Undoing Aging with Michael Greve

As our readers probably know, from March 15 to 17, the Undoing Aging 2018 conference was held in Berlin. Its goal is to bring together scientists working on technologies to repair age-related injuries in the body, as well as to provide students studying life sciences and all other interested people the opportunity to get a deeper insight into the current state of research in regenerative medicine.

The conference was organized by the Forever Healthy Foundation and the SENS Research Foundation , and the speakers were well-known researchers, including the director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine , Anthony Atala, Kristen Fortney, an expert in computational drug discovery and aging biomarkers, Michael West is the founder of Geron Corporation and CEO of BioTime and AgeX , James Kirkland is a world-class cell aging expert, and Vera Gorbunova is a pioneer in the use of comparative biology in the study of aging and co-director of the Rochester Aging Research Center. In addition to the scientific, educational benefits and networking opportunities, the conference no doubt greatly contributed to popularizing this area of ​​research and helped spread information about both the problem of age-related diseases and the remarkable opportunity to finally put aging under medical control in a relatively short time.

Of course, the LEAF attended this event to provide you with the most up-to-date information, and our readers will receive detailed descriptions of what happened during and after the conference. In the meantime, to arouse your interest, we met with the founder and CEO of the Forever Healthy Foundation, Michael Greve, to learn more about his organization and the history of his participation in the life extension movement.
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Michael and Forever Healthy

Michael’s success as an entrepreneur is rooted in the very beginning of Internet development. In 1995, he and his brother Mathias founded web.de - a site that has become one of the largest and most popular Internet portals in Germany. Among several other projects launched by Michael and his brother, the website for booking airline tickets flug.de and the website for organizing last minute travel lastminute.de .

As Michael himself admitted during his speech at the 2016 Rejuvenation Biotechnology conference, which was organized by SRF and held at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, his way of life during the period of hacking was not the most healthy, and his interest in extending life has resulted from his attempts go to a more correct lifestyle. Over time, acquaintance with the science of maintaining health led him to the work of Aubrey de Gray and to realize the potential attainability of indefinitely preventing age-related diseases and preserving health.

Following his successful insight, he founded the Forever Healthy Foundation, an organization whose goal was to accelerate the creation of bio-industry rejuvenation of the body, with the result that aging and the diseases associated with it should soon be a thing of the past. Forever Healthy is an open knowledge base that is designed to provide free access to information, with which people can develop their own life extension strategies. But even the most correct way of life will not prevent the occurrence of age-related diseases. To achieve this, you need to restore the damage that the body inflicts on itself as a side effect of its normal functioning - in other words, to use anti-aging biotechnology.

In order to make such technologies available as early as possible, Kizoo Ventures venture fund organized by Michael provides start-ups in the field of biotechnology rejuvenation with early-stage counseling and funding. To date, among the projects to which Kizoo has provided funding for Oisin Biotechnologies , Ichor Therapeutics and LysoCLEAR companies, and AgeX Therapeutics . Moreover, in 2016 Forever Healthy transferred $ 5 million to SENS projects, and seed funding of at least $ 5 million will be additionally provided to start-ups based on SENS research.

We thought it would be interesting to learn a little better than Michael and his way in the field of life extension, his expectations regarding the conference Undoing Aging 2018 and the nascent industry of rejuvenation of the body.

Interview

Nicola Bagala : So, Michael, could you tell us a little about your history as an entrepreneur?

Michael Greve : For me it was an amazing journey. The heyday of personal computers, the Internet, smart phones, cloud technologies, the era after personal computers. I am grateful that I was born at this time. Opportunity to survive all these events as a participant, participate in the founding and development of several large Internet companies in Germany, attract public funding and now fund and advise some of the most interesting start-ups in our country - I am grateful for all this every day.

Currently, the same rapid evolution that we have observed in the field of information technology is occurring in the field of genetics, biology and nanotechnology. No matter how impressive our past development was, I expect even more from the future.

Nikola Bagala : Was your decision to switch from the old, unhealthy lifestyle to the correct one caused by some specific event or did it just happen?

Michael Greve : Nothing concrete, just a sudden realization that it would be foolish to continue further in the same vein.

Nicola Bagala : You just stumbled upon rejuvenation in the process of searching for information about a healthy lifestyle, or independently realized the harm of aging and began to search, did others not come to the same conclusion?

Michael Greve : When you think about how to stay healthy as long as possible, you naturally come to the conclusion that aging itself is the main enemy and you think what can be done about it.

Nikola Bagala : In addition to the obvious - healthy eating, physical activity, avoiding bad habits, what else is included in your personal strategy?

Michael Greve : On the one hand, there are other important aspects of a basic approach to preventing diseases, such as proper sleep, limiting exposure to blue light, limiting stress, meditation, cleansing the body of toxins and heavy metals, dietary supplements (taken both inside and intravenously) , intermittent fasting and imitating fasting diet. I also constantly apply the latest achievements in functional medicine and genetics to monitor and correct violations of biometric indicators and potential risk factors for age-related diseases.

Two other key parts of my personal life extension strategy are the use of the best available early diagnosis methods and the use of the most promising, although still limited, anti-aging therapies and geroprotectors currently available, such as hormone replacement therapy, decalcification, metmorphine, deprenyl, berberine and Q10 . I closely follow the latest developments and tests of rapamycin , NAD + , and exosomes of young plasma.

For those interested, we have documented this holistic approach on our website forever-healthy.org , where it is available to everyone for free, and we continue to update and expand it. We are in the process of hiring a team of professional medical professionals to speed up work on this important project. Candidates can respond directly through our web site.

Nicola Bagala : In the course of your speech at Rejuvenation Biotechnology 2016, you told about your own educational activities. Undoing Aging 2018 is one of the clearest examples, but could you tell us about other ways in which you disseminate information, and how has the public perception of life extension changed in recent years?



Michael Greve : From time to time we have meetings in Berlin and we have an active Facebook group in which people share their personal methods of healthy longevity.

In general, public opinion has changed significantly over the past 2-3 years. Currently, you can read more publications on the topic of life extension and they have a more positive direction.

I am deeply convinced that as soon as the first working anti-aging therapy appears, the whole discussion in society will immediately change. The question will move from the category of abstract reasoning about overpopulation and the like to something very personal. Do I want to live for 20 years more with good health or not? At this point, I suppose no one will say, "Well, I will not use medicine and better get cancer, because, you know, overpopulation . "

So the best thing we can do is create this first anti-aging therapy and then actively promote its use.

Nicola Bagala : Many in our community hope that more wealthy people will take part, because they have more resources and they can be of great benefit by donating even a small part of their funds. But in general, this almost does not happen. What could convince such people? Do we need any special arguments for their beliefs, different from those we usually use?

Michael Greve : Large-scale charity in an early market, such as anti-aging biotechnology, is hard work, and it can only reach a small number of progressive-minded people. I think that the easiest and most effective way to attract wealthy people is to show them how they can become even richer.

I see the acceleration of the development of real anti-aging therapies as a three-step process. First you need to motivate scientists to start working in this field of basic research, then as early as possible implement the research results in the form of attracting start-ups and, finally, raise private capital to create the actual treatment methods. This last step will allow these wealthy individuals to invest in a good cause and at the same time make a profit from it.

That is why we are organizing this conference, attracting funds to basic research and making great efforts to translate promising scientific developments into start-ups, and this will allow us to move forward in the future at the expense of attracted private capital. As far as startups are concerned, we have already done this several times and expect a positive result.

Nicola Bagala : What are your expectations for Undoing Aging 2018? What is the main result of the conference? Public awareness, attracted investors or networking among scientists?

Michael Greve : First of all, we are focused on science itself. We want to provide a platform for the existing scientific community, which is already working on repairing age-related damage, and to strengthen the community itself. At the same time, the conference provides interested scholars and students the opportunity to get directly acquainted with the current state of research, which will attract new scientists to this area.

In addition, we invited a wider range of community members to extend life to extend networking and call on all educators to inform the public. Since journalists, bloggers and several television channels are showing great interest in us, the event will also have an enlightening aspect.

So yes, we can say that the goal is networking at all levels to advance our cause.

Nikola Bagala : Are there any plans to make Undoing Aging an annual event?

Michael Greve : Yes, we are planning a long-term participation. This year, we have already received a lot of positive feedback and even more people have registered than we expected. This is very encouraging.

Nicola Bagala : State funding for life extension research could significantly speed up the clinical implementation of effective anti-aging therapies, the German Health Party , in which you are a strategic advisor, was created to achieve this very goal. Is it possible, in your opinion, to attract the state to the financing of basic research, or will it become of interest only after confirming its fundamental feasibility, for example, by radical rejuvenation of the mouse or even the first human tests?

Michael Greve : States will act only if a significant proportion of citizens demand it, and a significant proportion of people realize the potential only after the first available anti-aging therapies appear. I do not think that a mouse will be enough. After overcoming this stage, organizations such as the Health Party will provide an ideal platform for directing such efforts.

Nicola Bagala : At Rejuvenation Biotechnology 2016 you said that the industry should be self-accelerating, as the Internet technology industry. The success of the latter, however, largely depended on the ability of new companies to develop easily on the basis of existing products and technologies that became available and inexpensively enough soon or were initially available as open source software. Is it possible in the field of biotechnology to accelerate development in a similar way. What factors could be decisive?

Michael Greve : There are two fundamental differences.

First, as you said, we could easily develop using the existing base. We had HTTP protocol, web server, browser, Linux and free databases. On the basis of this platform, you can create almost any service. Anti-aging biotechnology is arranged differently. Here on each startup requires a scientific discovery. Therefore, everything is much more complicated.

On the other hand, the future market of anti-aging biotechnology is probably at least two orders of magnitude larger than the Internet industry. Just compare how much a person spends, say, on an iPhone and an assessment of a company that provides people with the opportunity to avoid cancer and all other age-related diseases, throughout their lives and extend their healthy life for decades. This allows us to estimate the possible value of such a company. In the case of anti-aging therapies, there will be more than one company or service. Given the nature of aging, you need a lot of different treatment methods and a lot of different companies. So there is a huge incentive to invest in this industry.

Nicola Bagala : Speaking of accelerating progress, how do you see the effect of artificial intelligence, especially machine learning, on research in the coming years. Do you think these technologies will help accelerate progress?

Michael Greve : AI will be one of the key methods in future medicine, and it can be very useful in research.

Nikola Bagala : Many people are worried about the price. Do you think that the state will have to intervene and subsidize anti-aging therapies, which otherwise few people can afford?

Michael Greve : No need to worry about that. We are talking about a market with billions of buyers, a variety of possible technological approaches to every aspect of aging, such as cleansing the body of senescent cells. And the general approach, for example, to remove senescent cells, cannot be patented, only a specific implementation is possible. In such a market, as in any industry, market mechanisms will operate, with healthy competition and a large number of products in combination with a huge client base; they will lead to an increase in quality and a fall in price with the rapid improvement of products that will become publicly available.

Nicola Bagala : You are currently supporting several biotech startups that bring anti-aging therapies to clinical trials. Are there any estimates of the base cost of these treatments, and do you know how manufacturers plan to reduce their cost?

Michael Greve : In the end, these treatments will be fairly accessible.

Nikola Bagala : As an investor, what would you recommend doing to other investors to help accelerate the development of the rejuvenation industry and provide it with the same exponential growth due to the positive feedback that the Internet industry experienced at the time?

Michael Greve : The potential benefit is huge, but so are the risks. You must either be prepared to write off most of the investments made at an early stage, or pay a huge premium when investing at a later stage.

Nicola Bagala : And, finally, a somewhat personal question. Of course, you know about the “second cosmic” rate of life extension - a situation in which the life expectancy grows faster than you age. How optimistic are you about the possibility of achieving it during your lifetime or ever in principle?

Michael Greve : Of course, we do not know for sure when or with what probability this will happen, but it seems to me much more motivating and fascinating to work, assuming that we can achieve this and will do everything possible to achieve this. If we fail to reach the second space, at least we will have a very long and healthy life.

Nikola Bagala : Would you like to say something more to the readers?

Michael Greve : I think we live at the most amazing time in human history, let's take advantage of this opportunity to the maximum.

Translation done Pattern, SENS Volunteers group