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Hey there! Damien with episode 52 of The Quantified Body podcast here. This one’s a bit of a test episode. It’s a little bit different in format. It is longer and it is taken from a conference that I went to on the topic of longevity, and more to the point, life extension and the now growing market, growing industry around the topic of life extension.

You may know that that’s been a personal interest of mine for quite a while. This podcast is basically looking at topics of life extension, longevity, performance and general wellness and how we can quantify and ensure that we’re getting those types of results.

So this is something I’ve wanted to spend some time on for a while and you could look at this as an introduction to the current status of life extension tools and technologies and where things are and what you could do an experiment with today and what the risk profile of those tools and technologies could be today. Or actually the potential quantified benefits, if any.

So this is a test episode because basically it’s based on some live videos that I recorded with people attending RAADfest 2018 which was held in October in San Diego. RAADfest is one of the larger life extension technology conferences today. RAADfest stands for Revolution Against Aging And Death and then fest for festival.

So pretty much everyone who is active in this new industry, companies like Life Extension Foundation, the hosts and the leaders of this conference, Coalition for Radical Life Extension, investors, biotechnology startups in this new industry which is called Rejuvenation Biotechnology. That’s the name it’s starting to get for itself. All of these people were here at this conference so you’ll see there are a number of different profiles that I interviewed and that you can find in this interview.

So I think it’s a good episode to get an introduction into these topics to start understanding where life extension is and start getting an idea of where you may want to look into more and learn more about one of these topics. If you want to go check out the live videos, those are all on the Facebook page. So you can go to Facebook and just search the Quantified Body and you’ll find all of these interviews in the live videos there.

I would encourage you to skip around this episode. It’s long, as I said. So if there’s a specific topic that you’re interested in, you may want to check out thequantifiedbody.net blog and check out as always, we have the highlights, the times, who’s talking about what subject at what time in the episode so you may want to just jump to one hour or two hours in. Pick the area that you’re most interested in first. However, going through the whole thing will give you an overview of where things are at.

So with that, just let me give you some brief introduction into the topics and the people who are going to appear in this episode.

The first one is Aubrey de Grey from SENS Research Foundation. I interviewed him in episode 14 of The Quantified Body podcast. Really in this episode, he gives us an update on how life extension has moved from the fringe, basically something that was looked at as a fringe science, to becoming a new biotechnology industry where you know have a lot of funding coming in and a lot of startups becoming active.

As I said before, this is now starting to become labeled, rejuvenation biotechnology. I just went to another conference on this in London just a few weeks ago where there were a lot of prominent people and investors. So you can really see that this is growing into an industry all of itself more credible. So that was a good discussion on the progress of the tools and the funding and everything that’s going to bring it alive and make it happen in the longer term.

The next person I interviewed here was Liz Parrish from BioViva. Liz runs a biotechnology company focused on life extension and she was the first person to undergo gene therapy targeting life extension and this took place three years ago. She’s known as patient zero in some circles for this reason. She just presented the results from her telomere lab. Telomeres are something that people are looking at to measure how we age.

The idea is that telomeres get shorter as we age so you can have an idea of someone’s biological age based on measuring the length of your telomeres. So hers were actually shorter than average when she first tested before her gene therapy and now they are longer than average three years down the line using the same test from SpectraCell Labs to measure that. So with Liz, we talked about plans for her company to support the development of life extension therapies and of course her own experience with gene therapy to extend life.

The next person we have on the show is Reason from Repair Biotechnologies. So this is one of the new biotechnology companies that has emerged and been funded in this area already and they’re working on life extending therapies. He’s also the author of the blog Fight Aging which has been around for a really long time.

I’ve known about this blog for a very long time and he’s constantly been covering the science, the updates and how things are progressing; the ideas, tools and so on. So it was interesting to talk with him about his own self-experiments with senolytics, which you’ll learn about is probably the newer term tools that people will be using to aim to extend or rejuvenate themselves and also just an overview of where he’s focused and the science he has covered and some of the more interesting things.

The next person is the episode is Brian M. Delaney from Life Extension Foundation. So Life Extension Foundation, you may know of, is a company that has been very active in the supplements area and they tend to have better formulated supplements than the average company and they’ve always written pretty good articles with in depth references and citations. So Brian is sort of chief guinea pig for the life extension which is his new role he has taken on. He has been an advocate and someone who has practiced caloric restriction for a long time.

So we talked a little bit about that and then we talked about his new job with Life Extension Foundation and the things and the tools he has been testing which include senolytics and Rapamycin; two potentially newer term tools that can be used for longevity purposes to try and extend your life. Also go into depth in both of those and his own experiments on what he has been up to.

Next person on the show is Quantified Bob, Bob Troia. So Bob appeared in episode 22 way back in the Quantified Body. He does a lot of n=1 experiments and he quantifies those so obviously he’s a good fit for this podcast so you might want to go back and check that. Basically, we had a chat about what he found interesting at the RAADfest, which of the life extension topics he’s most interested in and also his other recent quantified experiments that he has done since we last spoke to him.

And finally, the last person in this episode is Howard Chipman from Young Plasma. Now Young Plasma is providing transfusions today of young blood so blood from young adults to people who are older in order for them to benefit from rejuvenating properties. This was first tested in the 1920s in Russia in fact.

Since then, there have been mice experiments and there has also been some allozymes as human studies which have shown benefits from basically just transfusing younger blood into people with older blood. So he talks about that service, he talks about the latest study , Ambrosia, and how he got involved with it and what patients are doing and who’s using this currently. So that’s obviously interesting therapy right there also.

As per usual, there are extensive show notes for this episode. They may be more useful than usual. There’s links to everything mentioned in the show including the studies and easy listed takeaways. There are summaries of the biomarkers, the tracking, the tools and the tactics we discussed in this longer episode.

So please reference those especially if you’re not sure about anything. I know some of the topics get a little bit deep in this episode because some of the topics like senescent cells are actually complex. So I think you might find some of the show notes useful to get up to speed there.

Also if you want to receive in future, updates on episodes and so on, go to thequantifiedbody.net forward slash newsletter and from then on and henceforth, you will get an email from me in your inbox whenever a new episode comes out with all of the details of that episode. So you won’t even have to go to the blog.

That’s it for me. I’m now going to leave you to delve into these episodes and get a broad introduction into the topic of life extension.

[MAIN INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT]

(00:09:32) [Damien Blenkinsopp]: There we go. We’re live again. We’re at RAADfest again and we have Aubrey de Grey sitting next to us which is fantastic. If you’ve been watching the podcast, you’ll probably know that we spoke to Aubrey de Grey in episode 14 which was about three years ago I think. So we’re not going to go over all of that stuff. If you want to get up to speed on the basics and what he’s doing, check that out later and then you can come back to this. That’s probably the best way to go about it.

We want to talk about what’s going on now, what you’ve been achieving and then how it’s all going. So first of all, we didn’t talk a lot about the SENS Research Foundation; how it’s structured and basically what the mission is and how it’s structured to achieve that. So I thought that would be a good place to start.

[Aubrey de Grey]: Yes it is. If you [check 10:12], first of all, just generically, but also because that has been changing over the past couple of years. So we are based in California and we’re a charity. We’re a 501c3 as it’s called in the U.S. and that means that people can give us money with tax advantages. We also incidentally have an affiliate charity in the U.K. so that U.K. taxpayers, ID taxpayers from most of Europe can do the same.

But our goal is not only to get work done internally on the basis of money given to us, but also to be the engine room of the industry. Of course you might think well what is this industry? There has been this thing called the Anti-Aging Industry for quite some time, but it doesn’t have a very good repute. That’s no surprise because it’s fundamentally based on things that don’t work or hardly work. We are creating. We’re the new industry; the Rejuvenation Biotechnology industry [unclear 11:05].

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: You renamed it.

[Aubrey de Grey]: Things that do work. That’s right. Now that has really only happened over the past couple of years. There have been investors coming to us saying, “What can I do? How can I get involved in this? But I don’t like giving money away so please give me an investment opportunity.” Historically, we would not have been able to help them because the projects that we were working on were too early a stage for us to be able to make a case that really joined the dots all the way to eventual profitability.

That is no longer the case. We’re now up to about half a dozen projects that we gestated for, in some cases several years, and that we eventually were able to spin out and to start up companies and every one of those companies is doing pretty well in terms of bringing in money. In some cases, money that is the equivalent of multiple years of our entire annual budget.

The foundation is still very small. We only survive on something like five million dollars per year. Some of these companies are getting twenty or more and that’s fantastic because it means the science can get done faster. It’s also fantastic in the sense that we can focus on the projects that are lagging behind and still have not reached the point where they can be spun out and made interesting to investors.

(00:12:22) [Damien Blenkinsopp]: Yeah. So is that transformed over the last three years?

[Aubrey de Grey]: Really, yes. Until, I’m going to say four years ago, we had never done this. Not only we had never done it, but at the moment we’re in a position where we’ve spun out six companies I believe now, but actually we’re also working closely with at least a dozen or more other companies.

They’re not spin-outs, but they’re doing very closely aligned work and the people are very much looking to me and the foundation as source of introductions to investors for example. So for me personally, it’s extremely gratifying. I’m able to maintain this position of influence in the emerging industry that I historically had in the non-profit world.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: So this is fantastic. So you listed several companies, the twelve companies that you spun out yesterday and also the SENS aligned. How many are there in total now that you consider within the right parameters?

[Aubrey de Grey]: Yeah. It’s a continuum. It depends how much [unclear 13:19] but at least a couple of dozen.

(00:13:22) [Damien Blenkinsopp]: Wow. Wow. We’ll get into some of the specifics of that. So one of the things I wanted to talk about is when you published your book. Was that 2008? The first year?

[Aubrey de Grey]: 2007.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: 2007 and you published the seven types of damage of aging?

[Aubrey de Grey]: That’s right. I had been talking about that for at least five years before that.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Yeah. Last night, you said that basically that hasn’t changed. That model has withstood time.

[Aubrey de Grey]: It has withstood the test of time, that’s right. Always though was the risk that there could be some new type of damage that had not been discovered.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Yeah.

[Aubrey de Grey]: Of course there still might be, but every year that goes by when it’s not discovered is increasing circumstantial evidence that it’s never going to be.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Yeah.

[Aubrey de Grey]: Similarly with regards to therapies, it’s very important also to recognize that we have not had any bad news of the form of this or that approach that we thought we would be able to take to succeed in repairing this particular type of damage is not going to work for some reason.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: It’s not dead end.

[Aubrey de Grey]: That has not happened either.

(00:14:18) [Damien Blenkinsopp]: Excellent. Excellent. Ok so if you got these seven areas, where are we making progress with this portfolio of companies now? Are there specific areas where we’re making progress now?

[Aubrey de Grey]: So that’s a much better finding. Really all of them, the progress is really encouraging; much faster than it used to be. So there is a possible big spectrum in terms of how far along they are. In fact, there has always been that spectrum.

So one of the areas is stem cell therapy to repair cell loss; cells dying and not being able to be magically replaced by cell division. That’s an area which was already sufficently established when we began a decade ago, but we have always deprioritized it with just an occasional little thing in the stem cell area. But other people with good money and from other sources are doing it so that’s [check 15:04] there. But pretty much all the other areas we have worked in, we have done quite a lot and yes they’ve all moved forward.

So the only one that is entirely within the foundation still is mitochondrial mutation. Even there, it’s probably not going to be all that long before we can [check 15:23]. Because after maybe ten years of working on it without anything really to show for it even before we were publication, we started making breakthroughs. We had our first real groundbreaking breakthrough publication two years ago now and we’ve made massive progress since then. We are universally recognized in the field as the world leaders in that area now and we believe that it’s going to be ready for private sector prime time fairly soon.

Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean that we can shut up shop and declare victory at the foundation. Because first of all, we are obviously doing other stuff in addition the research. We have this very vibrant education arm and also we do regular outreach. But also, even though some examples within these seven things are already out there in the private sector, it’s been out, nevertheless there are other examples that still need to be gestated for a bit longer before they can really be of any proposition.

(00:16:16) [Damien Blenkinsopp]: So some aspects of that damage hasn’t been spun out yet. So you said some of the mitochondrial mutations are looked at internally. When you’re saying internally, does that mean that you’re funding internal research or you’re funding external researches that you think are appropriate, but it’s internally funded?

[Aubrey de Grey]: In that case, it’s actually literally internal. We do the work in our own facility in Mountain View, California. We have a couple of other projects in Mountain View, but most of our work I think will be [check 16:44] about two-thirds is funded extramurally. In other words, we support professors in laboratories and institutes and universities.

(00:16:52) [Damien Blenkinsopp]: Wow. Ok, cool. Ok so if we look at the timeline, this is the kind of stuff people are going to be really interested in. If we look at the timeline of where these companies are and where you think they’re going to get to some commercial or even clinical trials or something that people could actually get involved in, could you paint a rough picture or maybe something we can expect?

[Aubrey de Grey]: Sure, absolutely. Absolutely. So let’s take Ichor. I would say out of all the actual spin-outs that we’ve had, that’s probably the poster child in the sense that it’s the one that has attracted the most funding so far and it has also grown in terms of the diversity of things it works on. Ichor was set up to work on macular degeneration which is the number one cause of blindness in the elderly. It’s an example of what we call LysoSENS. It’s caused by the accumulation of waste products inside the cell in a particular part of the cell called the lysosome.

We developed a method to fix that in house in our Mountain View facility. For several years, we couldn’t quite get there. We ran into the sand for a long time and we were a bit frustrated and one of our employees decided that he wanted to run with it. He felt he had a solution to this last problem. He was right it turns out [check 18:02]. He formed his company; fine with us.

We only took a very small nominal percentage of the company in return for the intellectual property. The technology went forward, they’ve got good money and there and then, they’ll be doing clinical trials next year or possibly even by the end of this year. That’s just one example.

Another company Covalent Bioscience which is in Texas. It’s a company formed out of the work that we funded on amyloidosis which involves waste products accumulating outside of the cell especially in the heart. It’s a very important phenomenon in terms of mortality and the [check 18:38]. That went well enough that the two main academics who were spearheading that work have now quit and gone full-time with the spin-out company. They are again hoping to be in clinical trials in the very foreseeable future so it’s happening.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Yeah. It’s starting to get to meet the road. Which do you think is going to be, I guess it’s the mitochondrial mutation which is going to be the last thing.

[Aubrey de Grey]: I don’t like to say. At this point, I would say the mitochondrial mutation strand is probably moving as fast as for example, the extracelular crosslinking strand; the [check 19:14] problem. The [unclear 19:15] problem is being spun out right now. It will be out within the next month. It just came together a little bit more quickly.

But I wouldn’t necessarily go on a rant in terms of how far along they are or how soon they’re going to be in the clinic. It’s all neck and neck. That’s how it should be. We have always been very careful to prioritize the ones that are at the most difficult, most challenging, most neglected so that they’ll catch up.

(00:19:43) [Damien Blenkinsopp]: So I was thinking about the seven types of damage. Liz Parrish, she has done one type.

[Aubrey de Grey]: Well two really.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: All right, two types of [check 19:52] so that covers two areas of damage?

[Aubrey de Grey]: Yeah.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Ok. Basically you’re going to have people which are covering some of the damage, but not some of the other damage and it’s a bit difficult to understand what that may look like.

[Aubrey de Grey]: We have to give our finger on the past [check 20:07] very carefully because you’re right, but the utility of this taxonomy, the seven-point plan that we have must never be lost sight of. The utility comes down to the fact that for each strand, even though there may be many examples of a problem within the strand, for each strand there is a generic therapy. So if you have cell loss, it’s just stem cell therapy.

Now, different organs have different cell types and they need different stem cell therapies. So if you get one working, that’s not the end of the story, but it is kind of halfway to the end of the story because the stem cell therapy, even though they’re different, they have an awful lot in common. That means that once you’ve got a couple of them working then getting the next one working is going to take much less effort and much less time. There’s much fewer unknowns so we can push that forward.

It also means that it’s easier to make a case whether to scientists or to investors that this is something that they can make money out of in a timeframe that they’re comfortable with.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: So in a sense once you’ve made progress in one of these areas, you’ve gone to clinical trials and you prove that even if it’s one-tenth of the actual end-output you need for that area, you’re validated, you’ve got credibility and that will make it a lot easier.

[Aubrey de Grey]: Let me also emphasize that you don’t necessarily even need to get as far even as clinical trials. So the strand of SENS that has been most in the news in the past couple of years is definitely senescent cells; removal of senescent cells. In that case, the company that’s really the flagship in this area, Unity Biotechnology, which is somewhat associated.

We could not describe them as a spin-out from us, but some of the founders have worked with us and have been funded by us. That company was able to attract its first [check 21:48] respectable enough like mid seven digit money on the basis of ridiculously preliminary data. Not just that it wasn’t clinical. It was only in mice, but also it was genetic models of mice that gave no particular reason to expect that one would actually be able to create drugs. It was even accelerated aging model which are always unreliable and they still were able to make a lot of money.

Since that time, their data has improved. They’re now worth nearly a billion dollars so this is a big deal. They’re not going to start clinical trials until later this year.

(00:22:18) [Damien Blenkinsopp]: Wow! This kind of leads on to some of the names you have in terms of the investing companies were quite big. You’ve got Juvenescence and you’ve got Andreeseen Horowitz, some huge names in the BC world and also Y Combinator. Has that made a difference? Why did these companies or these funders come in?

[Aubrey de Grey]: It’s beginning to. So some of the, well really all of the really early investors when the industry just was starting to begin three or four years ago, were private individuals using essentially, well starting with their own money. Juvenescence is an example. Jim Mellon and his colleague Greg Bailey, both very successfully invested in other areas and decided to get really into this. Other just private individuals decided to start their own thing.

It wasn’t so much a movement at the investor side of things at that point. But then after a year or two of that, things started to change. So Andreessen Horowitz, obviously as you said an extremely established name in BC, doesn’t do much Biotechnology. They still don’t. They decided to get into this area just because they’re with this one company, BioAge. Which again is not technically a spin-out from us, but we work very closely with them, that was doing bioinformatics. So Andreessen Horowitz is very heavily involved in informatics in general.

So it was just something that they felt that they could understand really and do well. They felt a bit comfortable with it, it looked promising and of course, they were right. The company’s doing extremely well. Then Y Combinator has got into this whole field more recently, just really in the past year. They have again, not had much influence on Biotechnology until recently. They decided to do that and furthermore, they’ve done it in a proper way.

They’ve done in a way that recognizes that Biotechnology just takes longer to get going than IT. So the typical deals that they would have had for IT companies would be more like three months to get to demo stage and then we’re only going to give you a few hundred thousand to create.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: More effective products.

[Aubrey de Grey]: Yeah. Whereas when you get to Biotechnology, they recognize the difference in its order of events to mobilize the time and the money.

Yes, they are very much very clear that aging is a major preoccupation of theirs. They want to get into a startup landing in the biology of aging as quickly as possible. They’ve already got a few companies which again of course we’re talking to. They are [check 24:34]. They’re literally on the same street of us. They’re literally two blocks away.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Well that’s useful.

[Aubrey de Grey]: Yes.

(00:24:41) [Damien Blenkinsopp]: Ok so you just mentioned bioinformatics and BioAge. I don’t know if you’re allowed to talk about BioAge. I heard they’re more of a stealth mode.

[Aubrey de Grey]: They’re not really stealth, no. In fact, they share about what they know quite a bit, but what they have done as a result though actually of successful fundraising is they have been able to go broaden beyond the bioinformatics side. So Christian Foley who started BioAge is… she made a name at Stanford in bioinformatics. But the predictive ability that she was able to demonstrate with her original very small team of people was so good.

It mainly focused on metabolomics, but now spreading out to other onyxes. It was so good that the funding came in that was sufficient to be able to do their own lab work as well as to validate some of the drug candidates that they were identifying in silico. So now I’ve heard that a number of very good lab scientists are working at BioAge as well; again, friends of us.

It’s an extremely mission-oriented company. They’re very, very strong on making sure that they don’t get diverted by short-term investors into doing the wrong thing. That’s not true only of BioAge. It’s true across the board of the companies we work with.

Lessons have really been learnt here. A decade ago, you had a few cases of very well meaning, very smart gerontologists going out and forming companies and getting investment to actually take things forward. Even though it was earlier days in terms of science. A great example would be elixir, a pharmaceutical study by Cynthia Kenyon and Lenny Guarente. Complete waste of time, but it became a waste of time because they got the wrong investors. Because they got people on board who were much more interested in short-term [check 26:13] than they were in actual long-term success and the whole thing ended up being a total clusterfuck. That’s not happening these days.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Is it because you’re advising?

[Aubrey de Grey]: It’s a bunch of reasons. Firstly, it’s because the founders of these companies recognized that risk and they’re very careful of what money they take. But secondly it’s because the opportunity exists to take money from people who are not going to do that; people who really are high-risk high-rewards type investor types who are very comfortable with long-term strategies and yet who also have sufficiently deep pockets to be able to be the major investors for a long time.

(00:26:54) [Damien Blenkinsopp]: Yeah. Great. So you mentioned bioinformatics and I was wondering how important is that to the overall strategy? Because we especially saw [check 27:01] some of the data and the stuff they’re doing and I’m hearing more about that data. It’s obviously something that we talk about here for validation. Does that also have to be an area of investment to push this forward by being able to validate the discovery you were talking about with BioAge?

[Aubrey de Grey]: It certainly does and it’s not just validation either. Well a lot of it is, but the sheer ability to make predictions so that you don’t have too many things to validate is the key really. Another great example in our space is Insilico Medicine who also received a load of money and mostly from Juvenescence in that case. Again, run by a longtime and very ardent mission-oriented guy, Alex Zhavoronkov; great friend.

They are usually state of the art machine learning techniques to achieve really fantastic results in terms of prediction of not only new drugs, but also new activities of old drugs that could be repurposed and their aftermarket is shorter in that case. Yeah and they’ve been able to get very good investment.

I believe that bioinformatics will never do everything You’re always going to have to do a lot of bench work and everybody knows it, but it definitely has its place.

(00:28:10) [Damien Blenkinsopp]: All right, great. So I’d like to pass a little bit on to you actually because we chatted last time just about what you do. Do you do any tracking for yourself? Are you interested in any of these life extension? One of the things I’ve heard about quite a bit here is senolytics because some people see this as something short-term they can do to enhance their health spans and they can get to these technologies. What’s your view to this for yourself? Are you doing anything or are you interested? Do you think it’s not really worth it because you’re just waiting for the big stuff?

[Aubrey de Grey]: Everybody’s different in this. I always tell people, “Don’t do as I do; do as I say.” The reason I say that is twofold. First of all, I’m just well-built. I’m a really lucky guy. Well first of all, I’m lucky in that because of my providence in the field, I’m able to get for free the kind of really top of the range analysis of my metabolic state that would normally cost ten thousand dollars and I’ve done that maybe five times over the past fifteen years.

(00:29:04) [Damien Blenkinsopp]: What kind of analysis?

[Aubrey de Grey]: They measure 150 different things in your blood and all manner of physiological and cognitive tests; you name it, they do it. I always come out insanely younger than I actually am like fifteen years younger. What that means in terms of what I should do is I have to be very conservative. Respecting how little we really understand about metabolism. It’s a case of if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it.

So the fact that I actually eat and drink what I like and I don’t even do much exercise, nothing happens. I’m doing fine and so I might as well, but that doesn’t mean that I’m going to do fine forever. I always have to pay close attention to any early signs of something going downhill.

The other way in which I recommend people not do what I do is because of my position and my advocacy role, I’m constantly on the road. I definitely don’t get nearly enough sleep and that’s definitely bad for me. But I figured it’s probably [check 29:57]. I’m hastening the defeat of aging, but I’m [check 30:00] in my life.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Absolutely. Yes it’s really interesting because I’ve spoken to a variety of people here and they have got very different strategies. One person I spoke to, he’s basically stacking everything that you’ve seen here. Some of his markers, he actually isn’t in such great shape so the higher risk is worth it to him. But if you’re starting from a great place then as you said, until they’re proven, it’s not worth taking these things.

[Aubrey de Grey]: Precisely. Senolytics, for an example, the [check 30:27] is definitely one of the things in my seven point list and so I’ll definitely be willing to do that at some point. But at the moment, it makes sense for me to wait and see and let these therapies become more effective and more, you know, more tested. That’s happening so fast now that in one or two years down the road would make more sense to me.

(00:30:50) [Damien Blenkinsopp]: Yeah. It’s a very strategic unit. It really fits with what you’ve done with SENS Research Foundation. So this is the last thing. Where can people, I mean two things. Have you got an ask for the audience? Anything that you’d like to tell them?

[Aubrey de Grey]: Sure, totally! At the moment, as I said we’ve got this burgeoning of the rejuvenation technology industry with more and more investors realizing that this is the next big thing and it’s starting to come in too. But there is still this residue of projects that absolutely vitally need to be taking fold as well and yet are not yet quite at the point of investability even from the visionary end of the spectrum of investors. That’s why the foundation still exists.

Now the unfortunate part is that your average investor is not totally keen on giving money away. They got wealthy by not giving money away indiscriminately. Therefore if anything, the burgeoning of the industry side actually makes that much harder for us to bring money in philanthropically.

As such, we are still way short of what we need in order to go as fast as the difficulty of the science allows. I think we could still at least double the rate at which we make progress on the hardest and therefore the most essential aspects of this work. Absolutely I haven’t asked. I say anything you can do to help. We have a nice friendly donate button on our website, sens.org and if you want to give us more than that then you know where and how to contact us.

Other than that, if you’re not wealthy, you can still give us ten dollars, a hundred dollars a month; these add up. But also advocacy; very, very important. People who are not billionaires and not scientists may feel that they can’t do anything, but that’s not true at all because the quality of debates, the quality of understanding and discussion of this area is still being unbelievably strongly held back by the desperate need for most people not to get their hopes up about this.

This is what drives what I’ve called [check 32:47]. They hear rationalizations that allow people to trick themselves into thinking that aging is some kind of blessing in disguise. I get so frustrated that people just refuse to open their eyes because it’s holding us back. That lack of enthusiasm is making people not support this work financially. When I say people here, I don’t mean just individuals, I also mean companies and governments.

So shunting the course of debates just as you’re doing right now by having me on camera, this is what needs to be done.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Perhaps more of these conferences. More people attending the conference, getting more involved, more engaged.

[Aubrey de Grey]: Totally. RAADfest is growing. Yeah it’s a fantastic event. We also have our own event in Berlin every year, every March. The emphasis is a bit different. It’s more exclusively science at that conference, but the crowd is the same. The kind of connections you have, it’s across the whole spectrum from the hardcore scientists who are getting the work done at the lab through to all the advocates, the investors.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Aubrey, thank you so much for your time.

[Aubrey de Grey]: My pleasure.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: It’s great to have you again. Yeah.

[Aubrey de Grey]: Thank you.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Can you go first? We were just talking about how we we’re going to talk and it just failed.

[Britton Schneider]: I’m Britton Schneider. I work with Liz at BioViva.

[Liz Parrish]: My name’s Liz Parrish and I’m the CEO of BioViva.

(00:34:15) [Damien Blenkinsopp]: You know me or you should do by now so I’m not going to introduce myself. This is going to be a great little chat based on some of the stuff I learnt yesterday from your presentation. Just talk about what BioViva is doing and also what you personally have done yourself which is one of the highlights. So first of all, just for the audience because many of them probably don’t know who you are and what you do. What do you do? Who are you?

[Liz Parrish]: I’m the CEO of BioViva. I’m considered the woman who wants to genetically engineer you. I want to create humans that are healthy and don’t die of the diseases of aging and therefore bring treatments back to children who are dying of critical diseases now that will cure them of their diseases.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: That’s a really good introduction.

[Liz Parrish]: I’ve been doing it for a few years.

(35:00) [Damien Blenkinsopp]: So Aubrey de Grey just called you patient zero so you apparently have several names. Are there any others?

[Liz Parrish]: Well depending on who you talk to.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Good ones! Well if you get any bad ones. Any bad ones?

[Liz Parrish]: I don’t know of any bad ones actually. I don’t think that I get too much right now.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: That’s good. Does Brit call you something? Does she have a pet name for you?

[Liz Parrish]: She calls me “you’re late.”

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Ok.

[Liz Parrish]: That’s how I know myself.

(00:35:21) [Damien Blenkinsopp]: That’s the main thing there. Ok so what does BioViva do and what is its mission?

[Liz Parrish]: BioViva is a bioinformatics platform now. We’ve changed our gears. For two years, we tried to be a program that actually treated patients directly with gene therapy. We’re looking at regenerative medicine gene therapies; gene therapies that reverse the biological clock, gene therapies that create upregulation of regeneration in the body, gene therapies that increase muscle mass for the aging population and therefore creating cheaper cures for kids with muscular dystrophy.

So every one of the therapies that we talk about today, there’s an aspect that can be used in childhood disease. But we wanted to do that. We wanted to treat patients correctly, but we found out we couldn’t do that. There was not a regulatory framework for us to be a U.S. company and do that, but the most important part of treating patients is the data; what happened when a patient was treated.

So we actually became in partnership with an exclusive partnership with a company that’s offshore of the U.S. It can broker deals between patients and doctors to do gene therapy and we get access to all the pre and post data. We find out exactly what’s been done to the patient and then we look at the biomarker panel that we’re developing with our bioinformatics program and we see where gene therapies work and where they don’t work.

In research and development, we are actually starting to design our first viral vector that will get multiple genes in at one time.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: So you are doing R and D still?

[Liz Parrish]: Yeah, we are.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Then you license that out, but you just don’t clinically deliver it?

[Liz Parrish]: No. The thing is you never want to fall in love with your hypothesis. So we don’t want to be a telomerase inducing gene therapy. We don’t want to be just a [check 37:06] inducing gene therapy, PCG-1 alpha, FGF21, Folistat. If you fall in love with your hypothesis, you’re going to try to prove that it works.

We’re a testing platform to see what works. We’re going to bring other companies through that have therapeutics that we will actually give them their first human data. So why would we do this? Why would we do medical tourism? It’s a multi-pronged approach.

Number one, you give patients access to therapies they couldn’t get otherwise. Often, these patients are in dire need of something and the regulatory system and their doctors would just let them die rather than treat them, rather than take the risk because we’re very risk-averse. So number one, you’re helping patients.

Number two, you’re helping biotechnology companies get the first data on whether their drugs work in patients and where they work and where they don’t work.

Number three, de-risking investment in biotechnology. Right now, biotechnology has a 94% failure rate through phase studies. Investors don’t want to invest, but if you plop down the data on ten, twenty, a hundred patients and what happened, we’ll know what drugs will work before we start to run them.

Do we think that drugs should go through a regulatory service? Absolutely. They should go through a regulatory service so they can be sold widely to a wider audience and help more people, but people need access now. The human model is the best model organism to work in to find out if drugs work for humans.

(00:38:30) [Damien Blenkinsopp]: So you completely pivoted the company. So before you were actually developing them and now you’re, just to get it straight, you’re not doing any R and D and development at all? Or you’re doing a bit, but mostly you’re going to be sourcing the R and D from other companies?

[Liz Parrish]: Instead of actually trying to run one gene to find out how well it works, we use the meta-analysis so it’s called bench to bedside. Where we are doing the development and research and development is the driver, the vehicle; what gets the genes into the cell. So we’ll let other gene companies and research institutions run all that expensive pre-data, but then we want to see what happens in patients when we look like we do have a promising drug.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: So you’re going to select the most promising ones?

[Liz Parrish]: Yeah, that’s right. So the reason we would look at telomerase induction is it actually has decades of research done on it. Nobel prizes have been given out and fantastic, very inclusive research papers have come out. Maria Blasco just put out an exhaustive scientific paper about how telomerase induction does not cause cancer, it may actually protect against cancer. These are the things that we need to see, but if we don’t apply them to humans, they have zero value.

(00:39:42) [Damien Blenkinsopp]: So basically what you’re doing is you’re saying the regulatory environment is not going to let us do any of this and it’s very expensive to do the clinical trials. So we’re going to let less risk-averse people or maybe they’re in a situation where they’re at high-risk of dying or they have a very damaging condition already and so it’s in their interest to reduce risk. So they can do it for medical tourism then you can get the data and then fast forward and validation.

[Liz Parrish]: Fast forward those drugs. Actually, I think that our platform in the next two years, we’d like to prove ourselves and then we’d like to have the regulatory service look at our platform. If we actually ran drugs like we’re designing to run drugs, this is actually what we want. Don’t hide any of the data, show the data; where does it work, where does it not work.

That way we have a clear picture of what’s going to happen. We already take drugs that aren’t necessarily safe, but we’re none the wiser. We get a pamphlet, you get a bottle of statins, you get a pamphlet, but if you look at the Cochrane Report, a statin will save one in 164 patients from getting a stroke, but one in ten will get Type 2 Diabetes and one in 50 will get dementia from taking the drug.

We don’t understand our risks to begin with, but we’re looking at gene and cell therapies, we’re looking at just upregulating a beneficial protein that has decades worth of data on it in the human body to push regeneration. Not only may these patients actually recover from their disease if we’re lucky, they will be spearheading the technology for the future.

Our risk aversion just has developed so many myths around living as if we’re not actually going to die, but how is anyone actually going to solve the problem. Taking a gene therapy is the type of people who want to buy an experience, but they are also health investors; they’re investing in their future.

(00:41:30) [Damien Blenkinsopp]: You probably are talking to a lot of people who are interested in taking gene therapies, what type of people is this? Just to get some on the ground information. i’m sure these kind of people contact you. What kind of population are interested in this?

[Liz Parrish]: We get thousands of people who contact us and are interested in taking a gene therapy and they really span the gamma and some of them were excruciatingly heartbreaking earlier on because we didn’t have ways to treat patients. We had people come through with sick kids who have probably died since then because there was no option. People with muscle disorders, heart disorders and various really sick people. But also we get some pioneers. Some people that hands down would take any therapy to be part of the experience of spearheading technology for the human race.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Like some healthy people?

[Liz Parrish]: Some healthy people.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Like you?

[Liz Parrish]: Yeah, some not so healthy. Well if you look at biological aging, by the time I was 40, I’m not very healthy. These therapies will be used in sick people. We’ll see if we can regenerate a kidney, we’ll see if we can regenerate a liver, we’ll see if we can create some more beneficial cognitive effect in patients with Alzheimer’s. But then we’ll work them back to people in less disease state and soon, we’ll be using them as immunizations. How soon that happens is how fast we start working towards that data.

(00:42:52) [Damien Blenkinsopp]: So what is the timeline for this model you’ve put in place? Is it just started? Is it 2019 you’re going to have some clinics in specific countries in the world that’s run by this organization called IHC?

[Liz Parrish]: IHS?

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: IHS.

[Liz Parrish]: Yeah, Integrated Health Systems. Yeah so we’re starting now and already patients are signing up to talk to doctors. They are very interested in therapeutics so we’re hoping to start generating our data in 2019, but how clean that data is and what that data means is going to take us a little bit of time to generate. So we’re looking at a huge biomarker set. We’re looking at a multi-comeback…

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: There are four monstrous slides. I think I’m a data geek. It was ridiculous.

[Liz Parrish]: Yeah. So we’re going to pull from publicly available data sets, but we’re going to be analyzing, the first company in the world that analyzes what happens when you do regenerative gene therapies in humans.

(00:43:44) [Damien Blenkinsopp]: So you’re going to ask the clinics to collect this data? Because it was a very extensive amount. So do you need equipment like special MRIs?

[Liz Parrish]: Well we actually work with the doctor. So the doctors who are exclusive to IHS are actually exclusive to giving all of the data to BioViva.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: That’s the new agreement?

[Liz Parrish]: Right, and there is protocol. So to every gene therapy, there’s a protocol, there’s a list of markers that have to be taken before a patient can be treated.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Ok.

[Liz Parrish]: It is pretty broad.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: It wasn’t all of those though, was it?

[Liz Parrish]: Remember a lot of it is done in blood work. So a lot of those biomarkers come from blood work, DNA testing, methylation testing. Other markers come from imaging. So imaging is really important when you’re talking about brain health, when you’re talking about muscle health. When we’re talking about whole body health, we want to visualize what’s happening.

(00:44:38) [Damien Blenkinsopp]: Are you going to basically standardize the definition of the type of data and also how to record it?

[Liz Parrish]: Yeah, absolutely.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: But who’s going to actually collect the data? Are you going to collect the blood samples and send it to a U.S. lab or a centralized lab? Or are there going to be labs all over the place or just the local ones?

[Liz Parrish]: So that depends on what labs the doctors work with, but they’re all the big companies. We work with generally the standardized labs.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Like [check 45:01]?

[Liz Parrish]: Yeah. Exactly. But we also work with some smaller companies that have some protein discovery methods, proteostasis, demethylations.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: This specific test is more advanced.

[Liz Parrish]: Yeah so we’re not only looking at the old biomarkers that we used to look at c-reactive proteins and a blood glucose level, but we’re looking at these markers that will be really important in five years that really will be more specific than the other biomarkers in the coming years. That’s how we’ll find the real true biomarkers of aging that can give us a close date to the biological age of what your due date might be on your body and how we could actually change that.

But by doing regenerative therapies, we might be able to reverse engineer some biomarkers of aging as well.

(00:45:50) [Damien Blenkinsopp]: What does that mean?

[Liz Parrish]: It will give us a new view, a new insight of reversing pathology in the body and regenerating certain [check 45:58]. So for instance, even when you’re young, you’re actually generating damage. Your cells are degenerating in a slow form way. This isn’t just something that happens as you get older. Your body is developing so we have the illusion that we’re not accumulating damage, but in fact we’re accumulating damage over our entire lifespan.

We’ll be looking at bodies hopefully with regenerative medicine in these gene therapies that actually start to restore damage. That’s a reverse process of damage. Therefore we’ll get the insights of what that actually means with biological age. First, we’ll start pinpointing it back to a healthy body. A healthy what I call 1.0 body with a 2.0 body may have different biomarkers that give us insight to how to adjust to what is happening with aging in the body right now in the 1.0 body.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: I’m not 100% following with this.

[Liz Parrish]: Sorry.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Sorry guys.

[Liz Parrish]: It’s probably me.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: So 1.0 is someone.

[Liz Parrish]: 1.0 is a human who has not been given the gene therapy.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Ok. All right. So you’re saying once you get a gene therapy, you may not be normal? You might be something different, but it’s also healthy?

[Britton Schneider]: Ideally, yes.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Or it might be healthier?

[Liz Parrish]: You’ll be regenerating, well that’s what we’re hoping, is to put the body into a homeostasis; stronger, smarter, faster, healthier.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: So that’s the 2.0?

[Liz Parrish]: Yeah. That’s any person who has gone through a regenerative gene therapy who has an upregulation of a protein that is designed to actually reverse damage in the body.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Ok so I’m following you now I think.

[Liz Parrish]: I nerded out.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: The same way we’re upregulated with many detoxifications.

[Liz Parrish]: I went too far.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: You talk fast. Not as fast as Aubrey, but he’s hard to keep up with. So for instance, we have many detoxification processes and enzymes in our body, you could upregulate some of those and then you could drink alcohol all day and not worry about it for instance, like Aubrey does.

[Liz Parrish]: Yeah, that’s true. That’s one use of our time.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Well I’m not saying it’s the best, but basically that’s what you are saying. We would have these abilities.

[Liz Parrish]: Yes of course. I’m all for people enjoying their life and living the life that they want to live.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: We’ll go to the gym less and be stronger.

[Liz Parrish]: Yeah exactly. Well that was one of the things with my therapy. I worked out five days a week, I ran about 25 miles a week and after my therapy, I got on plane after plane, I had jet lag, I wasn’t working out. When we did my second MRIs, I was really worried because I had not been exercising, but the muscle mass was bigger, the white fat was down and my insulin sensitivity was up.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Ok Liz.

[Liz Parrish]: So that’s fantastic!

(00:48:41) [Damien Blenkinsopp]: I did want to talk about this of course I did. So on this podcast, on this show, we’re into self-experimentation so you’re a good fit and tracking data on it so that’s one of the key things. But I wanted to make sure we covered all the business and what you’re up to there because we’re also excited about the data. Because my belief and probably most of the people following the show which includes BCs, entrepreneurs, software experimenters and biohackers, is that data is one of the keys to everything because it will stop us running around in circles.

[Liz Parrish]: Yes, exactly and boy did we learn a lot about data. When we started this company, I found an investor. He said I’ll invest in you taking this therapy to embark on this and show that we can reverse biological aging. We have really big plans, but we didn’t really have a list of things that we really needed to do. So all I did was a lot of blood work, I did MRI imaging then I did telomere length. But today what we know is there’s so much more that we could do.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: So you wish you knew probably more?

[Liz Parrish]: Of course, but that’s how you get there.

(00:49:38) [Damien Blenkinsopp]: What exact baselines did you take?

[Liz Parrish]: That’s when you saw my biomarker list, it’s extensive; it’s exhaustive.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Well because we don’t know which ones it’s going to affect.

[Liz Parrish]: No, we really don’t and we actually still don’t know what biomarkers [check 49:48] that we look at now. We’ve hunted LDL cholesterol like a witch hunt and yet people with high LDLs sometimes never have heart attacks.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: I have high LDL, but I’m not worried about it because my particle count is low.

[Liz Parrish]: There is the group in Italy that have a gene. They never develop atherosclerotic plaques, but amazingly they have really high LDLs and then people with high HDLs and low LDLs die of heart attacks.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: So it’s a perfect example.

[Liz Parrish]: So we have a long ways to go.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Because this biomarker is used everywhere and we don’t even know what it is.

[Liz Parrish]: Everywhere. Yeah.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: It’s called bad cholesterol, but we really don’t know what it is.

[Liz Parrish]: So we need more data. We need to look at phenotype, we need to look at anatomical, physiological data. We have a long, long ways to go. So even before BioViva came along and started throwing regenerative gene therapies into people, we had a problem with biomarkers and we’re just pointing out that problem.

(00:50:40) [Damien Blenkinsopp]: Ok. So you’re going to collect a lot of data, but how are you going to get the value right because there are a lot of biomarkers. Are you going to put AI on it or what are your plans for this leverage?

[Liz Parrish]: Yeah, right now we’re using machine learning algorithms so our computer scientists and the PhDs that are working on that are trying to collect all of the best data and they’ll do a little bit of light machine learning as the data goes in. The most important thing is that the data is clean because garbage in, garbage out, we’re screwed. AI can’t solve a problem if we have no data.

AI is really fantastic for old drugs because we have a lot of data on how those work and it’s helping us understanding protein to protein interaction because we have some data on that. But regenerative gene therapies, we need human data then we can plug that in then we can start to get some meaning.

The microbiome, very interesting; changes as you age. If we are actually able to regenerate parts of the body, will the microbiome change? But we still don’t know most of the microbiome and we have issues.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Well I can tell you that I’ve done 40 different microbiome tests and I’ve never gotten actual information because you have to combine it Liz to get the real picture and assay islands.

[Liz Parrish]: Well it changes with what you eat.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: It’s up and down all the time.

[Liz Parrish]: Yeah.

[Britton Schnieder]: We still have to identify what’s good and what’s bad. It’s still so much we don’t know.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Yeah, but we don’t know. There is a lot of “don’t know” basically so I think bioinformatics, it’s interesting. I’m always like, “Wow!” That’s what bioinformatics, and I’ve been thinking for a long time, we need to focus more on that. Because the more I get into, I’ve got into data just from this show and really it’s not accurate. A lot of this stuff is inaccurate. The more I’ve tested, the more I’ve spent on it, I’m like is this useful?

[Britton Schneider]: It’s the results.

[Liz Parrish]: Actually the arguments within the field. So in 2015, I took the two gene therapies that we’ll talk about. I did the telomerase induction and I did the myostatin inhibitor. Immediately people flew up and they were like, “Telomerase induction!” or they were like no, you should have tried this other thing. Well we have to get out and try these things. Without the data, we can’t say something doesn’t work.

(00:52:44) [Damien Blenkinsopp]: Could you talk about, I’m interested why did you take that decision to do it? Was it because you were frustrated the company wasn’t making progress?

[Liz Parrish]: No, no. The company actually was just starting. So in 2013, my son was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes. I was thrown into children’s hospital. I had been volunteering my time for two years working with stem cells and that advocacy and trying to figure out why the funding for stem cell had dried up and people weren’t interested when it seemed to show such promise.

So I had this regenerative medicine education that I was going through, I’m thrown into this hospital situation and I started asking them can you do something with stem cells. Could you biobank some of his pancreas so we can use it later and they looked at me like, “Lady! That’s experimental medicine.” They said kids are dying here. Your son has a treatable disease and I looked around and I saw that kids were dying and it was so unacceptable to me.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: But your point is if they’re dying, let’s do something riskier.

[Liz Parrish]: Let’s do everything. Let’s do everything. So I left the hospital and I never really went home. I started getting on every board that I could get on as far as information on the internet, looking up what was going on and I found a SENS conference happening in England. That was 2013 and I got on a plane and I went over there and I said, “Ok what is what you’re doing, how does that help kids?” Because I was looking for treatments for kids.

I got there, they said, “Look, we’ve got all this great technology, we just need funding.” So if you look, I went home and I created a funding company. It was called BioTrove Investments. I started BioTrove podcast thinking that people just needed education. I’d get a call on the phone, I’d get to go fly around with fancy people who have a lot of money asking me a lot of questions about the technology. They said, “If you prove it works, I’ll put money into it.”

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: The investors?

[Liz Parrish]: So I said well ok two of my favorite things were telomerase induction and myostatin inhibitors because myostatin inhibitors were already working in humans. So I thought they will like this. So I found an investor and I said, “Let’s start this company and if you want to, I would take these gene therapies.” It will be my contribution to the world, it will be my contribution to my children and it will be my contribution to a world that I hadn’t really given much back to. He said, “Let’s do it. I think this will work.”

Of course we hoped to cure aging in one therapy, but we didn’t, but we got some really interesting data. We found out ok now we have to build the platform to make this a reality. Test every gene therapy that we can and see what combination is needed to actually achieve what we originally started.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: So they gave you your start?

[Liz Parrish]: Yeah.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: So how long ago was this?

[Liz Parrish]: That was in 2015.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: So we’re three years on.

[Liz Parrish]: Yeah.

[Britton Schneider]: September makes three years.

[Liz Parrish]: Yeah, I took the therapy in September.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: So it’s exactly three years.

[Britton Schneider]: Exactly three years ago.

[Liz Parrish]: Yeah, but the company was started January eighth 2015. The investor came in right away and then it took a long time to get that gene therapy. Then the gene therapy was delayed twice. So here I was ready and anticipating ok we’ll do it. We had considered treating a patient with it, but we couldn’t find any legal way to do that.

(00:55:57) [Damien Blenkinsopp]: How were you allowed to do it? I don’t really understand the regulatory.

[Liz Parrish]: There are some loopholes in regulations where if you are educated, you understand the product of your company, you can participate in the product of your company

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: It’s your personal company, that’s the view.

[Liz Parrish]: It’s not an actual law, but it’s a bit of a loophole and so the FDA never sent us…

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: But you have to be the owner of the company. Is that the thing?

[Liz Parrish]: Yeah and actually people have looked at ways to use that in order to sell shares in their company for people who want to participate in what their company is doing. So yeah spoiler, some people do that. It’s called making an educated decision. I’m a major shareholder in a company, it’s developing technology that will treat patients.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: You needed that credibility to move forward.

[Liz Parrish]: I don’t know if it offered us credibility, but it sure ignited the industry. We were the first company to treat a patient for, or a person, in this case myself, for biological aging.

(00:56:57) [Damien Blenkinsopp]: Ok. So what baseline labs did you take?

[Liz Parrish]: We did all of the standardized blood tests that you would get at your doctor when you’re doing one of your uber health exams. We did MRI imaging, we did the telomere length testing.

(00:57:11) [Damien Blenkinsopp]: Which company was that?

[Liz Parrish]: We used SpectraCell. We actually used both SpectraCell and Life Length, but the Life Length one that we sent, they said they got it on the wrong day so they couldn’t analyze it.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: You know what? One of my friends has the same problem. He stopped using them.

[Liz Parrish]: Yeah I was really like, “You are kidding me.” Actually, they were our company of choice. So at the last minute, we had to do a SpectraCell because they would take a 24 hour delivery at that point and we had to get it in within 24 hours because I was about to embark on the test.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: That’s a shame you didn’t know.

[Liz Parrish]: Well what is great is one year after I took another SpectraCell and I went ahead and did Life Length again because they sent me a free kit because the first one got messed up. Guess what? They had the same value.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Exactly?

[Liz Parrish]: They pegged me at about 45 years old.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: So the same as the SpectraCell?

[Liz Parrish]: Yes.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: So the two labs coincided; that’s good.

[Liz Parrish]: They totally coincided. So the third one that we did this year, we used SpectraCell because it was the one that we had consistency with and they showed that they lengthened a little bit again. We don’t know if they lengthened all within maybe an 18-month period and they’ve stopped or if they continue to lengthen. Remember, this is only my T-lymphocytes so I can’t tell you that my whole body has been changed by it.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: The test only looks at one specific cell.

[Liz Parrish]: Yeah. So gene therapy has a lot of obstacles that we have to get over. One thing, what genes do we need to use to create really healthy humans. The other thing is how do we target a lot of cells in the body without creating a immune response. Those are two really big things.

So a lot of people, they either go one way or another. They’re like, “This is so great that you’re doing this” or “Why isn’t this working yet?” We have a ways to go and so by analyzing this data and patients, we’re not only going to learn what happens with gene therapies, but we’re going to learn about titration. That means the dose that you give.

Here’s a really interesting thing. Hemophilia B, they just found in studies if they give 20% of the dose, they had a better outcome in patients; completely unexpected. We don’t expect that with something like telomerase induction that’s not shared outside the cells, but we can expect that with other genes. That’s cost savings. What that means to you is a lot less cost.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: There’s a lot of those U curves in dosage. I’ve seen that talked about in other areas as well.

[Liz Parrish]: But generally in gene therapy when we look at myostatin inhibitors with the primase, the more they got, the bigger they were, but all genes are not the same.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Yeah. Ok. The other one you did was the MRI for the muscle?

[Liz Parrish]: Yes.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: The myostatin?

[Liz Parrish]: The myostatin inhibitor.

(00:59:48) [Damien Blenkinsopp]: Ok. Thank you very much. Where can people follow what you’re doing, stay in touch with you? Twitter, Facebook or the company?

[Liz Parrish]: Yeah. We are in several places. Actually Brit probably knows. We’re bioviva-science.com. That’s the website. You can see what we’re doing. In October, we’re going to be offering genomic testing, but more importantly, genomic counseling because a lot of people have already got their genes run, but what does that mean?

So we want you to be able to talk to live specialists. Then we will be working over the next year to turn that into longevity counseling. We’re looking at the 59 genes in the human body that drive longevity. We want to see if in people and their family lineage, if these are actually creating longer, healthier lives by the upregulation of these proteins.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: So they will come to you for that?

[Liz Parrish]: Yeah.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: So you’ve got a [check 1:00:38] just like a data service basically.

[Liz Parrish]: So the genomic counseling, the genomic products, we’re hoping to offer some of the methylation testing that you can get from other companies, but offering it through our platforms so you have the availability to share your data with our company so we can solve the problem sooner. Then other than that, we’re just analyzing data and doing research and development in BioViva research and development for the larger load viral vector in order to pump you up in one treatment.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Ok.

[Liz Parrish]: Fifteen years give us.

(01:01:11) [Damien Blenkinsopp]: Great. If you had one ask to the audience that would help your mission, what would it be?

[Liz Parrish]: I would ask you to go and read some scientific papers. I would ask you to go look at what we’ve achieved in science, look at model organisms and how we’ve extended lifespan. I’d ask you to look at organisms that are already in the planet that have specialized genomes. The extremophiles, they can handle hot, radiation, extreme cold. Axolotls, they can regenerate their limbs. The pentachromat species that can see in billions of colours and I want you to get really excited about your future.

Our life is code and I think that we can modify that. First, we’ll look for human health and then we’ll look to enhance your life for where you want to live, who you want to be and what you want to achieve.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Thank you so much both of you; Brit also. Bye.

[Liz Parrish]: Thanks. Bye.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: See you guys.

(01:02:15) [Damien Blenkinsopp]: Ok we’ve still got the lovely background noise. We’ve been running away from it, but it’s here and it’s following us so we’re just going to persevere now. So I’ve got Dr. Howard Chipman from Young Plasma with me here. We’re at RAADfest 2018. There’s basically an exhibition here. It’s an exhibition hall with lots of companies doing interesting things.

So I’m going to be talking to a selection of these people that I find more interesting and Dr. Howard is one of the more interesting people we’ve met. So first of all, could you just introduce yourself. You just gave me some great highlights of your background so I think that’s a pretty cool way to introduce yourself to they guys.

[Howard Chipman]: My name is Dr. Howard Chipman. I’m the medical director at the Atlantis Clinic in Oldsmar here in Tampa, Florida. I’ve been an emergency physician for many years and also done family practice and walk-in clinic. But I saw a lot of my patients were getting older and needed some other type of anti-aging treatments so I started doing the young plasma treatments. That’s what I’m here for to promote and also to learn about other anti-aging things that we can add to our protocols to help our patients stay alive and healthier and myself too of course.

(01:03:25) [Damien Blenkinsopp]: Yeah. So in a nutshell, what is Young Plasma and how long have you been doing it?

[Howard Chipman]: Young plasma is basically the blood minus the cells which is the plasma from younger people 16 to 25 years old. The idea is to get the healing and growth factors that you had when you were younger and replenish your body with those for anti-aging and healing of degenerative processes.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: So you’re actually giving people basically a transfusion?

[Howard Chipman]: Yes.

(1:05:00) [Damien Blenkinsopp]: Of how much blood?

[Howard Chipman]: We customize it for the patient, but typically patients get seven units of fresh frozen plasma. The plasma comes from a certified blood bank so it’s tested for all infectious diseases.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: This is the stuff you would get if you had an accident in a hospital?

[Howard Chipman]: Yes, this is the exact same blood you’d get in a hospital.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: It relates to your emergency medicine background.

[Howard Chipman]: Except the donors are young.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: So you make sure they’re young. So yesterday you were telling me that you mix up seven units of blood.

[Howard Chipman]: Actually we just start an IV and we just run the units in like an IV fluid basically over about two hours and that’s it. It’s very simple and painless.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Great. Well it’s very interesting. You said you’ve got a few other things just in your background.

[Howard Chipman]: Well my goal is eventually to fly into space. I love airplanes so I have a space training company also called Aurora Aerospace and we take people out for military jet training flights and also zero gravity flights. We do have a microgravity research as well as. We’ve had artists go up and do zero-G painting.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Cool. You’ve got an eclectic mix of interests. I like that.

[Howard Chipman]: I just can’t decide what I want to do when I grow up. With the young plasma, hopefully I won’t grow up too fast.

(01:05:08) [Damien Blenkinsopp]: Exactly. All right with the young plasma, I like to give people a little bit of background where this came from if they haven’t been aware of it. It has been in the press for the few years. So could you start from [check 1:05:19] study and then [check 1:05:20] here?

[Howard Chipman]: Well I’ll go back a little bit further. Actually, there was a Russian physician called Bogdanov in the 1920s who started giving himself transfusions of blood from young people to see if it would have an anti-aging effect. He reported many beneficial effects from it, but unfortunately he died after a transfusion.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: He did? Of what? A bad transfusion?

[Howard Chipman]: Well they’re not sure because back then they didn’t know about blood types. So he may have had a transfusion reaction, but the patient that he got transfused from had malaria and tuberculosis.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Ok that could have had something to do with it.

[Howard Chipman]: An interesting note, Dr. Bogdanov was actually a communist and he was highly involved with the communists of Russia. He actually treated Lenin’s sister with young blood. So that’s the first reported instance that we know of in modern times of people using young blood or young plasma.

After that, some experiments were done where they took mice and they interconnected their circulation system called parabiosis where they took an old mouse, young mouse, stitched their blood vessels together so that their blood circulated freely between them. What they found was that the old mouse, his health improved. He became younger and basically everything they could measure or dissect out of him improved.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Yeah and what happened to the young mouse?

[Howard Chipman]: The young mouse, he went downhill. Other studies have corroborated this that not only is there a lack of good stuff in your old blood, but there’s actually bad stuff in there as well that actually causes bad things to you. If you take out old plasma and inject it into a younger individual, it causes damage.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: So don’t do that guys. If you do end up in the army, if you want to ask for younger blood, i don’t know if that’s possible.

[Howard Chipman]: I don’t think so. Typically if you’re getting blood in the ER due to hypovolemic blood loss, what you really need are those red cells to provide the oxygen so that doesn’t really matter. Of course if I was dying and needed blood, I’d rather have younger blood, but if you need those red cells, it doesn’t really, that’s doesn’t matter so much.

(1:07:21) [Damien Blenkinsopp]: All right, cool. So are there any downsides to this? You’ve done this yourself.

[Howard Chipman]: Yes. I’ve been doing it for two years and I feel the difference. I feel more energetic and more youthful. I find myself acting more in ways that I did when I was younger that I had kind of forgotten.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: How old are you?

[Howard Chipman]: Fifty-six.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: I don’t think you look 56.

[Howard Chipman]: I used to jump up two stairs at a time. Over time, you get older and you act differently. You don’t really realize it, but after doing these treatments for a couple of years, I find myself doing things that I did when I was younger.

(1:08:00) [Damien Blenkinsopp]: Ok. What is your protocol? How frequently are you doing it? What dose?

[Howard Chipman]: I’m taking seven units every three months.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Ok.

[Howard Chipman]: Again, that’s not based on any hard science. It’s based on the study that we performed; the Ambrosia trial where we used seven units.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: You are mimicking the study?

[Howard Chipman]: Yes. That dose was come upon by a high dose of plasma because we use plasma for many other things in the hospital. Basically, we just took the high upper-level dose of that and do it every three months.

(1:08:30) [Damien Blenkinsopp]: Yeah. So you said you worked on the Ambrosia study. What was the Ambrosia study?

[Howard Chipman]: The Ambrosia study was a trial where we took a number of individuals and gave them one dose of seven units of plasma and then measured the biomarkers before and after to see if there was any change in there.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: And?

[Howard Chipman]: The study is not published yet.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: So you’re not allowed to talk about it.

[Howard Chipman]: I don’t have the data because I was a sub investigator, but my understanding is that the amylase and the CEA showed significant improvements and there were several other biomarkers that showed that as well.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: So reduction in amylase. Is that amylase did you say?

[Howard Chipman]: Amyloids, sorry. Amyloid.

(01:09:07) [Damien Blenkinsopp]: Amyloid plaques in the brain. How do they measure the amyloid?

[Howard Chipman]: They weren’t measuring the plaques. They were measuring blood levels. They send off a huge panel of 100 different tests.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Ok. Those were the only things you know that came back with a difference?

[Howard Chipman]: Correct. Correct.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Because you might have expected more basic things like CRP. A lot of people get elevated as age goes on.

[Howard Chipman]: It’s possible. Like I said, I haven’t seen the data yet.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Do you know when it’s going to be published?

[Howard Chipman: No, I don’t.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Ok.

[Howard Chipman]: I keep asking, but I haven’t gotten a straight answer yet. Hopefully soon.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Ok. We’ll look forward to that.

[Howard Chipman]: But the patients that we treated in the study and the patients I have treated subsequently have all reported subjective significant improvements in their wellbeing and health.

(01:09:50) [Damien Blenkinsopp]: Ok. Great. So now you’re providing this as a service to other people?

[Howard Chipman]: Yes.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: By the way, are you tracking any biomarkers yourself?

[Howard Chipman]: No.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Have you noticed anything personally?

[Howard Chipman]: I’m not checking any real biomarkers. I do routine labs upon myself and my glucose and cholesterol and all those things improved, but it might have been due to, I started going to the gym too. I figured if I’m doing this young plasma, I might as well make the best of it and do it as a regimen of improving your lifestyle.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: So you see improvements. That often happens with me. I do two or three things at the same time.

[Howard Chipman]: It could be from something else.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: I don’t know, in like, ten years. So I’m going to do several and then I’m like I don’t know which one did it, but it’s something.

[Howard Chipman]: The main thing I look at is, “Does it work?” The efficacy, and I think we’re eventually going to find the cure for aging, but that’s going to be a while off. So what we need to do now is to stay alive as long as we can with the best tools that we have now. That’s what my goal is, to try and find things that we have available now that we can use to keep ourselves.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Extend health span.

[Howard Chipman]: Yeah extend our lifespan until maybe something better comes along.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Cool. You’re doing this now as a service.

[Howard Chipman]: Yes.

(1:11:02) [Damien Blenkinsopp]: How many people have you had in your clinic?

[Howard Chipman]: We’ve treated over a hundred people with this so far.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Are they one-time users or are they frequent? What’s the way people have been using this?

[Howard Chipman]: About half of them were in the study and they came just for one-time; some of them. But many of them have since come back. I’d say probably 80% of the people that do one treatment continue to do them because they feel improvements.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Are they doing the similar protocol to you? The three months?

[Howard Chipman]: Some are, some aren’t. Some can afford it.

(01:11:34) [Damien Blenkinsopp]: Let’s talk about the cost. How much is one dose?

[Howard Chipman]: The treatments are eight thousand dollars and that’s for seven units. That includes everything. If people want less units, we have a prorated scale. We have a couple patients that come every month and get five units for example. We have a patient with dementia and we’re trying to see if it can help with that. Because there are some animal models and studies that show that it might be beneficial so we’re trying to help this woman. She comes every month and we give her five units, for example.

(01:12:05) [Damien Blenkinsopp]: Ok. All right. Cool. Do you have any idea of the mechanisms? It sounds like it’s probably way off for me to understand what might be going on.

[Howard Chipman]: There are many, many things going on and we’ll never know the details exactly. Basically what we’re trying to do is reproduce the young physiology that you had when you were younger by replacing all those healing and growth factors that are present in young blood and just basically replenishing the people who are older.

There are many different mechanisms going on. The body is very complex; the process. I think over time, we’ll be able to better understand these mechanisms, but I’m not a basic research guy. I don’t have a billion-dollar lab to figure all this stuff out. So what I’m trying to do is help people today and help myself with what we have right now until we figure it out.

(01:12:53) [Damien Blenkinsopp]: Great. So one of my first questions when I met you was how are you getting this blood? Is it legal? I’m sure that might be a question some people have in their heads. So what is the answer to that?

[Howard Chipman]: Of course. It comes from a certified blood bank so yes it’s completely legal. We’ve been using plasma treatments for over 50 years in hospitals. Every hospital in every country gives plasma every day pretty much. It’s usually given as a preventative or to treat bleeding disorders. It’s an FDA-approved treatment.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: You’re just using it off-label.

[Howard Chipman]: We’re just using it off-label for something else.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: So it’s quite straightforward really.

[Howard Chipman]: Absolutely straightforward; no problems at all.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: You’re just saying basically you have to be a practicing doctor.

[Howard Chipman]: Yeah, you have to be a physician because it has to be ordered and administered by a physician. There you go.

(01:13:40) [Damien Blenkinsopp]: Ok, great. So that’s Young Plasma. The other thing I would just like to know a bit more broadly what you’re up to in terms of your activities. You said you’re going to the gym and you’re tracking markers. What are you doing in terms of your own health and life extension?

[Howard Chipman]: I’m using young plasma. I’m also taking Metformin as well. It’s a Diabetes drug. There seems to be pretty good evidence now showing that it’s helpful. They did a study where they took people who are diabetics and put them on Metformin and measured their insulin, heart attacks and strokes and they actually had lower incidence than non-diabetic people who were not on the medications. I think Metformin’s a no-brainer so it’s probably a good idea to take it.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Did you ever raised glucose or anything like that or you’re just taking it for the longevity?

[Howard Chipman]: My hemoglobin A1C was measured at the time was borderline. It wasn’t diabetic.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Was it six?

[Howard Chipman]: It was 5.7. I used to joke and tell people I was one doughnut away from being borderline, but it’s all back to normal now.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Where’s it at?

[Howard Chipman]: I don’t remember what it was last, but it dropped. It dropped. It was almost in the abnormal range and now it’s well in the normal range.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: So do you think that might be the Metformin?

[Howard Chipman]: I tested it before I started the Metformin so I just started. I haven’t checked my blood. I just started on the Metformin recently.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: It’s probably the young plasma and your exercise.

[Howard Chipman]: Yes. Yes, but the Metformin will bring it even lower. Sorry, what were you asking about?

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: I don’t know. It skipped my mind there. This is the problem with live. I got into what you were talking about.

[Howard Chipman]: You asked me what I do for other treatments. So firstly, I take Metformin, I do the young plasma, take an aspirin a day; that’s a no-brainer.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Ok aspirin.

[Howard Chipman]: I also take cholesterol medication. I take a statin.

(01:15:31) [Damien Blenkinsopp]: Are you concerned about the potential negatives of some of those?

[Howard Chipman]: I don’t see statins as a problem. It’s overblown. A lot of my patients are 400 pounds, their cholesterol are through the roof, “Oh they can’t take a statin.” I do not see many problems with statins. Rarely, people get some muscle pain and you have to stop it.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Like fibromyalgia.

[Howard Chipman]: In some people, it will raise their liver enzymes slightly.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: The things I have seen are its potential interactions with mitochondria. I was thinking that might be the connection with the muscle pain and fibromyalgia.

[Howard Chipman]: It’s possible.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: The connection there.

[Howard Chipman]: But I don’t see too many side effects from it. Most people don’t have any problems at all. So I take that because my cholesterol was a little bit high. There are studies suggesting that even normal people take statins significantly to reduce their risk of heart attacks and strokes. My father had coronary artery disease.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: You’re focused on that one.

[Howard Chipman]: Yeah. My dad didn’t believe in eating vegetables. He lived to be 90.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: He would’ve gotten along with, have you heard of th carnivores? The zero-carb? There’s a whole tribe of them on the internet now.

[Howard Chipman]: Really?

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: They just eat pure meat. That’s a thing, yeah. Great. So you’re exercising, you’re taking Metformin, baby aspirin; you’re doing quite a range of things.

[Howard Chipman]: And the statin.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: And the statin, yeah. That’s quite a bit.

[Howard Chipman]: The other thing I’m looking into is Rapamycin as well. I’ve seen some potentially good studies and evidence on that. It is an immunosuppressant, but some studies show if you take it once a week, you don’t get the immunosuppression, but you still get the anti-aging effects. I have a couple of my young plasma patients that have dementia. I have them on Rapamycin.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Is it quite expensive?

[Howard Chipman]: It’s not cheap and it’s not very expensive either. You’re only taking it once a week.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: How much does it cost on a monthly basis, for example?

[Howard Chipman]: Can I just throw a number out like 50 bucks, 100 bucks. It’s not cheap.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: That’s pretty cheap.

[Howard Chipman]: I thought a four dollar Wal-mart prescription, but it’s not expensive. It’s not expensive. It has been out for a while. That’s something I’m not taking, but may consider taking soon because it looks like it does actually work.

(01:17:43) [Damien Blenkinsopp]: What will lead you to the decision to take that or not?

[Howard Chipman]: Maybe I’ll see how my patients do on it.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Ok guinea pig; the guinea pig approach.

[Howard Chipman]: Usually, I use myself as the first guinea pig.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: That’s good to know. It has been great to chat with you about all of this. Is there anything we missed?

[Howard Chipman]: Not that I can think of. I think you asked me to give my contact information. Anybody has any questions, they can contact me at any time. I’m at the Atlantis Clinic in Oldsmar, Florida. That’s next to Tampa. Our website is young-plasma.com and if anybody wants to call me for a consultation, I’ll give you my cellphone number 813-476-2321. If you have any questions about Young Plasma or any other anti-aging, I’m glad to answer for you.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Thank you so much for your time. It has been great to have you here.

[Howard Chipman]: Nice talking with you.

(01:18:37) [Damien Blenkinsopp]: Hey! We’re here with our second interview. There’s a little segway here actually. We happen to have one of the guys who’s using

[Brian M. Delaney]: Young Plasma.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Young Plasma which I didn’t know.

[Brian M. Delaney]: From Dr. Howard Chipman. I got that six, seven, eight weeks ago and I didn’t know what to expect. I read some of the research results. There are actually many and there’s lot for umbilical cord plasma which is really young plasma, but for less young plasma, there aren’t a lot of results out there, but I wanted results. For theoretical reasons, I expect there to be some benefit because I’m 55 and the plasma comes from someone between the ages of 16 and 25.

I did some before and after biomarkers and saw small changes, but it’s hard to know because I’m always changing my diet and exercise routine so I can’t really say much about that. What was amazing was the subjective effect which sadly didn’t last too long, but for about 36 hours I was Superman. It was amazing.

(01:19:35) [Damien Blenkinsopp]: What did it feel like to be Superman?

[Brian M. Delaney]: I have sleep problems and I’m not as young as I used to be. I think I do have a lot of energy and I’m in pretty good shape, but I walked towards my car from the clinic after having plasma. During it I had, some get hives so I had some Benadryl so I was a little tired from the Benadryl, but that had worn off. I got in my car, turned on the radio and the music sounded more beautiful. It didn’t matter if it was Abba or Beethoven, the whole thing from the bass.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Life is more beautiful.

[Brian M. Delaney]: Yeah, it was amazing.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: There were more colours in the world.

[Brian M. Delaney]: Yeah it was incredible. I’m driving across the Everglades and it’s just wow.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: It was a bit psychedelic.

[Brian M. Delaney]: It was almost. I happen to be a birdwatcher. You can fool yourself into imagining and experiencing it better than it is. So I’m looking at all these passing raptors and identifying them really quickly as if my vision worked better. I knew obviously my vision is not better. Anyway so for about a day and a half, I really felt physically, I felt, you could even say I had more energy. That’s such a stupid marketing term, but I really did have more energy.

I slept better that night which is unusual for me. Normally I have to take sleep medications which is not good. The next day I woke up and I felt amazing. I did, this is one slightly more objective measure, I do decline pushups and I changed my diet and I tried to see if it would have an effect so I measured the height of my feet on the chair exactly, it’s 47 centimeters, arms are set a certain distance apart and I could do about 15% more that morning.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: So how many?

[Brian M. Delaney]: Normally, it would be about low forties and it was somewhere around 50 I think.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: It pushed you to the maximum?

[Brian M. Delaney]: That was just maximum, yeah. Next day, I was exhausted, yeah. Unfortunately, the subjective effects and partially objective.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Did they decline as well? That change during the week?.

[Brian M. Delaney]: It did start to go back to normal after about a week. So the 36 hours was just an amazing experience and then it started to fade and within five to seven days, I felt like I was back to normal.

(1:21:42) [Damien Blenkinsopp]: So when did you do that?

[Brian M. Delaney]: I can’t remember exactly. I think it was maybe two months ago. It was seven weeks.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: You just did it once?

[Brian M. Delaney]: Just once although I’m going to do it again in a couple of weeks.

(01:21:50) [Damien Blenkinsopp]: So do you have a plan? Are you going to stick to it?

[Brian M. Delaney]: Here’s what I’m going to say. Money is an object for me, but if money were no object, I felt so good that I would do this every three or four days. That’s how good I felt, but it’s just too expensive. Dr. Chipman knows that and he would love to bring the cost down. He has a contract with the blood bank which is hard to get that enables him to buy small quantities of plasma.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: I think he’s going to be limited. He was telling me it’s quite tricky at that place.

[Brian M. Delaney]: Yeah so I would love to do it every few days. That’s how good it felt, but it’s just impractical.

(1:22:37) [Damien Blenkinsopp]: Ok. Now Brian M. Delaney, let’s introduce you. Who are you? What do you do?

[Brian M. Delaney]: I am currently the president for the Society for Age Reversal. It’s a group that Bill Faloon founded.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Bill?

[Brian M. Delaney]: Bill Faloon of Life Extension.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: One of the founders of Life Extension Foundation or supplement maker?

[Brian M. Delaney]: Exactly. He put me in charge of it. Lots of people, fortunately more and more all the time, are working on finding cures for aging or at least treatments to reverse parts of aging. It’s great that lots of money is coming in from increasingly conventional sources.

For example, Jim Mellon, the British millionaire was a very good, but more or less conventional investor. He slowly started turning towards Biology and then now he’s turning towards anti-aging. I’m sure it’s probably because he has charitable donations and he wants to save himself and his immediate family, but also because he has realized it’s a great investment.

So lots of money is going into anti-aging, but typically this is going to result in cures or effective treatments maybe a decade from now. The typical drug development path takes that long; maybe seven years, maybe fifteen years. What we’re trying to do is find what one could describe as the low-hanging fruit of age-reversal treatments. That’s not entirely accurate, it’s just easy to pluck. It’s not always easy to pluck, but you can pluck it soon.

So this involves things that have been investigationally orphaned because there’s no easy way to make a profit from it. For example, Metformin that has been studied for a long time for Diabetes, but now there are people trying to raise money during these trials to try to test it in humans as an anti-aging treatment, but how do you make a profit from a drug like Metformin? It’s not so easy. You can do it as a clinician, but that’s just patient fees so it’s not going to be too profitable.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: [Check 1:24:39].

[Brian M. Delaney]: Yeah. Rapamycin is another example and of course senolytics. Senolytics are substances that will destroy senescent cells; these zombie cells that spew out injurious cyclin molecules.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: The idea is we accumulate senescent cells as we age and it’s the signals they’re sending out or the metabolites or whatever they’re sending out which is damaging and accumulates over time.

[Brian M. Delaney]: That’s exactly right. Worse still, these senescent cells can turn other non-senescent cells into the senescent cells. So it almost is like The Walking Dead. So a TV show where zombies can turn non-zombies into zombies by just being near them and getting close and biting them metaphorically speaking. So it’s great tool to use if you can do it safely. Some would say that’s a big if. The category of senolytics spans both the traditional [check 1:25:37].

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: So senolytics are things that kill senescent cells?

[Brian M. Delaney]: Yeah. “Seno-” from the Greek “old” and “lytic” for “lysis” to split apart or break so yeah that’s what senolytics do. There are all kinds of them.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Are these compounds or molecules?

[Brian M. Delaney]: Yeah. Even now, there are new strategies using enzymes, but the standard approach that has existed upon not only Big Pharma, but also the stuff that we’re trying to find, involves either something like natural substances like fisetin or old cancer drugs that can be repurposed like Dasatinib.

So that has been tested in rodents several times now specifically a combination of Dasatinib and Quercetin. Synergistic is a word that is often abused, but it describes them correctly. You put them together and the effect is more than the sum of the individual effects of the two. I don’t think there has been a lifespan study done yet or even underway, but what we see in the rodents is regression of atherosclerotic plaques. for example.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Regression?

[Brian M. Delaney]: Yeah, actual regression which is astonishing which we normally think they can’t do. Dean Ornish I think has shown that a radically low-fat diet combined with other aspects of his program, meditation and exercise can regress them actually, but aside from that, it’s really hard.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: How do they measure that?

[Brian M. Delaney]: I think it was just x-rays.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: [Check 1:27:09]?

[Brian M. Delaney]: With the rodents, I think they actually just looked. They just x-rayed them, I think. I’m not sure. There are actually two studies I believe that showed that.

(1:27:19) [Damien Blenkinsopp]: So when you say you going about looking for these compounds, what does that actually mean? Are you looking for the research? Are you talking to people?

[Brian M. Delaney]: We’re talking about senolytics alone, but this is the same strategy for lots of other drugs.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: You’re doing several areas. This is just one you’re focusing on at the moment?

[Brian M. Delaney]: I’m focusing on many, but it’s one that I’m particularly interested in. So I think we can actually save people’s lives now with senolytics. I’m convinced. I’m trying to get my mother to try this and she’s a little scared because Dasatinib is a cancer drug and if you Google it, you see the side effects. That’s from people taking it daily for months who are really sick because they have cancer and are taking other drugs.

My approach partly is I just read research. My formal academic training is in the Humanities, but I’ve gotten up to speed as fast as I can on research. I try to make executive decisions about what areas our group needs to focus on and then I contact the real experts which I’m not, and try to form collaborations and try to see if what they’re doing in researching Quercetin alone or in combination with something else is redundant. Then we try to find funding. We might fund it ourselves. Bill Faloon has funded lots of projects; he’s incredibly generous. And or we find other people who want to fund some of this research.

At conferences, the talks are always great, but you go to the poster presentations and you find some mad scientist graduate student at the University of Lund in Sweden. He has got some cool idea and it may be something that hasn’t even been published yet. That’s what I really want to do. I want to find these things that no one knows about.

(1:29:10) [Damien Blenkinsopp]: Yeah. So just for the people out there, posters at conferences are typically studies in progress or maybe just finished by PhD students. Maybe it’s part of their PhD so they’re not going to do a full talk on it, but they’ll have this poster explaining that whole study and what they found or they’re finding. So I actually have PhDs working for me who present this kind of stuff at conferences so it’s a way to fund the edgier, earlier stuff.

[Brian M. Delaney]: Exactly. Yeah.