Thoughts on How to Help Advance Work on the Treatment of Aging
This article lists a variety of types of activity and project that might be undertaken to help to speed up the development of ways to treat aging as a medical condition. If you don't have a background in the life sciences, but nonetheless find human longevity a compelling topic, and would like to work in the field, what can you do? That is a good question, and often asked. There are many options that don't involve working as a scientist in a laboratory, though educating yourself about the science helps a great deal when it comes to picking the better options from the array of choices on the table.
Aging is a set of molecular and cellular processes that affects us all, but what if we could extend our healthy lifespan and live longer, healthier lives? This is the goal of the rapidly growing field of longevity. And after my last post about leaving my CTO job to work on longevity a lot of people have reached out asking what I'm working on actually? What I'm building for longevity? The short answer is... nothing. Yet. The long answer is... well, this post. I believe that anyone can work on anything they put their mind to if they are willing to put in the time and effort to learn the necessary skills. Whether it's research, funding, talent, media, practical longevity, aging therapeutics, or infrastructure, there are numerous opportunities to make a significant impact in this field.
$6.96 billion was raised across 96 funding rounds in 2022. This may seem like a lot but it's actually nothing. Remember that Instagram was acquired for $1 billion. So trying to bring more funding to the longevity field is very much needed. Someone needs to help talented people transition into the field. And believe me, we need far, far more people working on longevity. Recruiting and community building are important. The narrative around longevity is changing towards a more strategic conservatism which is proving to have better adoption. But it's far away from reaching a mainstream level. We need more communicators designing and evolving new narratives for different people.
The first drug targeted to extend healthy lifespan by 10-20 years could be developed and commercialized this decade. Aging therapeutics usually means getting the science out of the lab. So most often than not, someone with biology background will try to start or join a startup around their expertise. But what about people who are not coming from academia? The reality is that it may take anything from 6 months to 1 year (maybe even more) of full dedication to gain enough context, map the gaps, understand low hanging fruits, understand which technologies are the most promising, and get in love with a strong hypothesis to join or build a startup around it. This is the hardest part: in an ocean of possibilities, which one to choose? Which one is the most interesting? What technology is the most promising? What are the low hanging fruits?