Clinical trials on the threshold - an interview with Aubrey de Gray

In November, Aubrey de Gray was in Spain and took part in the Longevity World Forum in Valencia, where he gave a press conference organized by his friend, MIT engineer José Luis Cordeiro.

Dr. Aubrey de Gray is a Research Leader (CSO) and founder of the SENS Research Foundation . In Madrid and Valencia, Aubrey de Gray repeated Tendencias21 one of his most prominent statements in 2018: “In the future there will be many different drugs to reverse aging. In five years, many of them will work in early clinical trials . ”

The Longevity World Forum is a congress on longevity and genomics in Europe. He is the successor to the first congress in Spain, the International Longevity and Cryopreservation Summit , which was held at the CSIC headquarters in Madrid in May 2017, and Aubrey de Gray also took part in it. In Valencia, his presentations were received with interest, and Aubrey de Gray explained to a select audience that aging would begin to be treated as a medical problem in the near future. Instead of treating its symptoms as is customary in the treatment of infectious diseases, the causes of aging themselves will be cured.

Interview

Laura Sans Olasia : Recently, longevityworldforum.com stated that therapy aimed at preventing aging will become a reality within five years. What will be its mechanisms?
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Aubrey de Gray : There will not be any single medicine; there will be many different drugs, and they will all have different mechanisms. For example, some of them will be cellular therapies, in which we place stem cells back into the body to replace cells that the body does not replace on its own. There will be drugs that kill cells that we do not need. There will be gene therapies that, for example, provide cells with new opportunities for splitting debris. Vaccines or other types of immunotherapy that stimulate the immune system to eliminate certain substances. A lot of different things.

In five years, we will probably have most of this work. I do not think that by that time everything will really be perfect; we will probably still be in the early stages of clinical trials in some of these things. Then we need to combine them so that they do not influence each other negatively. So much more work. But, I believe, it is likely that in five years we will have everything or almost everything in clinical trials.

Laura Sans Olasia : Then clinical trials for seven years, until they become perfect. Do clinical trials usually not take a lot of time?

Aubrey de Gray : Not necessary. For example, in the process of aging, because there is a gradual accumulation of damage, you may have treatments that slow down the rate of accumulation of damage, or you may have treatments that correct the damage already done.

The second type of therapy is what we believe will be the most effective and easiest to implement, and you will be able to see the results very quickly, for example, after one or two years. You still want to know what will happen later, but first you need to decide whether it works at all, and as soon as it starts working, you can start making it available.

Clinical trials change in this way. Historically, clinical trials are bound to be completed before anyone can get medicine, but now we have new rules; There is such a thing as adaptive licensing , which becomes popular in the US and around the world, when therapy becomes approved at an earlier stage and then monitored.

Laura Sans Olasia : In addition to the humanitarian perspective, to avoid the pain and suffering that occurs in old age, if prolonging the healthy life of people will allow a significant reduction in health expenditures on the part of governments, why don't they help research in this direction?

Aubrey de Gray : You are absolutely right. It is rather strange that governments are so short-sighted. But, of course, the real problem is psychological: it is not only short-sighted governments. Almost everyone in the world is short-sighted about this issue. The reason I believe that this is so is that people still cannot convince themselves that this will happen.

From the very beginning of civilization, we knew that there was this terrible thing called aging, and we were desperate to do something with it to get rid of it. And people walked from the very beginning of civilization, saying: “Yes, that’s the solution, that’s the source of youth!” And they were wrong every time. Therefore, when a new person comes and says that he thinks he knows how to do this, of course, there will be some skepticism until he shows a working treatment. Of course, if you don’t think it will work, you won’t support financially. This is very short-sighted, but understandable.

Laura Sans Olasia : Why does the pharmaceutical industry not devote its research and development to this area, which leads to the death of 100,000 people daily?

Aubrey de Gray : Now the pharmaceutical industry aims to keep older people alive when they get sick. That way they make money. This is not just a pharmaceutical industry, it is a whole medical industry. So many say they are concerned that the pharmaceutical industry may be against these treatments when they come. I do not think this is so at all. I believe that they will be for, because people will be for, but people are not for.

People do not trust preventive medicine. They think: “Well, if I'm not sick yet ...” They do not trust medicine at all; they know that she is not very good. Therefore, when they are not sick yet, they think: “Well, I will wait until I get sick,” but we can change that. In the end, people will realize that it will be much more effective to heal themselves before you get sick, and then the entire medical industry will simply react to it; they will start developing medicines for which people want to pay.

Laura Sans Olasia : So you don't think they will be against this therapy?

Aubrey de Gray : No, they will be for her.

Laura Sans Olasia : But now they are not focusing their research in this area.

Aubrey de Gray : True, because they don't need it. Large pharmaceutical companies practically do not conduct their own research. They only watch what is happening in the market, and then they buy small companies.

Laura Sans Olasia : In your analogy with a car, you say that a car is designed for 10 or 15 years, but with good maintenance it can work for 100 years. Does this not express the idea that aging is programmed and that the life of the car is also programmed?

Aubrey de Gray : No, it is not. You all know that a long time ago, Henry Ford invented a concept called planned obsolescence , which was a way to design a car so that you could fairly accurately predict how long it would work. But, of course, the only reason this forecast works is because people are lazy and they don’t mind changing their cars, so they only do the minimum amount of maintenance that the law gives them.

The reason that some cars have served for 100 years is not because they were built differently, but because there are several people who fall in love with their cars and do not want them to age. So it is really the same. We are aging because there are some types of damage that are not fixed automatically.

Of course, many types of damage in the human body are corrected automatically, so we do not need medicines against them, but some of them are not corrected. So if we can develop medicines that fix these things, everything is the same as with a car.

Laura Sans Olasia : If aging is not programmed, why do different species have different lifespans?

Aubrey de Gray : Because they have different built-in repair mechanisms. When I talk about all of these types of damage, they are the types of damage that accumulate in the body, and they accumulate because the body has no way to fix it.

There are a huge number of other types of damage that I do not call damages, and the reason why I do not call them damages is that they do not accumulate. The reason why they do not accumulate is that we already have built-in mechanisms for their repair. Thus, in long-lived species, the best repair mechanisms are built into their organisms.

Laura Sans Olasia : Do you think that at first we can focus only on the replacement of organs and the restoration of their functions, and in the end we will be able to eliminate the root causes of aging? Once we reach the Longevity Escape Velocity , we can probably focus on eliminating them?

Aubrey de Gray : We can never stop the generation of this damage. The body will do this because it is inherent in metabolism, but the better we correct the damage, the less problems we have.

Laura Sans Olasia : What are your healthy habits?

Aubrey de Gray : I do not practice healthy habits. I'm lucky, I don't need to do anything; I can drink everything that I like and nothing happens. I do not do a lot of physical exercises, and I don’t get enough sleep either, which probably shortens my life, but it's worth it, because I accelerate the control of aging, so there is more benefit.

Laura Sans Olasia : What generation will live for thousands of years? Do you think they were already born?

Aubrey de Gray : I believe that they are probably already born, right. But, of course, we won’t find out until we get the medicine.

Laura Sans Olasia : Which country do you think is more aware, or are people more aware that this is a problem that we need to solve?

Aubrey de Gray : I would say Russia.

Laura Sans Olasia : Russia?

Aubrey de Gray : Yeah. Unusual, isn't it? But when I talk about all this in Russia, it’s so beautiful; I don't get any stupid questions, and everyone seems to understand this.

Laura Sans Olasia : They do not ask you ethical questions?

Aubrey de Gray : That's right, yes. They understand that this is a medical problem, it must be solved and can be solved.

Laura Sans Olasia : Kriorus is among them, right?

Aubrey de Gray : Yes, I know Kriorus, I know them very well.

Laura Sans Olasia : Alcor is the most expensive.

Aubrey de Gray : They have the best service. In a sense, it is good to have a very expensive, high-quality service, as well as less expensive and less quality service. This is normal.

Laura Sans Olasia : Where do you live now?

Aubrey de Gray : I live in the United States, but I travel around the world when I am invited to speak and stuff.