A new and very good interview of George Church:
https://endpoints.el...7g-4f3a8920cf7f
Of all the researchers in the field of anti-aging, I have long felt that Church has the best grasp on the causes of aging as they exist, unlike many researchers who view aging from their dogmatic points of view as they would prefer them to exist. His company's website Rejuvenate Bio just went up. There's no content yet.
Exert of their stagey below. I have no idea how effective taking a subset of genes and reconfiguring them and inserting them back into people would be, but evidently this is something that, if works, might be available for people in less than ten years. He has stated this timeline before and appears to be trying to stick to it.
One of my ex post docs, João Pedro de Magalhães, has a database that many researchers use called GenAge. It has about 304 genes for which there’s evidence in humans, and additional ones in worms and flies and yeast and so forth. The idea is to take the subset of genes that has been demonstrated to work for longevity or aging reversal in smaller organisms and reconfigure them into something that’s usable in gene therapy. You change it from longevity that requires introducing it into the germ line, which is not really a good strategy for humans because most of us that want longevity are already past the zygote stage, and we’re reconfiguring it as a adeno- associated virus gene therapy. This is an additive gene therapy, not a subtractive one like CRISPR.
Like I said before, it’s very easy to go from the literature to a gene therapy. We’ve put higher priority on those where we don’t have to get 100 percent delivery to every cell in the body. That’s in the future. We’re starting with things that are not cell autonomous or can in one way or another influence more than the cell it gets into.
And you’re actually working on the dog trial now.Yes, and the particular dog model we’re using has a heart disease issue. Rejuvenate Bio is still semi-stealth mode, incubator mode, but the trial is not a secret. Dogs are a market in and of themselves. It’s not just a big organism close to humans. It’s something people will pay for. And the FDA process is much faster for dogs than for humans — a little over a year versus nine years or so. We’ll do dog trials and that’ll be a product, and that’ll pay for scaling up in human trials.
