Fight Aging!

I made the pilgrimage to storied Manhattan last week for the first conference organized by the Life Extension Advocacy Foundation (LEAF), titled Ending Age-Related Diseases. It was well organized, all in all a very professional effort. Congratulations are due to the volunteers who set it all up and kept everything moving smoothly. The attendees were a mix of researchers, entrepreneurs, advocates, interested members of the public, and investors of various stripes - a good mix, one that in the present excitable market environment provoked a great deal of useful networking.

The presentations were recorded and will start to appear online as the LEAF volunteers process them. You should make a point of taking a look when they turn up, particularly the view from the investor side of the house. Investors who are personally interested in the success of a field are very different beasts from the run of the mill individual who mechanically seeks returns. They usually have an interesting perspective on the real world challenges inherent in turning a promising technology into a therapy, and that was the case here. The Fight Aging! audience is perhaps more familiar with the science, and so may find considerations of the business side of the house novel and interesting.

While attending the conference, I had a chance to meet in person a sizable number of people who I have only talked to via email over the past decade or more. I apologize to the apparently equally sizable number of people I didn't have the chance to talk to during the breaks between presentations. Keith Comito of LEAF announced that the organization will be making this a yearly event, so I will endeavor to do better next year. Hopefully at that time I will have more interesting things to say about progress towards rejuvenation therapies at Repair Biotechnologies, and the state of the industry as a whole.

As I see things, this sort of mix of participants is very much needed in order to keep progress underway in our rejuvenation research community. We need a regular stirring up of the everyday patient advocates, the entrepreneurs and employees who build therapies, the scientists who discover new opportunities, and the investors who fund those tasks. Communication and building bridges are hard tasks, and there is ever a tendency to form camps and forget how to travel between them. There is a vast chasm between academia and commercial medical development, and all too many promising foundations for therapy fall in and are never seen again.

Is this because scientists are not doing enough to reach out to entrepreneurs and investors? Is it because there are too few entrepreneurs? That the universities make it too hard to license technologies developed in academia, discouraging investment across the field? That investors and their funds are sitting around waiting to be handed opportunities in a nice, neat package, rather than doing more legwork? I'm inclined to put more blame on the investor community simply because they have the resources to do better and more interesting things. They could work more systematically when it comes to reaching back into the research community to pick up promising work and assemble companies to develop it. Doing so in a robust, organized way will help all parties.

While at the conference, I buttonholed a number of people to espouse what we shall call the Dasatinib Empire concept. At this point in time, I think there is more than sufficient evidence to consider that dasatinib and quercetin in combination is most likely a useful, cheap senolytic treatment - a legitimate rejuvenation therapy that partially clears out the senescent cells that cause age-related disease and dysfunction. A single dose is in the $100 to $200 range, less if one shops cleverly, and one treatment every few years is likely close to the optimal dosage. Human trials, such as that ongoing at Betterhumans, will prove the benefits over the next few years, but it looks very compelling even right now. Dasatinib has side-effects that are very well categorized thanks to the past fifteen years of studies as a cancer therapeutic, and they appear neither onerous nor life-threatening in the senolytic scenario of a single dose once every few years, rather than the sustained dosing of cancer treatment.

Given this, and that dasatinib is a generic pharmaceutical, out of patent protection, why can't someone build a serious non-profit or for-profit effort to deliver dasatinib and quercetin at scale to the tens of millions of older people who would benefit significantly from it? An initiative could finalize the human data currently in progress, and then it would be as much a matter of delivering information as delivering pharmaceuticals: anyone can set forth and obtain dasatinib if they only know how to do it. Doing this at scale would probably entail driving a very large truck through the loophole of off-label use of a generic drug, working to help as many older people as possible, as rapidly as possible, and then weaponizing favorable public opinion to fend off the inevitable attention of the FDA. Indeed, this could be a path to change the regulatory landscape, to force regulators to accept the treatment of aging as a fait accompli. I'd say this is a better, more aggressive, more plausible way to do it than the slow approach of trying to change the FDA from within.

It is the case that FDA officials, as a rule, are strongly opposed to the prospect of widespread off-label use, meaning the physician-ordered use of a treatment for something other than the purposes the FDA has approved. They see their role as protecting the population, and off-label use, while completely legal, is viewed as an end-run around their shield. However, and as I have argued in the past, the FDA is too much of a barrier, too strongly opposed to any and all risk, too unwilling to grant patients any choice in their own lives. The cost of that barrier is higher than the benefit. Why should so many millions of people suffer when the evidence strongly suggests that their suffering could be alleviated to some degree at low cost and little risk? Shouldn't it be their choice?

Manhattan is a wealthy enclave. There are any number of individuals resident in that small section of New York real estate with the wealth, connections, and acumen to make something like the Dasatinib Empire a reality, were they to turn their attention to it for the years it would require. At some point it will become obvious to even those who have not watched the development of our longevity science community that the benefits of early senolytics are large, the costs are low, and there is thus much that might be accomplished in the world by joining up these dots. So I'll keep mentioning this to people. Sooner or later it will happen.