If Much Older than 30, Save More Aggressively Over the Next Decade or Two
Five years from now, it will be possible to fly to an overseas clinic and undergo a treatment that will clear out between a quarter and half of the senescent cells in your body. That will to some degree damp down fibrosis, restore tissue elasticity, reduce inflammation, reduce calcification of blood vessels, and in addition improve many other measures of health that are impacted by the normal progression of aging. In short you will walk away a little rejuvenated, literally: one of the root causes of aging will be turned back for some years, perhaps decades, however long it takes for the removed senescent cells to emerge once again. Given the present cost of senolytic drug candidates, varying from a few dozen to a few thousand dollars per dose depending on whether or not they are at present mass manufactured, I think that the likely initial cost of treatment five years from now will be somewhere in the $5,000 to $25,000 range. Higher would seem unlikely, given that this is a competitive area of development already, and lower will probably have to wait for bigger players to enter the game in regulated markets. That cost will then fall as availability spreads.
Senolytics are just the start. Five years to a decade after the first candidate therapy for breaking glucosepane cross-links in humans, that treatment will also be available to anyone with the necessary funds put aside. It will also turn back the clock, removing some portion of one of the root causes of aging. Tissue elasticity will be restored, hypertension controlled as arteries become more flexible, and scores of other consequences of cross-linking reduced in their impact. That first therapy could emerge in the laboratories this year or at any time thereafter; a number of groups are working on it. There are a range of other rejuvenation treatments and compensatory therapies at similar points, on the verge in one way or another. Gene therapies to boost muscle generation, or dramatically reduce blood cholesterol. Approaches to clear harmful amyloids from old tissue. The next twenty years will bring numerous opportunities to benefit for anyone willing organize their own treatments via medical tourism, and who happens to know enough about the field to pick out the metal from the dross.
Therapies are not free, however. Funds are needed. Thus anyone much over the age of 30 who has an interest in this field should be saving more aggressively than he or she is at present. Live more frugally. Put more aside. On one chart is the ascending curve of savings and safe investments, on another chart the descending curve of cost of therapies. The objective for most of us is to make those lines cross sooner rather than later. If you dent your savings in a way that pushes out the achievement of traditional retirement goals by a few years in order to undergo an effective rejuvenation therapy, I think that puts you ahead of the game. Besides, traditional retirement isn't going to look very traditional any more by the time most of the younger folk in the audience get there. The aging of the population ensures that more people will simply remain working because there will be more work to accomplish than young people available to accomplish it. The advent of rejuvenation therapies will mean that older people can in fact continue working. And not just working: living a life that is worth it; interesting and active. Rejuvenation means additional health and vigor, not just extra years.
The rest of this century will be a grand adventure. The course of a human life is no longer planned and plotted and set in stone as it was for your grandparents. Medical technology, the development of rejuvenation therapies, will break us from tradition and the limits that aging places on the human condition. The traditional ways and means, the passing of generations, the declining trajectory of old age, are on the way out, fast or slow, sooner or later. We'll all be making it up as we go, exploring entirely new territory when it comes to the manners and organization of society. In the early days, however, only the prepared will find it easy to hitch a ride. So don't be unprepared. Everyone in the younger half of life has years ahead in which to save funds while keeping a weather eye on the state of research and medical tourism. Having a nest egg put aside will make all the difference when it comes time to strike out, repair the damage that aging has inflicted upon your health, and stride forth into a far better future than was offered to our ancestors.
This is the discussion I've had with my wife. She knows as well as I do that we will be traveling for various anti-aging therapies as they become available over the next 5-20 years. The price range mentioned in the posting is what we're expecting to pay for such therapies.
Depending on the capital requirements, setting up my own lab to duplicate some of these development is also a possibility. The lab may be in my own home here in the U.S. or may be in a friends's biotech lab space in Taiwan. I know several guys I used to work with who own small biotech companies in Taiwan (instrumentation makers, micro-plate manufacturers, etc.). The technology to develop these therapies themselves from scratch is also getting cheaper as well.
I really hope it is quick and easy to find a molecule or enzyme that can safely break glucosepane and get to it in the extra cellular matrix. This could turn out to be very difficult, and take decades. So the next few years could be nail biting.
When Richard Faragher poo pooed the SENS agenda in his Oxford debate with Aubrey, his main criticism was that there are plenty of potential showstoppers like this that could hold things up for decades or even hundreds of years. Aubrey replied that technology is advancing, Faragher replied that technology does not always advance exponentially or even steadily in all fields and areas.
If you want to know the costs, let's see what we have so far:
Dasatinib - $100/50mg
Quercetin - $20 (cheap supplement)
Navitoclax - $300/100mg
Piperlongumine - $80/100mg
A1331852 - $700/25mg, redundant with Navitoclax
A1155463 - $700/50mg, redundant with Navitoclax
Fisetin - $20 (cheap supplement)
FOXO4-related peptide - rent a lab
travel expenses - let's say $500 flight
hospital - $50/d
+ insurance
+ profit
That's current market prices. I don't know about the recipe, but you probably want to skip that strange redundant stuff anyway and I bet that FOXO4-related peptide will make it to the market soon if it happens to be safe.
Matthias F: Do you know the price of stuff not in the market but available overseas? I mean, not rejuvenation related, but other drugs, for other diseases, just to compare.
If these therapies are safe and effective we could see government involvement similar to what happened with penicillin.
Well I hope it will be cheaper than five or six figures?
I wonder if an expertly managed 0 calorie fast for 15-30 days would not have a similar effect to one of those treatments but w/o the extreme price.
Lets say the cost of 1 month off work and what ever the price is for a professional medically supervised fasting camp.
Not saying fasting will move you to immortality but one or two courses in a lifetime might ablate a significant number of senescent cells, progenitor cancer-cells, perhaps remove some atherosclerotic plaque, Im assuming some negative epigenetic states are reset.
I've been looking at the people on youtube who run 30 days water only, sure at the end of that they are horrid. But look them up a few months later and many are looking very much rebooted in some sense. Glowing skin and what not.
We still have to wait and see how efficient these therapies will be in humans. I'm optimistic, but just saying. If they prove to be very good at rejuvenating the human body, I think there will be great enthusiasm not just in the scientific world but in society.
I'd like to think head then, though. If those therapies outlined here taken together do dramatically extend our lives, we should ask if there are other types of damage/malfunction coming our way, that for example only start when you reach 150. For example, by reaching very old ages and having broken glucosepane, the other types of crosslinks will start to matter at some point, they only do not matter for the current lifespan. Other forms of metabolic waste that accumalate very slowly might become a thing and so on. Does anyone think about that?
> Matthias F: Do you know the price of stuff not in the market but available overseas?
I just used Google so as long as I don't know what you want I cannot tell. But generally speaking most of the time it's not worth the hassle because you have to pay customs and taxes yourself and your time is money, too. If it's worth doing it, somebody has done it already and has a web shop for it.
Liz Parish paid 250.000$ for a single gene therapy if I remember it correctly.
Matthias, you don't want to be taking dasatinib for this. The side effects are brutal.
K, that topic comes up often, but there's so much stuff affecting us right now that it's pointless to worry about the slower stuff.
Martin S.,
No, she spent $200K to actually develop two CRISPR gene therapies from stratch in essentially a home-based lab. The whole story was in Technology Review and is quite fascinating. The cost of administering the therapies to other people will be much lower (but might still be low five figures - like buying a car).
> Matthias, you don't want to be taking dasatinib for this. The side effects are brutal.
Maybe they are tolerable for a single dose. I simply took the list out of the latest clinical trial article just to make a list of the actual costs involved, to see what is and isn't reasonably prized. In reality if you don't want to do it all by yourself you'd also have to pay the organizer and a doctor supervising the process, so $5000 seems to be reasonable if doing it overseas or even offshore, $25000 not so much.
Doing more than one patient at once can help bring the prize down significantly, because the actual drugs involved are not the cost factor.
I will have to wait 3-4 years after the first therapies for price to drop, $25k is just too expensive for me.
I am exactly 30 now.
I'm in the exact same boat as you, RS. I'd probably want to wait a few years regardless though, unless absolutely necessary.
I love this particular write-up, Reason. You provide a vision of what you expect over the next 10 years or so. I certainly hope it becomes true. I would be ok with the $5K to $25K, though cheaper would be better. And, I suspected many of your readers would comment on this article/blog.
My concern is, I would want to wait a few years (besides price going down, maybe)due to any unforseen negative side affects that noone thought of. I would rather not be a human guina pig.
But, if this does work out, it will be all over the news big time. I think huge amount of people will be interested in it and moving forward with compeition, prices should come down dramtically.
Matthias, Martin and Abelard, thanks for your replies. Dasatinib and the like have been available for other conditions for some time now. I was interested to know the price of some therapy that is relatively new and not approved yet but available by medical tourism. That would be a better comparison to the first rejuvenation therapies than dasatinib etc.
Robert, I don't think there will be so much hype among laypeople for rejuvenation therapies unless there is some good aging biomarker available and recognized by the mainstream physicians. For example, say you have a 50% efficient senolytic drug with no side-effects. Will the average guy on the street hurry to buy it? Unless there is longevity data for its users (and there will not be any for some decades) or a good biomarker, I don't think there would be so much interest in buying it outside the life extension community. See for example what happens with cryonics. Most people don't care about it because there is no resuscitated cryopatient yet.
Reason,
Where do you think the price will end up for senescent cell clearance with the method Oisin is proposing? The upper end of what you mentioned (around 25k), or much more?
@Ham: No idea. It is way too early in the development of this broader class of gene therapy to make more than educated guesses as to how much it will cost once mass manufactured. Then the dosage schedule (currently unknown, the optimal approach yet to be worked out for humans, as is the case for all senolytics) makes a sizable difference at the lower price points; a single shot and single clinic visit plus followup is going to cost less than four visits over weeks for partial doses over time, with assays along the way to adjust the schedule. Time from trained staff adds up as a cost.
@Antonio: I think that the biggest hurdle for cryonics is logistics, since the planning process is hard even for those living in the US / Russia - let alone when you need to die in a foreign country away from your family, which aside of being extremely scary is also something that could take weeks and thus cost a fortune in itself. The alternative, which is moving dead bodies across borders, is bureaucratically complex and tends to result in the brain being too degraded for any reasonable expectation of revival. Finally, freezing heads is 'ghoulish' enough to render building a facility where the pool of potential clients is small (i.e. anywhere in Europe) too risky for anyone wanting a reasonable shot at ever seeing a ROI.
A trip to Thailand for a one-off gene therapy treatment does not involve the same complexity, cost, uncertainty, or effort.
Biomarkers will be useful, but I believe that before they manage to convince anyone that changes will translate into additional years of life, there will be plenty rich people old enough to take the plunge. If these rich people then return from their beach holiday with more than just a healthy tan, their friends will follow suit and word of mouth will take care of the rest.
Sure it didn't work like this with medical tourism for stem cell therapies, but a new rotator cuff is not universally needed, and above all nowhere near as visible as even small improvements in, say, skin quality, hair colour, muscle mass, or gait. We are skeptical creatures who need to see to believe.
@ Antonio,
"I don't think there will be so much hype among laypeople for rejuvenation therapies unless there is some good aging biomarker available and recognized by the mainstream physicians"
I am not sure I agree with that statement. If people buy steroids, multi-vitamins, asprin, and a host of other "pills", some of which are questionable, then many will do what they believe can improve their bodies. Look at what some of the rich and famous people do to themselves. I think once the mainstream analyzes the clearing of senescent cells as a bona fide treatment, you may see significant hordes of people rushing in to take advantage of this treatment, if they believe it is safe and not too expensive.
I really wish there was overseas this available for cutting edge cancer treatments. I recently had to watch a close relative die quite quickly from cancer, and not being in the US we weren't offered any treatment options other than Chemo.
Apparently there is a saying in the pharma industry "If it bleeds, it leads" which means if a drug is preventing death then it is more worthy of investment as if approved the company can charge an arm and a leg for it.
So I am a bit surprised there is not much of this overseas arbitrage for cancer treatments. I did read this article about the CimaVax-EGF vaccine being used in Cuba: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-39640165
I also read a great medium article about a group of friends and journalists trying to get a richer individual to fund a small 10 person trial for an oncolytic virus without ethical problems (in reality without leaving themselves open to criticism that a rich individual paying for treatment is grossly unfair). Basically the rich individual pays for 10 people to go on a small trial, then gets given a dose themselves.
https://medium.com/mosaic-science/a-plutocratic-proposal-deba1f979bff#.qvedskg0j
I recently read about the use of LPS secreting salmonella in cancer and wondered what I would have done if this had been available to try at a Cuban clinic?
I think someone like Liz Parish might be able to get something set up, although it would be some work, and you would probably have to follow the recommendations of that Medium article in order to deflect criticism when experimenting on anyone other than yourself and making people pay for the treatment/experiment.
A capable individual carrying this work out could help to bridge the "valley of death" for many treatments, where something has been proved in a mouse model in the lab, but big biotech and pharm companies aren't yet willing to fund more development to the point where the FDA will allow a human clinical trial to begin. If there is good, albeit small, data on a treatments use in humans already out there, that my open some wallets.
Here is the actual LPS salmonella study: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5040766/
Or how about this, Cowpea Mosaic Virus particles seem to act as a super potent adjuvant when injected into cancer.
http://www.genengnews.com/gen-news-highlights/plant-virus-used-as-cancer-immunotherapy-agent/81252142
If Liz Parish or someone similar was offering this to try in Cuba, I might have mortgaged this relative's house for a couple of hundred grand and paid for the treatment of my relative and ten local Cuban cancer patients.
Hi,
I believe average people won't be truly looking for it, they might be willing but not all that much (at first), as said, the 'news' of some person getting rejuvenated or having senescent cells removes will, at a certain point, reach the mainstream. But for the most part it will almost be like under the radar stuff, it will pass-through like it never came : most invisible. That's not to say, that some people won't go for it; some will (like the people here) but most people won't bother/won't Be bothered all that much. You just have to look at all
Rich people do spend huge money of anti-aging stuff, that's why they look so good, they buy the entire anti-aging boutique for themselves and have endless supply..not the regular people who have no money. I'm not talking against rich people (Great for them. Rich = Survive = Money = Resource = YEars Life), but clearly it'S matter of money, yet again. Poor people don't give a...because they will stay poor, and may die poor too; a Free Therapy they might get it but is there anything free in this life ?
Get Rich or Die, poor, trying.
Most people can't even start save anything, because there is nothing to Save. There is only something - To Survive - each month (rent/food/blalbla/resources). People who make 50K-200K, great for them, for the below 25K which represents that large Swath, there's not much (left) to save when all is paid for at the end of the month and your bank account shows : 0.
Only if we make a Huge Visible reversal of Aging, I'm talking Rejuvenation 'Make grand-ma back to 20 years old'.
One more thing, if you look at things like Quercetin and dasatinib though great, have you seen any one jump on a plane any time soon... ? People are not convinced, it's not tangible; you need better Marketing pitch than that to convince people. Just saying, senescence therapy will be like the rest of anti-aging stuff - most (regular/poor middle people, not the life-extension people who follow this) they won't care and will eat at McDonald's to get some more senecent cells or smoke a few more cancer sticks (while smiling at revolting pictures on smoke packs) and these senescent therapy will have about as much appeal as watching wall paint dry and slowly peel off...
I completely agree with CANanonymity and I think these are reasons priority should be given to glucosepane clearance if it has a strong chance of altering appearance, that would be the real money maker that could fund the other areas of research, everyone can understand and wants to look young.
There are probably enough relatively affluent people around the world who follow this type of blog to amount to millions of potential early customers. This will be sufficient to form a big customer base for early SENS clinics with medical tourism.
About glucosepane clearance: It seems that the rest of SENS is steaming ahead such as senolytics, stem cells, mitochondrial gene therapy. Is there any type of fundraiser planned for glucosepane this year?
Glucosepane research has now $300,000+ per year http://www.diabetes.org/pathway/recipients/?referrer=https://www.google.com/ It probably doesn't need SRF funding anymore.
The more widely and quickly this information becomes known, the sooner a wider market demand will develop for these treatments, which will then increase the availability and lower the costs, as per market dynamics. Therefore, it's in everybody's interest to spread this news around.
@sanman: Agreed, this needs to be treated as mainstream news similar as sports and weather, talked among average people.
I very much hope that when elimination of senscent cells becomes available via medical tourism, there will be alot of "noise"/publicity about it. If so, this will be the beginning of anti-aging becoming mainstream, IMO:) Then, there should be a lot of money (how do you say venture capitalist) thrown at anti-aging companies. That will be awesome.
Regarding ordering drugs from overseas and paying taxes and duties, I've been buying anti-aging drugs from an Indian pharmacy for twenty years (metformin mostly, and recently dasatanib and rapamycin). Never had a problem with delivery, and never paid taxes or duty. Cost was tiny compared to US pharmacies. Didn't need a prescription.
If you're more adventurous, you can get experimental drugs synthesized by Chinese labs for reasonable cost. I did that for an experimental drug that cured schizophrenia in mice.
@Jim Rice - do you have a link for your Indian pharmacy company? Also (and this is rather critical), have you tested yourself to see if that Metformin is legit and was/is having the expected effect on your blood sugar levels?
What other drugs, and what side-effects have you had from them? Have you noticed any difference in how you look, feel, or in terms of measurable medical benefits?
Thanks for your answer!
FWIW.
For the last couple of months I have been taking gradually increasing doses of Quercetin, Fisetin, and Dried Piper Longum (the pepper that Piperlongumine is extracted from. I have no idea what the concentration of Piperlongumine in Piper Longum is). I take an alternating dose of one of the three every 7-10 days. I am up to:
Quercitin: 3,000 mg.
Fisetin: 500 mg.
Piper Longum: 2,400 mg
I plan to continue increasing the doses until I feel side effects, die, or it gets to some stupid high amount.
@JohnD - any noticeable effects as of yet?
@Paul
No noticeable effects
@JohnD, keep us updated on your progress.
How's that coming up now we are in 2024?
Any list of recommended clinics where any of that is possible?