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How the world got lost on
the road to an anti-aging pill
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August 12, 2017: by Bill Sardi
Oligarch: a very rich business leader with a great deal of political influence.
Main points:
We’re talking about an elixir that if utilized by billions of adults in the world’s family of 7+ billion people could become the first trillion-dollar medicament. The quest for an anti-aging pill is now commandeered by billionaire oligarchs who are competing for the biggest prize in history, the discovery of a nexaceutical – a youth pill that would prolong human life indefinitely.
A recent issue of The New Yorker described “the frustration of many successful rich people that life is too short: ‘We have all this money, but we only get to live a normal life span’.” [“Silicon Valley’s Quest To Live Forever” The New Yorker, April 3, 2017] That is the impetus driving the quest for biological immortality by billionaires who now believe they can conquer aging. This may be the greatest technological mountain man has ever attempted to climb.
Actually, wealthy Americans are living longer already. While a “long life” is on a list of fifty things money can’t buy [Inc.com], a modern truth is that people in the U.S. with higher incomes are living up to 20+ years longer (variance 66 to 87 years). Obesity, lack of exercise, smoking and diabetes, emanating from poor diets and nutrition, account for 74% of the variation. [CNN May 9, 2017; JAMA May 8, 2017] But the kind of longevity Silicone Valley technocrats are talking about is more like 120+ years.
The anti-aging business has become a rich man’s pastime. Silicon Valley billionaires dot the anti-aging landscape: Methuselah Foundation’s Peter Thiel, Google’s/Alphabet’s Larry Page, Oracles’s Larry Ellsion, Juvenesce’s Jim Mellon, to name a few. These billionaires who provide the capital have everything anyone would want in life except immortality.
Rather than the National Institutes of Health designating public funds to further research towards development of an anti-aging pill, a key group of billionaire oligarchs now lead private enterprise ventures to discover ways to halt, slow or even reverse aging. But the problem is, they may be the only people who can afford their own inventions.
A striking problem is that these oligarchs are investing their millions of dollars in anticipation of a monstrous return on their investment.
The much-publicized anti-aging business appears to be out of touch with financial reality.
Not only are Americans living a lifestyle on borrowed money ($1 trillion of credit card debt and counting) with its government having doled out $13.6 trillion of benefits beyond what it has collected in taxes over recent years, the consumer economy in America is weakened by current socio-economic factors.
According to economist John Williams at ShadowStats.com, the hidden unemployment rate is more like 22%. Inflation hides the fact wages have been stagnant for over 40 years in America. And robots are predicted to eliminate 6% of all the jobs in the US by 2021. With limited disposable income, this doesn’t sound like a consumer economy that is ready to buy anti-aging pills.
Given that three-quarters of the world’s population earns less than $4 a day, such business ventures would be narrowly aimed at populations in industrialized countries that presumably have sufficient incomes to purchase anti-aging technologies. But imagine the outcry to get such an anti-aging pill throughout the undeveloped world.
Presume some potion, pill or blood transfusion is scientifically proven to favorably alter measures of aging (there’s no practical way to conclusively prove anything prolongs human life as that would require a decades-long study). Just what will it cost and who is going to pay for it?
At one point in time (~2004) the Rand Corporation think-thank penciled in a $1/day anti-aging pill into future Medicare budgets. But that idea fell by the wayside.
There are ~50 million Americans age 65 and over who are on Medicare. If Medicare paid for $1/day anti-aging pill and 75% complied with taking it, some 38 million retirees would cost $13.7 billion. Said another way, an anti-aging pill would only have to save $365/year in healthcare costs to be a break-even proposition.
A $1/day anti-aging pill would only have to
save $365/year in healthcare costs
to be a break-even proposition.
Insurance companies and Medicare pay for diagnosis and treatment of diseases, not aging. And just how and when would a physician diagnose an individual with “premature aging?”
There there are efforts to produce economical remedies to counter aging.
Dr. Nir Barzilai of the Institute for Aging Research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York proposes a $50 million dollar study to prove whether the anti-diabetic drug metformin will significantly prolong human life. Metformin is a ten-cent pill.
Metformin induces marginal but statistically significant health and longevity in laboratory animals (8% lifespan prolongation) and in humans “a small but statistically significant improvement in survival.”
If the FDA eventually approves metformin as an agent that slows aging, would the public race to their doctor’s office to obtain a prescription? Maybe yes, maybe no. Maybe only if Medicare paid for it.
This proposed study serves as a distraction to the primary question: can aging itself be controlled to produce indefinitely long lifespans? Can small molecules that can get into a living cell’s genetic machinery mimic the lifespan/healthspan doubling observed in calorie-restricted lab animals?
David Sinclair of Harvard Medical School has already cashed in on the sale of Sirtris Pharmaceutical SRT501 resveratrol pill that was sold to Glaxo-Smith-Kline (GSK) for $725 million. After GSK purchased Sirtris, Sirtris’ executives attempted to offer their “drug” for sale as a dietary supplement. GSK slapped their hands and it was withdrawn from the market. It appears GSK paid to shelve product. Sinclair is now introducing a niacin-analog, nicotinamide mononucleotide (NMN) as his latest discovery in the ant-aging pill market. [Press Reader April 1, 2017]
As an exception, there is one realist in the longevity game: Leonard Guarente of MIT. Guarente co-founded Elysium Health in 2014 to market a different niacin analog, nicotinamide riboside along with a methylated form of resveratrol called pterostilbene, combined in a product called BASIS.
Guarente side stepped the FDA’s onerous drug approval process and is the first tech giant to walk over to the “dark side” to so-called unregulated dietary supplements. In so doing, Elysium’s product doesn’t have to wait for regulatory approval and is available for sale at a reasonable price.
MITs Elysium Health is the first tech giant to walk over to the “dark side”
to so-called unregulated dietary supplements.
It is not just the imagined high price of these proposed anti-aging technologies that is unrealistic. It is also the growing list of private enterprises, loaded with millions of dollars of venture capital, that claim they are out to reach for the stars, that is, even implausibly attempt to achieve biological immortality.
There is a lot of venture capital to burn before the cash in these new ventures is burned up. Despite a decade of advancements in the knowledge bank of aging, Harvard geneticist George Church is quoted to say in The New Yorker that: “it is immensely difficult to identify longevity genes.” This suggests a long R&D road ahead. So don’t hold your breath for an elixir that will make you look young again any time soon.
But if that were really so, researchers in the field of aging would had to have gone into hibernation over the last ten years. In fact there have been many advancements in the field of aging. It is now well known that epigenetically anything that prolongs human life will:
So precisely what are these PhDs and billionaires going to find that anti-aging scientists don’t already know?
Of course, like pharmaceutical companies, these anti-aging ventures seek to produce synthetic molecules and/or proprietary technologies that can be patented. That drives up the price.
National Academy of Medicine’s Grand Challenge in Healthy Longevity intends to award at least twenty-five million dollars for breakthroughs in the field.
The amount of venture capital devoted to this ambitious effort to put an end to the curse of aging that has plagued mankind ranges from $1.5 billion at Google’s CALICO to $12 million at Insilico.
Based upon affordability the most obviously affordable approach to super-longevity is to limit daily calories to about 1200, which is equivalent to eating one meal a day. Intermittent fasting would also be life prolonging. But the Calorie Restriction Society only has about 100 members.
Then there are natural molecular mimics of a calorie-restricted diet, like resveratrol, the anti-diabetic drug metformin, rapamycin derived from a soil organism and designer niacin derivatives such as niacinamide, nicotinamide riboside and nicotinamide mononucleotide.
According to the Natural Medicines Comprehensive Database, there are 510 companies offering resveratrol pills. But where are the hordes of consumers to buy them? Sales of resveratrol pills are sluggish. The resveratrol pill business, largely based on borrowed science, is all dressed up and has no place to go.
Longevity could be big business, very big business. Now that oligarchs have everything they want but immortality, a growing number have chosen to invest their money where the medical establishment won’t go.
Now that oligarchs have everything they want but immortality,
a growing number have chosen to invest their money where the medical establishment won’t go.
A so-called anti-aging pill would at its best cut a large swath through the heart of chronic age-related disease and could save trillions of dollars in healthcare costs. But not if it is going to cost thousands of dollars for a year-long regimen of anti-aging pills.
Global spending on healthcare in 184 countries was $7.83 trillion in 2013 and is expected to soar to $18.28 trillion by 2040. US healthcare spending reached an historic high of $10,345 per person in 2016. The US spent $3.35 trillion on healthcare expenditures in 2016, about 17.8% of the nation’s gross domestic product.
Any affordable technology that prolongs the number of years of healthy living would unequivocally save billions if not trillions of dollars. But politically, government economists are relying upon new jobs in the healthcare field taking care of senior Americans to reduce unemployment. Politically an anti-aging pill is a crossed wire.
Clinically, don’t expect any technology that reduces healthcare costs to be popular with physicians. Prevention in the minds of most doctors equates with more expeditions (screening mammograms, PSA tests, colonoscopies) to find more disease to treat. Ironically, Medicare pays $100,000 or more to keep a cancer patient alive for another 3-4 months but hasn’t even approached the idea of spending a dollar a day for an anti-aging pill that might add years to one’s lifespan.
Ironically, Medicare pays $100,000 or more
to keep a cancer patient alive for another
3-4 months but can’t fathom spending
a dollar a day for an anti-aging pill
that might add years to one’s life.
What the public and physicians fail to recognize (or frankly don’t want to know) is that the Medicare trust fund is full of IOUs, promises to pay called US Treasury Notes. These IOUs are backed by nothing other than the full faith and credit of a nation is in deep debt and paying $400 billion a year in interest on the national debt.
Various authorities deny the Medicare Trust Fund is insolvent. The Center for Budget Policy & Priorities says that won’t happen till 2029. The Committee For A Responsible Federal Budget says the Medicare hospital insurance fund will be insolvent by 2025. But an telling report published in the National Review claims the hospital part of Medicare lost $128.7 billion between 2008 and 2014.
Because Medicare’s insolvency is a few years away doesn’t give license to keep going in the same direction. The Peter G. Peterson Foundation reveals only 58% of Medicare’s costs will be covered by payroll taxes in 2017 and the rest will come out of the general fund. This is why Federal income tax revenues shot up from $2.4 trillion to $3.2 trillion in recent years.
A financial death-cross looms as people live longer and the number of Social Security checks they receive over their lifetime increases. God only knows how the country remains solvent in such a situation.
Even a modest prolongation of just seven more healthy years would predictably save Medicare from insolvency. This is the so-called longevity dividend conceived by S. Jay Olshansky at the University of Illinois. Modern medicine is organized around treating diseases as if they are independent of each other and require a specialist for each and every age-related malady. But this is untrue. Chronic age-related diseases have a common driver that can be targeted.
According to forecasting studies conducted within the scientific community by the Rand Corporation and by Smith Kline & French Laboratories (SK&F), direct control of senescence and a significant increase in longevity may be realized within the next half century.
In the Rand Study scientists predicted an increase of 50 years in life expectancy by the year 2020.
The SK&F studies… did not show the same degree of consensus as the Rand Study, but their median estimate of a 50-year increase in longevity brought the date of achievement into the early 1990s.
-Pharmacological Control of Aging,
Experimental Gerontology 1970
Dr. Olshansky refers to a forerunner of thinking about aging — Bernice L. Neugarten who over 35 years ago said old age doesn’t have to be old age.
No longer should modern medicine look down its nose at anti-aging medicine. A consortium of researchers now say: “The goal of slowing aging has fascinated humankind for millennia, but only recently acquired credibility. Recent findings that aging can be delayed in mammals raise the possibility of prolonging human healthspan. There is near consensus among aging researchers that this is possible” (Cell 2014).
From the biology side of the equation, in the 1970s researchers began to realize human genes could be manipulated, that genes weren’t static and broken DNA could be repaired. News headlines claimed humans would soon live as long as the Biblical patriarchs. Then the prospect of extended youth vanished from view.
The life insurance industry was briefed on the prospect of 250-year lifespans and exerted influence to throw this science back into the research closet. The whole sordid affair is archived in a report entitled Longevity and Genetic Engineering (Record Society of Actuaries, volume 5, No. 1, 1079). Insurance actuaries realized no one would buy life insurance if they lived so long, and then only when they were hundreds of years old.
So this isn’t the first time a revelation of technology that can quell age-related disease and prolong life indefinitely has been on the table.
Don’t bet on biotechnology. A report on “The Business of Anti-Aging Science” states: “Of the 4000 private and 600 public biotech companies worldwide, only a few percent have shown increasing profitability. Historically, only one in 5000 discovery-stage drug candidates obtain approval and only a third of those recoup their R&D costs.” The report says it will be a surprise if the biotech companies in the anti-aging business today are active 5-10 years from now.
It will be a surprise if the biotech companies
in the anti-aging business today
are active 5-10 years from now.
Trends in Biotechnology August 1, 2017
The masses are being manipulated by their handlers. Unless the President or some religious leader like the Pope steps forward to give their blessing to this idea, the pursuit of super-longevity is going to be an individual one, not a societal one. There will be no herd consensus to take such pills. Politicians recognize superlongevity breaks the bank at the Social Security and Medicare trust funds.
The pursuit of super-longevity is going to be an individual one, not a societal one.
Since 2004 when Professor David Sinclair of Harvard Medical School announced that a red wine molecule, resveratrol, was found to activate the Sirtuin1 survival gene, a link had been made between the French Paradox and longevity (the wine-drinking French having a coronary artery disease mortality rate almost three times lower than North Americans). But “translation to the clinical arena has been unexpectedly slow.” There has not been a single human trial using resveratrol for heart disease despite promising animal studies.
Only one cardiologist has dared to utilize a resveratrol pill in his general practice. A Medicare audit reveals, from the point when this doctor first examines new heart attack patients in the emergency room, his patients do not experience subsequent heart attacks. This heart doctor began prescribing a resveratrol pill (Longevinex®) for his patients in 2005.
These are the terms upon which Silicon Valley oligarchs engage the public. Whatever these biotechnology startups have in mind, they are carving out their own niche in the anti-aging business and the public had better take what they are offered and make the oligarchs that own or manage these enterprises even richer than they already are now.
Oligarchs have enough political clout to block anti-aging technologies that are more cost effective (less profitable) or compete with their inventions.
Political clout is used to eliminate competition. As an example, the Department of Justice has now entered the regulation of dietary supplements and has criminalized nutraceuticals that make anti-aging claims. Bankers are delegated to remove online marketers who tout anti-aging properties for their nutraceutical products. Bankers now have authority to arbitrarily remove merchant accounts for nutraceutical companies that make such product claims. You can bet the Department of Justice isn’t taking any action against new biotech companies that make similar claims.
The Harvard Kennedy School Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics & Public Policy serves as a scientific background source for journalists on the topic of dietary supplements. That media resource center serves up specious reviews of nutraceuticals. Harvard is also reported to have brought in $27.8 million in licensing revenues from its pharmaceutical patent holdings. It’s a cabal against anti-aging pills that aren’t backed by well-positioned oligarchs.
Here is another axiom: any economical antidote for aging will be shunned in place of high-yield technologies.
That is precisely what happened to Longevinex®, a nutraceutical company that was the first to undergo animal testing to see how well it switched longevity genes.
In 2008 researchers took three groups of laboratory mice and gave them a calorie-restricted diet, a normal diet + resveratrol or a normal diet + Longevinex®. A global gene array was conducted. The results were striking but never saw the light of day in the news press.
12-week study
The Longevinex® matrix of nutraceuticals not only activated 9-fold more genes than resveratrol or a calorie restricted diet over the short term but it differentiated (expressed or silenced) 82% of the genes (677 of 831) activated by life-long CR.
Epigenetically this is the closest thing to a molecular mimic of CR that has been tested to date. If this effect can be achieved in humans, they wouldn’t have to wait a lifetime for its full effect like with CR.
But Longevinex® doesn’t have any oligarchs backing it. It is not part of the elite club that is creating a lot of ink for news outlets. In fact, oligarchs own the news media.
It was President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a military man, who warned America of a dark alliance between the nation’s military and the arms industry that supplies it. That dark alliance in the anti-aging field encompasses a cabal of researchers, capitalists and controlled news media along with politicians and insurance actuaries that aren’t going to allow a lowly dietary supplement company to pose competition.
In fact, an independent university-based researcher who dared to put Longevinex® to the test was falsely accused of research fraud and pilloried in the news press. Under pressure, he died within a year of these allegations. Subsequent research conducted by other investigators validated his prior studies. The researchers was exonerated. But the public had already backed away from resveratrol pills in a big way. Longevinex® received unsigned letters typewritten on a major university letterhead claiming the research community would put it out of business if it continued to conduct research.
A landmark evaluation of anti-aging science and attempts at commercialization has just been published in Trends In Biotechnology. The report suggests a poor understanding of what causes aging is one of the pitfalls to successful commercialization.
A question that goes unanswered in this era of epigenetics is what causes aging genes to be silenced (down-regulated) or expressed (up-regulated) increasingly in a pattern that progressively induces old age? And what causes these genes to progressively operate in reverse to produce superlongevity as observed during calorie restriction?
Human aging proceeds at three different speeds.
During the growth years, there are birthdays but little or no observable aging changes in cells and tissues. It is during this time of growth that the body has immense need for minerals; iron the produce red blood cells; calcium to make bone; copper to produce connective tissue.
After full childhood growth is achieved the speed of aging accelerates as the body’s demand for minerals subsides and minerals begin to accumulate. This first begins in males as females have an outlet for iron in their monthly menstrual flow and often are anemic. Adult males accumulate one excess milligram of iron per day of life and by age 40 have accumulation twice as much iron, and four times as much calcium, as an equal-aged female. Women donate calcium to build the bones of their offspring. At age 40 men will incur twice the rate of diabetes, cancer and heart disease compared to females. If a woman undergoes an early hysterectomy she incurs the same rate of disease as males.
Women who have more babies or have a late-in-life births tend to live unusually long lives because they have donated more minerals to their offspring.
Late in life (probably around age 70) the body reaches a steady state of iron, copper and calcium, the major minerals. The rate of aging subsides.
There is no other explanation offered in biology for these three speeds of aging than overmineralization.
There are other evidences for the overmineralization theory of aging:
This author maintains it is not calories but rather a limited intake of minerals that coincides with reduced food intake that decelerates aging. The overmineralization theory of aging, first proposed in 2007, is the only explanation for the three speeds of aging.
The overmineralization theory of aging provides the only explanation
as to why humans age at three different speeds.
Another convincing argument for the overmineralization theory of aging is an astounding but overlooked study published in 1992 that asserts the rate of aging ceases late in life. “The discovery that aging ceases in one of the most significant discoveries in recent aging research, with potentially revolutionary implications,” says a noted biologist.
A 10-year study of adults who ranged in age from 60-93 years shows that iron storage levels (as measured by ferritin, an iron storage protein), level off and do not continue to rise in this age group.
Mineral chelators (key-lay-tors) are proposed as anti-aging agents. A key experiment conducted at McGill University in Canada conclusively show that dietary restriction did NOT reduce the number of aging deposits in the brain tissues of lab rats compared to animals fed a normal diet, but a calorie restricted diet did reduce aging deposits in the brain when a standard calorie restricted diet with low metallic mineral content was compared against a diet where animals ate a restricted-calorie diet with added minerals. It’s the minerals, not the calories, which control aging.
The overmineralization theory of aging can be read online.
Phytochelators (plant-based chelators) have recently been proposed to address the many diseases of aging. Other researchers note that the accumulation of iron with advancing age leads to protein aggregation that can be blocked with plant-based iron controllers to extend the normal lifespan.
Even more recent data confirms the overmineralization theory of aging. In particular the Sirtuin1 survival gene that is active in calorie restriction controls iron in cellular energy compartments (mitochondria).
Among seven sirtuin genes, sirtuin3, which has biological action in the mitochondria of cells, has been described as a “forever young” gene. Of interest, Longevinex® was demonstrated to activate Sirtuin3 295% greater than plain resveratrol. Longevinex® is a proprietary combination of synergistic mineral chelators.
Will these longevity R&D ventures produce a viable product before Baby Boomers have all succumbed to the ravages of old age?
What would it take to convince humanity to take an anti-aging pill– an endorsement from the Pope? Out from the fear of approaching death, would people even go to church if they lived a couple hundred years? In this surreal world where aging may be optional, anti-aging pills not only compete with doctoring, they compete with God Himself.
However, it should be called to attention that the Bible holds historical precedent over any other document in regard to superlongevity as the Biblical patriarchs are reported to have lived hundreds of years (Adam 950 years; Methuselah 970 years). There must have been some biological mechanism(s) behind this reported superlongevity.
One plausible explanation for the superlongevity of the Biblical patriarchs may be a progressive gene mutation that would have occurred after Noah’s flood, precisely when human lifespans began to dramatically decline to 120 years as exemplified by Moses who fasted and lived that long (“and Moses was an hundred and twenty years old when he died: his eyes were not dim, nor his natural force abated”—Deuteronomy 34:7). The Bible says this is the observable limit that biologists agree upon today for the maximum human lifespan. However, there is a counter-argument that humans can live an unlimited lifespan.
There is a genetic flaw in all humans that shortens their lifespan. The gene for the enzyme that facilitates the internal production of vitamin C in the body was damaged at some point in time long ago in human history.
There had to have been a bottleneck in the size of human populations for that gene mutation to affect all of humanity thereafter.
The decline in the human lifespan after Noah’s flood possibly emanated from a gene mutation induced by intermarriage of Noah’s eight remaining children, which is consistent with a well-known break in a gene that controls the endogenous production of vitamin C.
Vitamin C is an iron-controlling nutrient. The provision of supplemental vitamin C in doses that approximate natural endogenous vitamin C synthesis in early humans suggests adults could live most of their lives symptom-free as most vitamin-C producing animals do.
By the way, oligarchs ought to be directing research funds towards reinstallation of the broken gene that regulates vitamin C synthesis in the human body. That gene can be reinserted in human eggs to produce future offspring that naturally produce vitamin C.
Restoration of the intact non-mutated gene that would reestablish the ability to synthesize vitamin C in the liver has been theorized in the scientific literature. A kit for geneticists to conduct basic CRISP research on the flawed gulonolactone oxidase gene is now available. Restoration of the intact gene has been demonstrated in genetically modified mice in the laboratory.
Furthermore, probably the most economical approach to implementation of anti-aging technologies is to add them to the drinking water supply. With that in mind, the addition of vitamin C to drinking water of laboratory mice has been shown to increase lifespan by 8.6% to 20.0%.
The financial elites appear to be congratulating themselves ahead of any achievements. U.S. President Barack Obama recently presented Arthur Levinson of Calico Life Sciences, with the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. Money can buy medals and trophies, but precisely what has Calico Life Sciences achieved so far? The Longevinex® pill has achieved more scientifically than the billionaires at Google have achieved to date.
Tom LoGiudice of Ojai, California, who has become an amateur longevity coach and who helped raise funds for David Sinclair at Harvard to purchase lab rats he needed for his initial resveratrol study, started taking Longevinex® along with his mother and daughter in 2004 when the product first became available. That’s three generations on an anti-aging pill.
LoGiudice says his mother rapidly recovered from two hip operations without succumbing to pneumonia at her advanced age. She is now 94 years old, has outlived her parents who died at the age of 57 and 68 and all of her siblings and now lives in Hawaii. LoGiudice says you just have to take the pill for a decade and watch all your contemporaries get old and senile to know the difference. LoGiudice and his daughter have not spent a day in a doctor’s office in the past decade.
In ancient Egypt workers toiled to build pyramids to house the bodies of kings and queens who would be carried to the after-life in ornate sarcophagi. The pyramid builders and the remaining masses were left behind. Not much as changed since then.
Disclosure: Bill Sardi is managing partner for Longevinex®, a nutraceutical company based in Las Vegas, Nevada.
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