The list of interventions is disappointing but not surprising. It’s particularly bad to see Minicircle on the list since they have been claimed by credible people to be a scam. Also like I expected, I see nothing on the list on fixing or slowing down aging of the extracellular matrix, which is a shame, but such treatments generally wouldn’t fit the X price so well at this time since they would be too early stage or would take longer than a year to show up as beneficial.
In terms of solving aging, while X price is a great initiate, the whole X price competition is somewhat limited in that they competitors have to demonstrate a change in health in less than a year. With no accurate ways to measure the rate of aging, such a short time will tend to favor interventions that lead to quick biomarker changes without any real slow-down or reversal of aging.
I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss it. We’re going to get human data on rapamycin and many other well known longevity interventions, as well as a number of wild cards that aren’t too well known. Additionally if there are good results it will create a lot of excitement in the general public which will drive demand and investment.
It’s going to be rapamycin combined with exercise, which will give some nice data but problematic one in that a lot of the benefits could be from exercise alone. Ideally they would need comparison groups using either exercise or rapamycin alone, but we know that’s unlikely due to cost. Anyways I hope that combo will do well and bring some excitement.
I would agree that most of them won’t pass them. Regarding the tests being good, I don’t think so, but it’s not their fault. Their tests are fine given what we have available within such a short time frame, but none of them will distinguish true age slowdown or reversal from merely quick biomarker changes. Any competition like this has huge limitations due to lack of good biomarkers of aging.
Btw personally I’m most excited to see what comes out of Progerinin. It’s acts on a somewhat novel interesting target that is involved in aging, a target that has not been attacked before in healthy humans AFAIK.
Something to think about regarding the biomarkers measured in XPRICE. I think they are measuring things like walking distance, congitive function and immune function. Problem is, even if an intervention were so massively powerful that it completely stopped aging for the one year duration of the trial, that intervention would likely come out as negative because these parameters change so slowly that one year of aging doesn’t give a significant difference. So if a close to perfect intervention would give negative results obviously the biomarkers aren’t good. This lack of good biomarkers is a huge problem in general, not limited to this competition.