Excellent overview! I can not get enough Kaeberlein on his research and perspective. He believes rapamycin does slow, reverse aging and extends life span with health. His taking rapamycin shows that confidence.
Well, as long as you can’t get enough of Kaeberlein… I’ve discovered that Optispan, the new investment fund that Matt is involved with has created a YouTube channel and posted a few videos (and has all of 11 subscribers so far :-). Here are two other videos of Matt’s that they’ve posted:
Seems the video above may be a bit outdated. The oldest mole rat in captivity turned 39 this year, and he’s still young(ish) and healthy. He’s still breeding. We really don’t know how long they can live to, but I would say 40-50 is more like it. Actually, I hope these little guys can pull an energizer bunny and keep going and going and going…
Matt and Attia are by far the best communicators and advocates of aging research. Green and Blagosklonny have added a lot to the field, but neither one can communicate well.
I think he wants rapamycin / longevity medicine to go mainstream and the degree to which people avoid doctors and just take the biohacker / self medication approach it doesn’t move the medical field forward towards more of a “healthcare rather than sickcare” model that many of us thing is the better approach…
There are a few interesting questions. One, if you had tested a million compounds, would you find something better than rapamycin? I would be shocked if you wouldn’t, but that’s an unknown at this point. Another question is, “What happens when we start combining more than one thing that affects lifespan?”
There’s reason to believe that at least in some cases, combining two or three things could be beneficial, and we wanted to be able to explore that. This is where we decided to start with WormBot, because we felt like we had enough capacity to test individual drugs, and, in select cases, combinations.
The strategy we settled on was to start from FDA-approved drugs because not only are they approved for human use, but, usually, something is known about their mechanisms of action. They are also usually quite potent, so the chance to get a sizeable effect is higher.
I love the WormBot idea! That is something that could really improve the discovery of new drugs and combinations to improve longevity. It’s like shining the few first rays of light into a darkened room. Maybe we’ll be able to see the black cat after all…
So to find out how robotics, AI, and worms could be combined to target aging and drug discovery, we reached out to Ora Biomedical’s co-founder and CEO, Mitchell Lee, to find out what the company has been up to since launching earlier this year.
Effects of rapamycin on age-associated intervertebral disc degeneration
The speaker is a nightmare but the histological results shown at 35min are impressive I think. They gave rapa to marmosets and looked at the disc degeneration. It works a lot more better in males but I think that’s simply because old female marmosets are like their human counterpart and are deficient in oestrogens. We talk about the skeleton, vertebrae and disc so I think the hormonal difference is important. They only studied a couple of animals but still, these histological pics are very telling.
Thanks, I wasn’t sure this stuff had not already been shown. Yes, it really is great stuff. The “old + rapa” tissues are almost similar to the young tissues and miles away from the simply "old " tissues. The architecture, the organisation, the density. Everything is stunning.