FYI. Here is an interview I recently did with Mitchell Lee, PhD, CEO of Ora Biomedical. Ora is pursuing a goal of 1,000,000 chemicals studied in the next few years to find pharmaceuticals and natural products that are superior to rapamycin. If you follow Dr Lee on Twitter, you know that they are already having success. This is a bit outside of my normal podcast topics but is personally interesting to me as an older athlete so I am doing a few interviews in this area. Next up is an interview with Healthspan.
“Success” means they show blinded (no chemical names) lifespan extension results superior to rapamycin. Results in worms. I understand the chemicals used are FDA approved pharmaceuticals (approved for what I don’t know).
How else can they test 1M chemicals and combinations of chemicals in a short time? If they find something that works 2x better than rapamycin, they’ll be able to find money to work it. If it’s already FDA approved (for something else), we’ll see it rapidly. This is the hope.
I spoke to Dr. Miller about this. He said that unfortunately there are a lot of false positive and negative results with worms. BUT it does provide a basis for further testing in mammals.
Definitely it’s just a first pass screen but I think here is the advantage: they can test stuff that’s is way weirder than any other method could get funded. They can test nearly infinite combinations. They can test classes if drugs that have no longevity data at all. Give them 5 years and they’ll have a short list of 500 new ideas for further investigation that nobody ever even considered before.
I completely agree! I am excited about the wormbot experiments. I think they’ll find a lot more interesting stuff faster than without. Also, I think M. Kaberlein is a fantastic researcher. I wish them all the best.
Here’s my interview with Healthspan’s Daniel Tawfik. I use them now (I pay in full), and have found them to be very helpful but more expensive than direct sourcing. Healthspan is definitely a good way to get started on this journey with a medical guide for support.
! Thank you for this great potcast!