"Aging comes down to loss of information"

How David Sinclair promised people eternal youth

Yuri Deigin, "Snob"

The other day there was an online presentation of a book by David Sinclair called "Life expectancy: why we are getting old and why it is not necessary to do this."

If you don't know who David Sinclair is, then you don't follow the fight against aging at all. In the last few months, David has become the most media scientist in this field. He regularly appears in the news, releases podcasts with such influencers (popular users of social networks) as Joe Rogan or Peter Attia, and generally tries in every way to stay on the radar. Of course, the presentation of the new book, organized by the Life Extension Advocacy Foundation, was very successful: at the moment, the record has already gained 9 thousand views. Which is quite solid for a small community of supporters of radical life extension.

About the author

Some of Sinclair's colleagues are already rolling their eyes at the next mention of his last name, although they admit that you can't refuse David the ability to spread the topic, and then capitalize this HYIP competently. He has already done this once with resveratrol, selling it in 2008 to the pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline for $ 720 million. And at the same time he earned several million for himself personally. Unfortunately, although resveratrol has shown impressive life-prolonging effects in animals, GSK has not been able to confirm them in humans. In 2013, the company closed the project.

After resveratrol, Sinclair and his team became interested in nicotinamide (more precisely, its mononucleotide form NMN). In 2017, Sinclair published an article on it, which was immediately picked up by many media outlets, and some even dubbed "a huge leap in the fight against aging" and suggested that the new drug would help astronauts maintain health during future flights to Mars. David himself modestly mentioned that only one week of therapy was enough so that the cells of old mice "could not be distinguished from the cells of young ones" – that's how well NMN supposedly repaired breakdowns in DNA.

Then, however, David's ardor for NMN cooled down a bit, and at the end of 2018, Sinclair apparently decided to play big and founded a whole anti-aging conglomerate called Life Biosciences, where he managed to attract $ 50 million. In parallel, David founded the "Academy of Health and Life Expectancy Research", which included himself and 15 other leading scientists involved in the fight against aging.

Let's venture to assume that David's immediate goal is to bring Life Bio to the stock market in the footsteps of another aging company, Unity Biotechnology, which went public a year ago and was estimated at a billion dollars at the peak of its capitalization. Apparently, in preparation for the springboard for the IPO of his conglomerate, David is actively engaged in PR activities, and perhaps for this purpose he wrote the very book that served as the reason for this article.

About the book

Let's return to the presentation of the book. Before plunging into reading some passages, David explained why he decided to write it. Here and further David's quotes are given in my translation.

"Being a leader in the field of [anti-aging] at Harvard and publishing in leading scientific journals, I saw the need for someone like me (in the end, it was me who turned out to be one) to tell what is really happening in our field. I have a unique advantage: I see results on mice and humans sometimes 10 years before you, and I wanted to share this."

Let's join the content of a potential bestseller that promises to reveal to us the secrets of eternal youth. Here is an extract from the introduction to the book, read by the author at the presentation:

"Ever since I can remember, I've wanted to understand why we're getting old. But finding the source of a complex biological process is like looking for a spring at the source of a river. It's not easy. In my search, I turned left and right, and there were days when I wanted to give up. But I persevered. Along the way, I saw many tributaries, but I still found what may be the same spring. In the following pages, I will present a new idea about how aging has evolved and how it fits into what I call the information theory of aging. I will also tell you how I came to realize that aging is a disease. <...>

What is the upper limit of our life expectancy? I don't think it exists, and many of my colleagues agree: there is no biological law that would make us grow old, and those who claim otherwise do not know what they are talking about. Most likely, we are still far from a world in which death will be rare, but we are not so far from pushing it away."

After the introduction, David read out several more passages, including the key thesis of the book:

"That's the reason we age: aging comes down to the loss of information. Not digital, genetic information, but analog information in our cells, epigenetic."

David Sinclair summarized his presentation with the following excerpt:

"I believe that aging is a disease. I believe that this is a curable disease; I believe that we will learn to treat it during our lifetime, and at the same time I believe that everything we know about human health will radically change."

After reading excerpts from the book, David answered a few questions. He was asked about resveratrol and nicotinamide, the recent sensational mini-study by Greg Fahey, as well as how David assesses the current prospects of humanity to create a radical means of prolonging life in the near future. That 's what he said:

"I changed my views during the writing of the book, because a big discovery was made in my laboratory. The article about him is still under consideration, but its preprint is on the Bioarchive. We were able to reprogram the mouse's eye and rid it of blindness by curing glaucoma and significantly rolling back its epigenetic clock, the so-called Horvath clock, that is, making it younger. Before that, even with rapamycin and other molecules we were working on – metformin, NMN – we would never have been able to live to 120. After all, it is extremely difficult to extend the average and maximum duration of human life even for a couple of years. We need a qualitative leap in our understanding and abilities, and this is exactly what I think we have managed now. And I've seen a lot in my career.

Therefore, now I predict a sharp increase in life expectancy if we can learn to use these reprogramming methods in humans. I hope to start the first security checks of this technology in the next two years. I am working on this with Juan Carlos Ispisua Belmonte from the Salk Institute, who will probably receive a Nobel Prize for this, as well as with Steve Horvath and Manuel Serrano."

I couldn't resist asking too. The fact is that, as David mentioned above, his group recently published a preprint of a scientific article that has not yet been reviewed on how, with the help of epigenetic rollback, they were able to restore vision and restore the ability to regenerate nerve fibers. What is an "epigenetic rollback"? I proposed this term in 2017 to describe the results of the same Belmonte, to whom David is reading the Nobel Prize. In short, an epiotcat is the return of epigenetic settings, that is, molecular labels on the DNA of a cell, to a younger state and, as a result, the rewinding of the epigenetic clock of the body (for example, the clock of Steve Horvath mentioned by David, about which the "Snob" was one of the first to tell). In fact, this is the Holy Grail of gerontology – systemic rejuvenation.

I am a long-time supporter of epiotkat, and I was interested to hear David's opinion about one of the so far unsolved tasks of this technology, namely, effective means of delivering new genes to all tissues of our body. So I asked if David was working on such delivery methods. That 's what he said:

"The challenge now is to deliver the components for gene therapy to most of the cells in our body. We don't have a good way to do this yet. I know that Roche has thousands of different AAV (virus used to deliver gene therapy elements into the cell. – Approx. author), which they produce to solve the problem. The good news is that we don't need to reinvent the wheel for clinical trials and for the drug to enter the market: there are already AAVs that work well for the eyes, Spark Therapeutics uses them, Editas also conducts tests with them.

Therefore, we are not going to pile new technologies on top of technologies: this threatens us with failure in clinical trials, which are already quite complex. But if we show that we can reverse the aging of the eyes in patients with glaucoma, it will be an excellent proof of principle. This is one of the areas we plan to start with, and I think by the time we get there, the problems of gene delivery will already be solved."

Well, let's hope that David's optimism will be justified and the problems of delivering genes to the diverse types of cells in our body will really be solved soon. In the meantime, we will closely monitor his progress in rejuvenating his eyes, nerve fibers and other organs and hope very much that everything will work out. Because, as it was noted in one of our previous notes, the fight against aging makes the world a kinder place.

Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru