Transcriber: Zuha alkh Reviewer: David DeRuwe
So you know, our kids have really no imagination
to understand they’re going to look like their grandparents.
They don’t understand - where did they come from?
What happened to them? Why did they look so different?
Why do why do they slow down?
Why do they get diseases and age, and is there an alternative?
I’m going to talk about it in the next few minutes.
So look, life expectancy throughout human evolution, 50,000-100,000 years,
life expectancy was somewhere between 19 and 35.
And something happened at the end of that, in the last 100-150 years
where we must have complained and somebody said,
“OK, let’s do agriculture, let’s clean the water, let’s do sewers,
let’s do surgery, let’s do antibiotics, let’s do vaccination.”
And all of a sudden, our life expectancy have shot to 78 years old,
but the deal for us got us age-related diseases that are terrible -
we just heard about one -
their accumulation and also bad quality of life.
The good thing is that aging has the biology. Now, this is not new.
We know here, looking at you, who’s older and who’s younger,
What’s new is that we understand now that this biology is what drives diseases.
You know, you can be born with a mutation,
with a change in your DNA that’s called APOE4,
that means you most probably are going to get Alzheimer’s during your lifetime.
It doesn’t happen when you’re born or when you’re one year or ten years.
It takes decades to come up because you need the aging part to do it.
But the good news is that it’s not hard to modulate aging.
We’re doing that across labs across the world every day.
Aging can be targeted, aging can be delayed,
aging can be stopped and reversed in several instances,
and the idea is that when you do that,
you prevent all those diseases that we’re trying to cure when it happens,
rather than just don't get them there in the first place.
And what helps us, gero scientists, is that we have hallmarks for aging.
We have where to start. How do you become a hallmark of aging?
You have to show that something goes wrong with aging,
and when you fix it, then animals are living healthier and living longer.
In fact, you see the connectivity between the lines.
You can target one hallmark and get improvements in the others.
We don’t have to attack all of them at once in order to get a real effect.
And really, when we do that, when we target the hallmarks,
we can show that healthspan and really, for me it’s about healthspan -
lifespan could be the side effect of healthspan -
but healthspan and lifespan can be enhanced in animals.
So if we, gero scientists, want to develop a gero therapeutic,
OK, something that will target aging, what do we want to show?
So for example, we can take a bunch of elderly people and give them the drug
and in five years show that with a drug compared to placebo -
it has to be a clinical trial - they have less mortality.
Is metformin enough?
Well look, our lifespan, our maximum lifespan as a species
is about 115 years.
We argue somebody lived to be 122, OK?
But statistically, it’s 115 years, and we die on average at the age of 78.
So there are 35 years more to realize.
OK, how do we do this?
So the question is, Do we have an example, OK?
Is it possible for us to have extended healthspan and lifespan?
In the picture you see here are four siblings
that were born in New York City between 1910 and 1920,
and the amazing thing with those four siblings
is that all of them got beyond the age of 102.
Helen, I’ll get back to her later, she was 110 when when she died.
So first of all, you see the genetics of exceptional longevity,
but you see also that it's possible.
And the question for us is, Just a minute, did they get sick when everybody got sick,
and now they just live sick longer, which is not what we want,
or did their healthspan and lifespan go together?
And this is the answer:
Here you see in the beginning, that everybody is free of disease,
and it’s going down when they’re starting to accumulate diseases.
So look at the green line for our control.
After the age of 60, less and less are free of diseases.
In fact, at age 80, 10% don’t have any disease,
and you can see in blue, the centenarians, they shift to the right,
they live healthier 20, 30 years longer,
and even after the age of 100, 30% of them don’t have a disease.
They might not wake up one morning.
And indeed, this is not the important part,
that healthspan and lifespan goes together;
the important part is that they have a contraction of morbidity
at the end of their life.
They spend very little time sick at the end of their of their lives,
and this is a huge longevity dividend.
Even the CDC have shown that people who -
the two year,
the medical costs in the last two years of life,
of somebody who dies at 100 is a third of those who die at 70.
We cannot afford not to do it.
It’s trillions and trillions of dollars that we could save if we could imitate it.
So centenarians have longevity genes that slows their aging,
and we’ve discovered some -
you know, aging is about interaction with the environment of genes -
and we found that people where genes are important.
Of course, for you guys, it’s about exercise and movement;
it’s about diet, maybe intermittent fasting.
There’s a lot of things to do,
but I want to actually tell you that our centenarians are not like that.
Helen, who lived to be 110,
I saw, I met her first in her New York apartment, when she was 100 years old.
She opened the door and she was smoking.
(Laughter)
And I said, “Helen, nobody told you to stop smoking?”
She said, “You know, all four doctors, that told me to stop smoking, they died.”
(Laughter)
And if you smoke for 90 years, you’re going to live a long life.
There’s no argument.
But 60% of men, 30% of women were smokers.
Obesity and overweight was more than 50% .
Exercise like even housework, less than 50%, Vegetarians, 2% .
Because those guys, it really didn’t matter what they did with the environment.
But it matters to us.
Let’s say, who knows how old they would be if they would react with the environment.
Some of those results have been translated to drugs
that went to phase three trial and were approved for use.
And the American Federation of Aging Research
has begun an effort to expand the recruit
and do a sequence of the genes of 10,000 more families.
I have 750 families in my study, and there is the proof of concept,
but we want all the longevity genes
because there’s more than one way to get there, and we want to validate it,
and we want to create more and better drugs,
so we can get to much better results than what we have now.
So get ready for gero therapeutics.
But I want to say one thing: This is not only about aging.
If you survive cancer, if you got chemotherapy or radiation - you aged.
And people who survive cancer are having tremendous problems when they age.
Even kids can get heart disease when there are 35 years old.
So they need help.
People with HIV get diseases ten years before their cohort. They need help.
People who are disabled and they cannot move or eat OK, they get into trouble.
And you know what?
If we want to go somewhere in space besides spinning for 20 minutes there,
if we want to go to Mars, OK, we need to solve aging.
We’re never going to Mars without getting cancer or heart disease,
and we’re never coming back.
So there’s a lot of reasons to stop aging.
So could our kids and grandkids be healthy centenarians?
Fasten your seatbelt. We’re going there.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)