What is going on in aging research now
Overall, from the bird's eye view
- Nature Outlook[1] is a decent place to read pop-sci about cutting edge research
- List of researchers working on aging research
- List of cool modern papers
- CRISPR
Budget of NIH is ~$40bln/year. Budget of NIA is ~$4bln/year. And that's just U.S.
What is NIH efficiency?
List of companies in anti-aging
Altos Labs, Calico, AlphaFold etc
There are some topics which are +- mainstream, highly innovative/radical and highly relevant. F.e.:
- https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=Interspecies+Blastocyst+Complementation&btnG= (growing human organs in animals)
Billionaires in life extension
Timeline of events
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_senescence_research might be useful
2000 - current record on drosophila life extension (paper). Seems to be unbeaten(?) as for jan2023.
2004 - current record on mice life extension ([https://www.livescience.com/3725-methuselah-mouse-rejuvenation-prize-awarded.html popular science paper). Seems to be unbeaten as for jan2023.
2008 - current record on nematoda life extension (~10 times; paper). Seems to be unbeaten as for jan2023.
2022 - $3bln investment to Altos Labs
2022 - $180mln investment by Sam Altman. Aubrey thinks this money goes to the right hands: "I have known Joe Betts for many years. I would say that of all the big players, Retro has the best leadership credentials in terms of commitment to the longevity mission. I am very sure it won't be another Calico" [2]
2023 - launch of Aubrey de Grey combinatorial approach experiment.
Future of anti-aging research
There are quite a few ideas which can help really much but for which some key technology is not yet quite available. For example:
- If we can reprogram cells to do some extra work (f.e. reprogram T-cells to clean vessel walls or kill cancer cells, or clean tau-proteins etc) it would be really great. The part with killing cancer cells is already developing btw (CAR-T). Machine learning should help with that.
- If transcriptomes/analyses panels are cheap enough, we can quickly assemble a large database of how different interventions change a wide set of biomarkers. Machine learning would analyze that big data and suggest best (combinations of) interventions to make biomarkers better. Another machine learning would analyze what set of biomarkers you should aim to for long healthy life ahead.
- If we learn how grow new organs, everything except brain could be replaced which will reduce problem to brain aging. Not giant but substantial reduction. May be deep learning can help with growing organs also.
- The overall concept of emerging AGI such that it either radically increase or radically decrease our lifespan.
- There is a possibility of cultural revolution such that people (including top researchers, billionaires, politicians) would recognize the utmost importance of defeating aging and age-related diseases asap. May be we just lack some critical mass of arguments, proponents, activists (and technologies) for that.