Interview with Elena Milova - Member of the Board of Directors of Life Extension Advocacy Foundation and Lifespan.io

What is aging? We can define it as the process of accumulation of molecular and cellular damage resulting from normal metabolism. While researchers still poorly understand how metabolic processes cause damage accumulation, and how accumulated damage causes pathology, the damage itself — the structural differences between old and young tissue — is classified and studied very well. Correcting the damage and restoring the old - intact - young state of the body, we really rejuvenate it! It sounds very promising, and so it is. And for some types of damage (for example, for senescent cells) it is shown that it works!

Today in our virtual studio somewhere between St. Petersburg and Moscow is Elena Milova, a member of the Board of Directors of the Life Extension Advocacy Foundation ( Life Extension Foundation ) and Lifespan.io , a crowdfunding platform that supports research in the field of aging.

Elena is an activist of the movement for the extension of healthy life since 2013, when she first began to organize educational activities to increase the popularity of the idea of ​​preventing aging and new scientifically based methods of slowing aging.
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Over the past few years, Elena has participated in a number of successful projects in Russia aimed at spreading the idea of ​​healthy longevity among decision makers, as well as the general public. A number of her proposals regarding the need to actively inform the population about the achievements and potential of gerontology are included in the strategic program documents of the Russian Federation related to the problems of the elderly. She is the co-author of the book “Prevention of aging for all” (Teacher, 2015), where, among other things, Elena shares with what techniques of self-organization to facilitate the transition to a lifestyle aimed at prolonging the period of health.

In 2016, Elena participated in the organization and conduct of the successful crowdfunding campaign of the Major Mouse Testing Program project. The project aims to test the combination of senolytic drugs to extend the life of the mouse.

Previously, Elena worked in the pharmaceutical and advertising industries, helping to promote new medicines and treatment methods. This experience helped her to understand that the existing treatment methods are not 100% effective and cannot completely stop age-related diseases, which caused interest in developing innovative approaches.

Elena has two higher educations (linguistics and psychology) and in addition to working at Lifespan.io she is engaged in sociological research on the attitude of the population to the problems of life extension.

Interview

Ariel Faynerman : Good afternoon, Elena!

Elena Milova : Hello, Ariel.

Ariel Faynerman : Tell us a little about yourself, why did you decide to devote your life to the fight against aging and the promotion of anti-aging biotechnology?

Elena Milova : I always liked the idea that my work can make people's lives better. Therefore, for quite a long time I worked in a pharmaceutical company, and then in pharmaceutical advertising. I still think that to promote new drugs, to notify people about them is an extremely important task, for someone it can really save lives.

But at some point I was struck by the idea that no matter how hard I worked, there are illnesses that cannot be cured, against which there are no medicines yet. And maybe I should deal with this problem, and not just help inform people.

Then this problem touched me personally when, in a very short period of time, three people died in my family - both grandmothers and mothers. It is considered to be death in old age, and in old age (my mother was 62 when she died from cancer) as something normal, but for me it was not so. They all wanted to continue to live, to continue to work, to be useful, and what happened to them felt like a huge injustice. Especially insulting with my mother, her teacher career was on the rise, there were a lot of ideas, plans ... Cancer destroyed all this. I have seen enough of the suffering that aging has brought to the lives of loved ones, I was faced with a loss, and the cup of patience just overflowed.

Then I decided that I should change the direction of my life. And the point is not only that aging destroys people's health, but mine too, and this needs something to oppose. I was then thinking a lot about what it means to be human. I came to the conclusion that only where we dare to take on a super-complex task that at first glance cannot be solved at all, only there is a chance to fully know who you are, what is the scale of your personality. For me, being human means pushing the boundaries of the possible. For myself. For all. This is what I do.

Ariel Faynerman : How exactly did the immersion in the topic go for you? Did you understand yourself?

Elena Milova : I was very lucky when I just started this global reversal in my life, I met Russian transhumanists. Transhumanism is based on the idea that the achievements of scientific and technological progress should constantly improve people's lives, elevating a person, making him healthier, more powerful, fit, more reasonable. It was thanks to the leaders of the Russian transhumanist movement, Danila Medvedev and Valeria Pride, that I understood exactly how to solve the problem of aging. I understood the value of science and activism in the field of public health.

At one time, the global community has made significant progress in the prevention of infectious diseases by identifying their causes - pathogenic microorganisms. As soon as the opportunity arose to act on the root causes, the mortality rate from infections dropped by several times, while life expectancy, on the contrary, increased. Hygiene, sanitation, water chlorination, vaccines, antibiotics, all this was directed to the root causes.

The same principle is quite suitable for solving the problem of age-related diseases. Identify the processes that underlie aging, and create drugs and therapies that would effectively inhibit or even reverse these processes. And then for the first time in history we will have the opportunity to eliminate age-related diseases. Those who have deprived the lives of three of my close people. The ones that bring people the most suffering, and that kill about a hundred thousand people on the planet every day. Now age-related diseases lead in the top ten causes of death in developed countries.

And when I read the book of the famous ideologue of the abolition of aging, Aubrey de Gray , which described exactly seven types of damage, due to which people lose their health with age, I had a clear understanding of what should be done.

Ariel Faynerman : How did you get on the team at Lifespan.io and LEAF ?

Elena Milova : For several years I worked in the projects of Russian public organizations involved in promoting the prevention of aging. At this time, we also conducted an expert survey among developers of medical innovations about which key barriers hinder the development of preventive anti-aging medicine. The key problem, as it turned out, is only one: lack of funding.

Scientists who have a strong interest in this topic, a huge amount. They are ready to lead the work. So if someone else thinks that the problem is a shortage of scientists, it is not.

You'd be surprised, but research on the aging process and the development of approaches to the extension of the period of health and efficiency in Russia are included in the state research programs at the highest level. If you look, for example, the Program of Basic Scientific Research of the State Academies of Sciences for 2013–2020 , you will see there almost all the directions proposed by Aubrey de Gray at one time.

Problems begin several levels below. In the framework of the state system of financing science there is a shortage of experts who would give priority to projects on aging mechanisms. This is not surprising, the idea is still relatively fresh, all scientists with expertise in this information field prefer to take up their direct responsibilities, they conduct research. They do not have the opportunity to spend time on administrative issues like distribution of grants. And the existing experts of the old profile are still directing money to research individual diseases - instead of investigating the root causes and developing much more effective therapies.

There is nobody to blame here, it’s just a coincidence, characteristic of breakthrough research in almost any field. The system is conservative, it recognizes and recognizes more promising solutions, but with a delay - when there are enough experts for some of them to be in the system of distribution of state grants. And this picture is not only in Russia, so it is in other countries.

Underfunding especially sadly affects basic research, that is, where data accumulation occurs before a jerk in the direction of creating a new medicine. Until the required amount of data has been accumulated, it will not be possible to create a prototype solution for a particular aging mechanism. There is nothing to test even on animals. And without animal testing, one cannot start developing anti-aging medicines for humans.

That's why, after working for several years in projects of a different profile, I finally decided to address the problem of underfunding, and I ended up at Lifespan.io. The state grant system is not the only source of funds for research groups. There are at least two more - business and the general public.

Lifespan.io is a non-profit crowdfunding platform aimed at supporting early stage research. We are approached by a research team, explains the essence of the project, shows the study protocol, calculates the approximate cost, and if the project is good in a scientific sense and fits into our subject matter - we put it on the site and call on people to support it. That is, Lifespan.io is a website through which anyone can send a small contribution in support of a specific research project directly. This is a public co-financing of aging research.

Ariel Faynerman : What is the difference between crowdfunding and the state grants system?

Elena Milova : What are the advantages? First, we support only those projects that solve the problem of accumulating the necessary data on the mechanisms of aging and promising therapies. By the way, more than 200 well-known promising drugs to slow down aging are known, so there is a lot of work.

Secondly, basic research is relatively cheap, and the crowdfunding model works quite well. For two years we have collected a quarter of a million dollars and supported 6 studies. One project has already been completed, a brilliant scientific publication has been published .

Thirdly, although there is, of course, control over the target expenditure of funds, but unlike the grant system, we do not overload scientists with unnecessary long reports and do not dictate the schedule of expenditure of funds. Believe me, scientists are well aware of where, from whom, at what price and at what point you need to buy equipment, preparations for testing and animals. This is their job! We allow them to focus on the main thing, on the organization of the study. The criterion of success is to conduct the experiment in a reasonable time and the resulting publication, the rest is secondary.

The cost of an animal experiment is 50-70 thousand dollars, and if during the campaign we involve, say, a thousand people, then all of them are enough to donate only 50 to 70 dollars to fully fund the experiment. Almost every person can afford a donation of this size at least once a year. And if 2-3 thousand people participate in the campaign, then a contribution of 20-30 dollars is enough.

In order to provide the necessary number of participants in crowdfunding, we are constantly working to educate people about advancing research on aging and rejuvenation. We run a scientific blog , where we write about new discoveries and publish interviews with leading scientists, organize scientific discussions live, cooperate with journalists of well-known publications - in Russia, for example, this is Komsomolskaya Pravda . At the moment we are one of the two largest English-speaking newsmakers in the niche of the fight against aging.

Our key task is to create a social movement in support of aging management technologies, and therefore it is important for us to achieve the widest possible coverage. To this end, we are working with large projects in the field of popularization of science, for example, last year we helped the German video blog Kurzgesagt (the blog has about 5 million subscribers) to release two videos telling about the prospect of slowing down aging and methods that have already been tested on animals soon to be tested in humans. Each of these videos was watched by more than three million people, for a few days they were at the top among English-speaking audiences - and our website almost hung on the flow of interest. Now in work two more such projects with other channels.





Ariel Faynerman : What research projects did you finance?

Elena Milova : The first project was MitoSENS , the goal of the project is to test the possibility of mitochondrial repair (“power plants” in our cells) by transferring mitochondrial genes to the nucleus, where these genes will be better protected from free radicals and can provide more stable production of proteins for mitochondrial repair .

The second is the Major Mouse Testing Program (MMTP), a project for testing drug senolithics in mice. Senolitiki eliminate senescent (old) cells from the body. When these cells accumulate, it leads to poisoning of the body with harmful signaling substances and an increase in the level of systemic inflammation - which, in turn, increases the risk of developing cancer. If these cells are removed from the body, it reverses some age-related changes and leads to improved health of some systems and tissues.

The third project, OncoSENS, is aimed at analyzing a library of drugs in search of substances capable of controlling the mechanism of telomere prolongation by cancer cells. This mechanism is called ALT - Alternative Lengthening of Telomeres. Approximately 10% of all cancer cases are related to the operation of this mechanism, and disabling it may increase the chances of curing cancer for about 800,000 people a year.

The next project is CellAge - a plasmid construct for detecting and eliminating senescent cells. Interestingly, due to the widespread notification of the community to hold crowdfunding for the early stage, the CellAge team immediately after the end of the campaign was able to attract investment to the next stage of development.

Next we had a project to develop a hardware method for determining the biological age of people. The project is called AgeMeter .

Well, the last project we conducted at the end of last year is MouseAge - the project is aimed at creating a research application using artificial intelligence. This application will be able to accurately determine the biological age of laboratory animals by their image. This is an incredibly interesting project, since it can not only accelerate the search for promising methods to slow down aging, but also reduce unnecessary suffering for animals during research. The application is ready, there is a set of database of images for training and debugging of the neural network used in it.

And now we are preparing for a new campaign, while I don’t want to disclose the details, but I can say that the project is devoted to methods of stimulating DNA repair. I look forward to the launch date.

Ariel Faynerman : Why didn't you go to SENS ? And what is the difference between your organizations?

Elena Milova : It’s just a coincidence that I ended up at Lifespan.io , and not at SENS. Our goals coincide with those of SENS , but unlike Aubrey de Gray, who had several million dollars to give a high start to the organization, we started from scratch, we had nothing but a few ideas. All that we have been able to achieve has been achieved through hard work, and great organization and team spirit have played a big role in this. Each member of the team is unique in its own way, but one thing unites us all: we want to save the world from age-related diseases and aging. We want to make the impossible possible before.

Ariel Faynerman : You mentioned earlier that there is another source of research support - business. Many expect that billionaires will take up the problem of aging, but for some reason this does not happen. Positive examples, such as entrepreneur Michael Greve or creator of cryptocurrency Ethereum Vitalik Buterin , who donated several million dollars for aging research, units.

Elena Milova : Business, of course, is much more interesting to invest than to donate money. However, participation in crowdfunding on a charitable basis gives businesses the opportunity to get acquainted with a startup at an early stage of its development. And if the research team is ready to continue the development of technology and go into clinical trials, then business donors are among the first to know about it - and they thus receive privileged conditions for investment. This is exactly what happened with the CellAge project. Thus, crowdfunding research on aging is one of the most profitable types of charitable activities. Well, among other things, this is a positive image of the company and its leadership in the eyes of the community, which is also a lot, after all, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of progressively thinking people.

Ariel Faynerman : You recently attended the Undoing Aging 2018 conference in Berlin, what are your feelings? Your colleague, Steve Hill, wrote: “I can say from the experience of attending the Berlin Conference Undoing Aging 2018 that Aubrey de Gray is not alone in his enthusiasm. There were many enthusiastic scientists from around the world who were confident that aging could be defeated. Do you agree with him?

Elena Milova : I completely agree. And this is not a question of faith. There are no physical laws that deny the ability to control the aging process. The fact that worms can prolong life tenfold by changing the work of only two genes suggests that the course of aging can be modified. In mice, as you know, when affecting one of the mechanisms of aging, the result is an extension of the healthy period of life and the life span by about 25-30%. Aging will be defeated when we are able to control every aging process using medical methods, and we will combine these methods into a system.

Now one of the tasks of scientists is to test a complex of already existing methods for reversing aging in a mouse and see what happens. Perhaps such a mouse will already live three times longer. But again, an experiment of this nature will be expensive, it is not 50 thousand, it is, I think, at least thousand three hundred dollars, if not half a million. Expensive. But the information that we could receive in the course of such an experiment would be invaluable.

We are regularly asked, when will the anti-aging medicine appear?

They say that the realist is a well-informed optimist. Here is food for thought. According to statistics, the process of developing a new drug takes about 15 years. When the medicine is registered, it may take another 10 years to distribute it in all countries of the world. If initially it is expensive, additional time will be needed to improve the technology and reduce the cost to make the anti-aging medicine available to most people. If all prototype solutions existed today, we would still talk about the horizon of 25 years. I am now 39. In this scenario, at the time of the appearance of the rejuvenation complex, I will be 64. I don’t like this number, and there are a lot of people in the world who are older than me ...

The first therapies, such as senolitiki , are already in clinical trials in humans, their appearance on the market is possible already after 5 years. Various cellular therapies are being actively tested , for example, for the treatment of Parkinson's disease ; as their safety improves, they will also be actively entering the market in clinics. Immunotherapy , which can also be attributed to anti-aging interventions, already exists and is being applied. In short, it is moving. But, unfortunately, so far this is a very small part of the solution to the problem of aging and age-related diseases.

Aging can be defeated, yes. But I do not like this wording, it is too soothing. You see ... the goal is unattainable in two cases: if you do nothing, and if you move to it too slowly. And the problems with financing are very stable, they are not yet solved, and in order to ensure significant progress in the development of rejuvenation therapies, serious efforts of the society are needed literally in every direction.

Ariel Faynerman : What is your plan?

Elena Milova : That is what I consider the most important.

First, the crowdfunding of basic research on aging, the search and verification of prototype solutions. The sooner prototypes appear, the sooner clinical trials will begin - and they take the most time during the development of a new drug. Lifespan.io is not the only option I have mentioned Aubrey de Gray many times, and he is the scientific director of the SENS Research Foundation , the flagship organization for research on aging. You can support her. There are wonderful Russian scientists who deserve support - Alexey Moskalev, Vadim Gladyshev, Andrei Gudkov, Elena Pasyukova, Peter Fedichev ... Stars of a world scale, by the way. We supported MouseAge, where Vadim Gladyshev is the supervisor. Very proud of it, by the way.

Secondly, the activity of patient organizations in the field of conducting clinical trials of already identified promising geroprotectors. Geroprotectors are drugs originally developed for the treatment of age-related diseases, which have been shown to slow down the aging process at the system level. This is what the Open Longevity project is doing.under the leadership of the President of the Foundation of Science for the extension of the life of Mikhail Batin. I fully support their initiative. After such clinical trials, doctors will have a reason to prescribe prophylactic geroprotectors, which will give each of us additional time. Promising geroprotectors among the already existing drugs, by the way, dozens, well-known civilian scientist Dmitry Veremeenko writes about this in great detail on his encyclopedia website www.nestarenie.ru .

The third is advocacy of increased government funding for aging research. This is a complex and rather large-scale task; it includes informing about the potential of rejuvenation technologies for all key players: the scientific community, business, civil society, and representatives of state bodies. In 2014-2015, three or four speakers from our community attended the public hearings of laws and programs related to aging. Even in such a composition, we still managed to make a number of improvements to the state strategy of action in the interests of older citizens . And dozens, hundreds of people have to go, and then we will have a chance for a serious change in attitudes towards these issues and a change in government financing.

The whole experience of social activism in the field of medicine suggests that there is nothing impossible here. The anti-cancer movement, the anti-AIDS movement, achieved their goals of drawing attention to these problems, and were able to channel funding to develop medicines that people need. Our situation is no different. It is just a job to do. Need more hands and good heads.

Well, in conclusion, I want to say the following. This is often said, because the idea of ​​getting rid of age-related diseases seems to some people to come exclusively from the community for longevity, and not universal. This is absolutely not true.This is a global idea. Opinion polls show that between one-third and one-half of the population in developed countries welcome the development of anti-aging therapies , if they prolong youth and health.

In addition, there is a higher level public consensus about this idea. Remember what the goal of the World Health Organization? Its goal is the attainment by all nations of the highest possible level of health . At the same time, WHO defines health as a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being, and not only the absence of diseases and physical defects.. Pay attention to the words "no disease." This refers to all diseases, including age. Control over the aging process for the elimination of age-related diseases is the realization of a universal human desire for perfect health. This is a worthy goal, and we have to work on it. All together.