Longevity Research Has a Funding Problem: Here's Why

In terms of progress, like what has to happen for there to be a shift in the biological age of people where you could actually reverse it or where you could actually maintain the position they're at now for extended periods of time? First of all, let me answer that last part. So reversing aging is actually going to be pretty much the result of maintaining it. There won't be a just you maintain it because that would mean that you are repairing the damage of aging just exactly at the same speed that the damage is being laid down, which is ridiculous. If you can do that, you can obviously do it a little bit faster than it's being laid down. So you don't really need to think about the maintaining part. However, what we need is we need to be able to repair all of the types of damage. And because the human body is so very complicated, there are, of course, a lot of different types of damage. So it's a divide and conquer strategy. Many of these types of damage at the molecular level, cellular level can perfectly well kill you more or less on schedule. However, well, we fix all the others. So since the beginning, the Census Research Foundation, my organization, has focused on the most challenging, the most difficult types of damage because basically the easiest ones are being worked on by other people. We have, you see, we set ourselves up as an independent charity. So we're a charity. We're a public 501c3, which means that if someone gives us money, they get a tax break. But we're independent, which means that we do not rely on peer-reviewed government grants or anything like that. We just rely on philanthropy. The number two advantage of that is that we're not competing with a lot of other people who have their own ideas about what to do. And in particular, the people who are deciding who wins that competition are not, you know, in your public government grants, it's terrible. You know, you end up having to basically emphasize really boring, low-hanging fruit just in order to have a chance at getting funded because people want to avoid funding things that don't lead to high-profile publications soon. So you know, really ambitious, high-risk, high-reward stuff just doesn't get done. And so we focus on that because other people can't. That makes sense. And that's very unfortunate that that doesn't get done outside of what you're trying to do. Yeah. I mean, of course, this is a recognized problem. And the NIH, for example, have tried to address it with awards, with types of grants that are specifically focused on more cutting-edge visionary stuff. But the magnitude there is real tokenism. You know, it's less than 1% of the NIH budget. That's frustrating to you about the state of understanding repair and understanding the ability to fix things. Well, I'm not the kind of guy who gets frustrated very much. You know, I'm always a glass-half-full kind of person. So for me, what matters the most is the fact that the understanding that this is what aging is and this is how to deal with it has improved so much over the years. So I started putting out the idea that this was the way to go after aging 20 years ago. Up until then, the only game in town, really, was we've got to make the body run more cleanly and generate this damage more slowly than it naturally does. And that's a very big conceptual difference, right? So it's not surprising that it took me maybe 10 years to really get the damage repair approach taken properly seriously by my colleagues in the scientific community. But about 10 years ago, it was taken seriously. And in fact, over the past decade, people have been periodically reinventing the idea. And I don't necessarily always get as much of the credit as I probably ought to have, but I don't care about that. The main thing is I don't have to persuade anyone anymore. People get it that damage repair is at least, if not the way to go, at least a very promising way to go. So really what happens next is convincing people outside of the community, right? And there, there's been enormous progress as well. So when you and I spoke last five years ago, really, that was the end of the story. I pretty much won the scientific argument, but still no one was really listening. And then over the past five years, the huge thing that's happened is the private sector interest in this has taken off. So investors have been coming along. Typically, it's been led by the angel investor types, the seed investors, people who are willing to do really high-risk, high-reward stuff. But they understand that we're getting close enough that this is the next big thing, that we will actually have bonafide, a genuine rejuvenation medicine in the foreseeable future. How foreseeable? Well, you know, some of it's already in clinical trials. Like what kind of stuff? So for example, the stem cell therapy is now being used for aspects of aging with a really clear understanding of how they're going to work. Parkinson's disease is a great example of this, where stem cell therapy is the right way to go and it's in clinical trials. Something that's been in the news a lot over the past couple of years is Cenolytics, which are drugs that selectively kill what are called senescent cells. So these are cells that hang out in the body in a bad state where they're doing more harm than good. Not only are they not doing what they're supposed to, they're also secreting nasty stuff that damages their neighborhood. And so drugs have been developed that are seemingly pretty good at getting rid of those. And they're in clinical trials as well. And so we used to work on that area. We basically do no work on that area anymore, hardly any. And we may end up doing that at all a couple of years from now, just because other people are doing it. And so our money is better spent doing the stuff that's still at an earlier stage. And beyond that, we are able, even for things that are a couple of years behind that, so won't be in clinical trials for another year or two, we've been able even then to get investors interested so that we can actually spin the project out as startup companies and focus on the things that remain. And it's not just us, of course. There's lots and lots of... I mean, literally way over 100 other companies now that I work with because they're not spin-ups from my foundation, but they are doing closely aligned work. And so I'm literally spending probably a day a week on average just making introductions between entrepreneur founders, scientific founders with great science and investors who want to get involved.