Transcriber: Daniela Urzúa Reviewer: Helen Chang
Good evening.
I’d like you to imagine with me
that we’re in 1880 and we’re part of a family having a baby.
It could be the mother, the father, a sibling,
maybe the grandparents.
Well, back then, rather than it being a joyful situation,
it could end in tragedy.
The mortality rate of a woman having a baby
and the mortality of the baby at delivery was very high.
What if I told that family in 1880
that within 50 years medical science would change all of that?
I think from that perspective,
they might have been very skeptical.
Well, a paradigm shift in science and medicine did change all of that.
And that was the germ theory of medicine.
It was the recognition that bacteria and other microorganisms cause diseases.
Something very simple started to change--
surgeons washing their hands when they delivered the baby.
It made a big, big difference.
This was followed by modern surgical techniques, other medicines,
and most importantly, antibiotics.
And so now with with those types of interventions,
the mortality rate of women and babies during childbirth, although not zero,
is much, much lower.
How did this introduction of the germ theory of medicine
affect overall human lifespan?
Well, life expectancy had been constant since the year 1500,
and it was only 40 years.
So for several hundred years of duration,
human lifespan was on average 40.
With the introduction of the germ theory and the interventions I told you about,
human lifespan began to increase.
And over the last 150 years,
it’s almost doubled from (an average of 50 to)
an average of 40 to an average of 80.
Medical paradigms are extremely important.
And tonight, I want to tell you about a new paradigm
that we’re in the midst of right now.
It’s called the Aging Paradigm,
or the Geroscience Paradigm.
It’s the idea that we should treat aging as a disease.
Around the world, top medical scientists are studying the biology of aging,
just as scientists in 1880.
We’re studying the biology of bacteria and try to understand how to kill them.
Medical science today are studying this body wide changes that occur with aging.
There are changes in blood vessels, changes in our immune system,
and changes in our outward appearance that we’re all familiar with--
hair growth and skin content.
Now, aging is different from most types of diseases
because it is affecting the whole body, not just a single organ or tissue.
So new approaches are needed.
I think one of the most exciting insights about aging
that gives us a therapeutic opportunity
is to understand that we have stem cells in our body
and these stem cell reservoirs,
which are there to help the health of our organs
and help tissues heal
and allow dying cells to be replaced, are diminishing.
So what if we could take these cells,
grow them in the laboratory,
turn them into a medicine,
could we potentially have a successful treatment for aging?
So just as antibiotics address the germ theory in the past,
can stem cells address the geroscience theory?
I've been very interested in this idea for some time,
and I actually decided to put it to the test to see if it could work.
My name is Dr. Josh Hare. I'm a cardiologist,
but eight years ago I started a company called Longeveron.
And Longeveron is a company dedicated to finding treatments for aging
and specifically testing stem cells as one of the treatments.
Now, when we think about aging, it's not just the longevity of life.
It's not just how long we live,
but it’s also the quality of those years.
As human lifespan has increased,
unfortunately, the period of time where we’re disabled at the end of our life
has also increased.
So we have more length of life,
but more time being disabled in later years of life.
And we call that period,
the period where we’re at risk for frailty or for poor health span.
So targets of anti-aging treatments
need to be focused not just on the length of life,
but also on the quality of life,
particularly when we're older.
So one of the first things Longeveron did
was develop techniques to make stem cells that could be used as medicines
and they call the stem cell that they’re testing right now Lomacel-B.
One of the earliest studies that Longeveron did
was to test Lomacel-B in older people who had frailty.
In order to do that study,
they needed a simple way to index frailty.
And they came up with a very simple way
which is just to measure how far a person can walk in 6 minutes.
A normal, healthy adult can walk 5 to 600 meters,
which is about 5 to 6 football fields.
But somebody who's got frailty can only walk about half of that much,
2 to 3 football fields.
Think about how long it took you to walk from the parking lot to your seat.
It's probably about 600 meters and it probably took you 6 minutes.
Think about what it would be like if you couldn't make it.
And actually, if you want to know what your six minute walk test is,
it’s on your iPhone. If you have an iPhone, it’s on the health app.
It'll tell you what your six minute walk distance is.
That's how important that measurement is.
Well, when when the study was done by Longeveron,
people who received Lomacel-B infusions
actually had a gradual and steady increase in the amount they could walk.
And this continued over nine months.
People who got a placebo actually declined over nine months,
so that after nine months,
the difference between the people getting Lomacel-B
and the placebo
was almost a whole football field.
So what is Lomacel-B?
It’s a human cell that can be taken from a healthy donor
and grown in the laboratory.
Some scientists refer to this as a medicinal signaling cell.
And I think what’s exciting about this
is it giving us a frontier both on treating aging and health-span,
but also into a new era of using cells as medicines.
I believe that cells are going to be a safer and more effective way to treat
to treat a whole host of diseases to replace what we do right now,
which is to use medicines, chemicals.
Now, we’re already starting to use cells as medicines. It’s very exciting.
A great example is a treatment for cancer called CAR-T therapy,
which is a modified cell that can kill cancer,
and that's already proven to be very successful.
So I think we’re at the beginning of a new paradigm and a new frontier,
this geroscience paradigm, where we’ll use cells as safe medicines.
So what does the future hold for human longevity?
As I already showed you,
human longevity has already doubled in the last 150 years.
It went from 80 to 40. (should be: from 40 to 80).
How long can this continue for?
Well, scientists estimate that this will continue
for at least another 40 to 45 years by the end of the century,
so that our longevity will be 120 to 125 years.
That might seem unbelievable,
but just think about how skeptical you would have been
if you were having that baby in 1880,
and I told you that medical science would make that much safer.
Now, remember, I've already said this. I'll say it again.
It's not just about how long we live,
but it’s also about the quality of those years and the health span.
So that is one of our key focuses in this area of research.
So let me end with a quote
from a very prominent aging researcher whose name is Aubrey De Grey.
He is credited with saying
the first person to live to 150 years of age has already been born.
Thank you very much.