents um and there's a maybe abuse of that system for monetary reasons. That said, if there were a certification, whether it's an MD or something an MD can get, that would allow the use of experimental drugs.

Right now, that is possible, but it's not widely used. It's generally frowned upon. available if you have a terminal disease or something that um doesn't have any current cure why not try something that is at least already shown in phase one to be safe yes exactly in fact david fagenbaum i don't know if you know david he he's uh uh he cured his didn't cure he's treating his castleman's disease using rapamycin. And so the numbers are interesting, right? There are 3,000 FDA approved drugs and there are 12,000 diseases. And his work right now is saying, can we fund looking at which of those 3,000 drugs might have a dual use for the 9,000 diseases that don't have a treatment, right?

They're already on the market. They're already in production. They're already shown to be safe in humans. And so rather than developing a brand new treatment. So his efforts called EveryCure. And he just announced it at the Clinton Global Initiative a couple of weeks back. David and Peter, what is your personal preference to when you feel comfortable enough to try something? David, you probably have a lot of exposure to this because you're constantly

testing things in the lab. When do you say, okay, you know what, I'm good enough to put myself on the line here. And Peter, likewise, I'd like to know for you. myself on the line here and Peter likewise I'd like to know for you uh I consider myself a chief guinea pig for a lot of uh of what's out there uh Tony Robbins who's a mutual friend of both of ours and I think about that all the time it's like huh interesting so um listen if it's I'm probably not likely to be the first human really never talk about something unless I'd tried something. And so I never recommend anything. I'm not even an MD. I'm a PhD. But I will talk about my own experience in a way that will allow others to think about it themselves.

I do find... Sam, yeah. I think it's important as we are speaking about this field and what's becoming available to explain either that it's something I do do or the reason I haven't. Right. And actually, a New York Times article was written about my lab and me. lab and me and they said uh um i think it was posed to the effect of well david you're conflicted because you're studying this molecule in the lab and you're taking it aren't you going to be biased and if there's something bad you'll hide it and i'm i'm thinking to myself i want to be the first person in the world to know that there's something wrong with this molecule because my father's taking it i'm taking it and i will tell the whole world to stop taking it if i see something

and i want to be that person to find it asap so it's actually it's it's flipped is that i'm looking for problems with these treatments because if i'm taking them or i tried them i need to know if there's a problem and so you know you can trust me that you'll hear from me first if there's a problem. And so, you know, you can trust me that you'll hear from me first if there is something that's negative. Yeah. I'm Ahmed Foreman. I've just started rapamycin, five milligrams for my own body weight. And I did a lot of research and talked to a lot of physicians about it and felt that the, you know, it's always a risk reward situation. And I just felt like at this point, the reward side was higher than the risk. Oh, for sure. And the older you get, the more so. But we tend to underestimate the risk of aging.

We don't think about it as much as we should. Aging is really, really risky. In fact, we It's known to cause death. Yes. It runs in my family. David, do you mind if I cut in? I build off of that for a moment. So one of the questions that came in was, let me find it here. It was, are we effectively, I'm going to shorten what they said, but are we effectively just kicking the can of dying here? I'm going to shorten what they said, but are we effectively just kicking the can of dying here?

And are we just prolonging it, say, 120, 500 years, whatever the case may be? Or is the proposition that we're going to live forever? And what's your take? And Peter, what's your take? All right. Yeah, we are kicking the can down the road, but that's the point. Life is wonderful. And the more times we kick the can down the road, that's the point you know life is wonderful and the more times we kick the can down the road the more life and wonder we have and so yeah i that's what it is i don't think that we're going to be able to kick the can down the road for an infinite number of years based on technology that i can foresee in our lifetime now i could I could be wrong, because I didn't foresee reprogramming as effective as it has become and age reversal. So never say never. But given my viewpoint right now, I think that 150 is achievable in many of our lifespans, but not immortality. Peter?

Yeah, so most definitely kicking the can down the road. The analogy is now I was, you know, on a vacation with my family, and we're having so much fun time. It's like, let's stay an extra week. You know, if you're enjoying life, you know, adding decades to it, but let's not forget we're in the steepest part of the exponential curve, you know, in terms of what's coming in AI and robotics and quantum computation. That's just on the edge of our capabilities. So yeah, I may not want this mortal body 50 years from now. I may want a upgraded body. But the idea of being able to see my grandchildren, my great-grandchildren to go to the moon, go to Mars, to see what happens next is extraordinary.

I don't, you know, Ray Kurzweil talks about the singularity, right? The point at which the speed of technological change is so rapid that we're unable to predict what's next. And that number is circa, you know circa the early 2040s. Let's not forget that's 20 years from now. I mean, it's not like 100 years, it's 20 years from now. So part of what we're talking about is intercepting the technologies that will give us longevity escape velocity. But beyond that, the technologies that will allow us to connect our minds to the cloud, maybe it's uploading ourselves. I'm not a huge fan of freezing myself. Are you, David?

Yeah. So I definitely want to get immortality or at least extreme longevity. Is that a real thing, Peter? Like an Austin Powers freezing yourself thing? Yeah, I know. Sure. There's a lot of people. Yeah. Cryonics is the technology it's the notion that if i freeze myself and i don't rupture the cells and there are ways to do that that hopefully technology super advanced technology

you know a hundred or a thousand years from now will be able to bring me back and restate my neural structures and my memories and so forth but that's that's a subject for another conversation hold on i have a question david uh have you ever visited or peter if you guys ever this is a very interesting question visited a facility where people are frozen i mean is this a i i i thought that this was all hearsay uh i have not uh either of i but there are a number of them uh and people i mean the first person I just saw an article about this. The first person frozen was about 50 years ago. And there are companies today that you'll wear a bracelet. And at the moment of death, when your brain function ceases, they will come in and they'll pull out your blood,

replace it with effectively an antifreeze and freeze you. And you can have the choice of freezing your entire body or coughing off your head and just freezing your head because it takes less energy to do that. It may actually work. I didn't think it would, but actually, given that we can now reset the age of cells, I can imagine that you can quickly unfreeze a person and get their cells to begin the rejuvenation process that we seem to be able to control now. And yeah, so I think I wouldn't do it myself, at least currently. But I think that it's not as crazy as it once seemed.

But I think that it's not as crazy as it once seemed. But I would rather stay alive by being alive. And I think the technologies to do that are increasingly here. It's a fun subject to think about, but I'd rather put my energy and focus into extending the healthy human lifespan. You know, Peter and I are very much into democratizing technologies and cryonics is not going to be for everybody. It's a very small number of people that can afford this. So that's, again, not a good reason to focus our energies on those kind of technologies. I have a lot of deep appreciation for that answer.

I have a great one I want to end it with, but Peter, this one was directed at you. Somebody wanted an update on, I didn't even know this was public yet the age reversal prize and i'm not sure if david you know about the age reversal x prize that peter has but obviously and let me just cue this up for everybody listening david's efforts are substantially uh documented realized and and very public right now he he's in my opinion the leading world expert on on anti-aging at the moment and um you know peter i think that you're now going to actively join this fight through one of your efforts um do you want to share how uh yeah sure and david is is very much involved uh he and george church are are my co-conspirators are if i would are scientific co-chairs of a $101 million age reversal XPRIZE.

And the question we've asked, I mean, we've been talking about the idea is, could we do, and it's not launched yet, to be very clear. We're majority funded. Dave and I have been having a conversation every few days on the rule sets and getting them really honed in. I hope to launch in the early part of 2023. But we talked early on about a longevity prize, but the problem with the longevity prize, like can you add 30 healthy years in a person's life, which we will, is you have to wait 30 years to see if you have a winner. But can you in fact reverse aging in someone?

In this case, the rules we're thinking about is can you give a therapeutic that lasts for less than a year but reverses biological age by 20 years or more david do you want to add your thoughts there yeah the goal is to inspire companies and labs, individuals to work on methods to safely reverse aging in multiple tissues and organs, to rejuvenate the body and make it function better. And this kind of prize money will be a huge incentive. I think it's going to have a big impact on the field and drive innovation in the same way other XPRIZES have done. So I'm super happy to be involved. We're looking at, you know, we're trying to decide what the focus will be. Dave and I are honing in on cognition, on muscle, on skin, on immune system. I mean, these are the things that as you age, you want to look good, you want to move well,

you want to think clearly, you want to be able to have a good immunity in a world of COVID and influenza. But, you know, this is about getting the smartest people on the planet to focus on one of the biggest problems, one of the biggest grand challenges on the planet, which is extending the healthy health span. And David, on a previous episode, you mentioned the economic impact for adding one healthy year on a person's life. What was that number again? It was staggering. Well, for the US alone, it's $86 trillion in the long run of doing that. So David, where should people go to find you? where should people go to find you well i'm active on social media um so find updated news there my podcast is still available and i'm working on season two and that's on all podcast outlets my book i think a lot of people got inspired by um and i was inspired by yours too peter my book is called lifespan why we age and why we

don't have to and i didn't get to talk a lot about what i do on my in my daily life which supplements and that kind of thing but that is outlined in large part on page 304 of lifespan so check that out um that's the cheat sheet but please do read the science as well and all of the future that's coming so that's where to find me um that is a good spot other than that um i'll be i'm working on a on a tv show that uh i'll let you know how that goes i do want to be able to show people the insides of our bodies and how we work and how to improve our bodies in our daily lives in a way that no show has ever done before. So stay tuned for that too. Nick, do you have a last question for us? I do. And I'm going to direct it at David and then Peter will have you recorded on this too.

David, the question that came in, I thought it was novel, is are you happy? If so, why? And was there ever a point in your life in which you weren't and what did you do because uh i like this because a lot of your research is pending on this fulcrum of whether or not people can resolve that okay uh am i always happy no most days i'm happy because i'm doing something that i dreamed of doing and i'm fulfilled but But I have down days. I have days where I get attacked by large pharma, by colleagues. I've learned to have a thicker skin, so I don't get full-blown depression. But it's still upsetting. But I've learned to trust in myself and be resilient and get up. I find that having teenage kids is the most challenging thing in life.

And I find that having teenage kids is the most challenging thing in life. And I have three of those. And I'm still trying to be a great dad. So I'm a struggling vegan and a struggling teenage dad. So that's who I am outside of research. us know what you think rate review and give us a follow find david across all socials he's very active and i think um we're just really blessed to have had him peter do you want to share any closing notes david uh it's a truly a pleasure to call you a friend a co-collaborator co-conspirator on this journey we're ahead of uh and have a beautiful day pal yeah you too it's great to have you as a co-pilot on on this final frontier of biology appreciate yeah appreciate you too take care