10 ms·

So you wanna build an aging company

69 points by apsec112 1y ago

nashashmi 1y ago
Diabetic medication can be a significant factor for increased healthy longevity.
- tracker1 1y ago
  But is it the medication, or reduction in oxidative stress and glycation? Medications almost always come with some form of negative side effects for a portion of those prescribed to. I think part of it needs to come from awareness of what we're putting into our bodies in the first place. I think a large part of it all comes from what we're taking in that wouldn't be considered food by most reasonable people knowing what goes into processed "food". "Food is medicine," also means food is poison. Not all are created equal. This isn't to completely decry all advancements in food production, or even all processed foods... but there's definitely more that needs to be looked into.
  - lawlessone 1y ago
    >I think a large part of it all comes from what we're taking in that wouldn't be considered food by most reasonable people knowing what goes into processed "food". we're not going to natural food our way to 150.
  - nashashmi 1y ago
    Neither. It is the prevention of high sugar to prevent steady organ damage. For those with diabetes, there is no way to reverse it. They just have to reduce their intake. And all organs will continue to be steadily damaged over time.
    - bobmcnamara 1y ago
      Interesting recent news about diabetes! Type 1 has been reversed through pancreas and islet transplants, recently in at least one individual by stem cell transplants, now he makes his own insulin. For some type 2 individuals diagnosed early enough, blood sugar can be managed through diet and exercise, and insulin response can be normalized back to typical levels. This seems to work best when caught early, and when the person has the ability to make long lasting lifestyle changes. And the risk of relapse seems to remain much higher than in the general population.
      - tracker1 1y ago
        I know a lot of people that manage their diabetes just with keto/carnivore diet and moderate activity. That said, it's not easy and doesn't address a lot of the underlying issues that bring people to overeat to begin with... Overcoming the hormones once you're there and even maintaining are really hard.
Maultasche 1y ago
The headline is confusing. This is not about a company that's becoming older. It's about a building a biotech company that treats the symptoms and causes of aging.
- lawlessone 1y ago
  Strange because in a way we've already had these for a long time for the visual signs of aging, moisturizers , wrinkle creams etc. And we've been trying to treat all the symptoms of aging for a long time too. Alzheimers, heart disease , arthritis etc. They just haven't been explicitly "anti-aging"
- izzydata 1y ago
  Wouldn't this be an anti-aging company? Aging is bad and not aging is good.
  - nowahlot 1y ago
    Is aging bad though? Seems like natures way of helping humanity evolve. As individuals it may seem bad. As a species, keeping old ideas in the form of ossified biology around seems like a bad idea. For example: see 70-80 year old politicians ageist assault on future generations. Physics is ageist and its march towards entropy unstoppable. Anti-aging is just more first worlders who can ignore externalities thanks to fiat wealth, engaged in vain wank.
    - izzydata 1y ago
      That is a much more philosophical point than I was trying to make, but it definitely raises some interesting questions.
    - gopalv 1y ago
      > Is aging bad though? Seems like natures way of helping humanity evolve. We're not undoing death, dying healthy would be better than aging the way we do right now. Increasing healthspans as a society would be great in a more family integrated society rather than an individualistic one. I'd love my retirement years to be spent helping my kids and grand-kids instead of the other way around. A senior community that can stay involved actively has been part of the "it takes a village" until very recent times.
idopmstuff 1y ago
"A successful aging treatment would be something that: prevents diseases of aging, ideally more than one; preserves a healthy function that normally declines with age (like fertility, immune function, cognitive function, resilience, or physical fitness); or reverses the course of at least one age-related disease." I think a lot of the anti-aging companies out there would say that the real answer is a combination of the second and third - reversing the course of age-related decline. Also, I think it's sort of contradictory to have two of these points focus on diseases of aging but in a subsequent section say that oncology isn't anti-aging. Cancer is in many ways a disease of aging (it's very clear from the numbers that increasing in age causes increases in likelihood of developing cancer, generally more than any other single factor). Curing cancer obviously isn't going to get you a general-purpose anti-aging treatment, but that's why it seems odd to say that reversing the course of an age-related disease is a successful aging treatment.
- hyghjiyhu 1y ago
  From an anti aging perspective, cancer is the most visible symptom of DNA gradually becoming more and more damaged. The anti aging solution that happens to solve cancer as a side effect is then to figure out how to repair DNA damage, and/or replace cells with damaged DNA with cells with intact DNA.
  - lawlessone 1y ago
    We all get cancer everyday, normally our immune system destroys it.
    - Jalad 1y ago
      Wouldn't it only be cancer if your immune system doesn't destroy it? If your immune system can handle it, that's just normal. The DNA damage that the parent was talking about would lead to cancerous cells which your immune system cannot handle, which is different from the ones that your immune system can handle
  - avogt27 1y ago
rhet0rica 1y ago
Unpopular opinion: Any medical intervention that delays or defeats the aging process will disproportionately benefit the wealthy, and is therefore unethical. The last thing a healthy democracy needs is millennium-old acolytes of Peter Thiel pulling the strings from the shadows.
- DelaneyM 1y ago
  The distance between a scientific revolution being accessible to the ultra-wealthy and the average consumer is measured in years, and shrinking rapidly. I would rather billionaires get anti-aging technology 10yrs before I do than never get it at all.
- daemonk 1y ago
  This isn't an unpopular opinion. I would argue this is the mainstream argument. I think all medical advances benefit the wealthy first and then becomes more affordable over time. The term "aging" seems to trigger a lot of people and lead to philosophizing over the importance and morality of death. They are important topics to discuss, but I also think it is worthwhile to also hear out the optimist perspectives rather than the endless dystopic cynicism we hear on the daily basis.
  - rhet0rica 1y ago
    It's certainly not the mainstream position here on HN, according to this informal study of provoking commenters with incendiary remarks... It's true that there are many age-associated diseases that are morally trivial to oppose: a good society should want to minimize preventable suffering. However, dementia, cancer, and cardiovascular research programs already exist, both privately and publicly funded, and these initiatives have existed for many decades without needing to be labeled "aging" research. So let's be clear and refer to these initiatives as life extension rather than anti-aging, because that is the actual goal. The best optimist narrative I can come up with is as follows: without the looming fear of death over our heads, humanity will be liberated from (a) the grief of losing loved ones, (b) the suffering of old age, and (c) the capacity lost when someone dies. In particular, (c) might mean that geniuses stay productive forever. A little more fancifully, it is sometimes suggested that the value of a human life approaches infinity as human lifespans approach infinity, so the fear of violent death would effectively prevent all violent conflict. There is then often an emotional appeal about how much more time we would be afforded for exploring the universe and undergoing personal growth; at this point of the conversation you can really tell that the person trying to sell you on the anti-aging agenda is from California, and has tried LSD (or at least pot), and maybe knows a thing or two about Buddhism and Star Trek. (Perhaps they're even fans of Iain M. Banks?) Just think of all the good someone like the Dalai Lama could do if he could literally meditate for centuries, achieving ultimate enlightenment! What if Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams never died? How can you afford to say no?! The answer to this all comes to us from a lesser-known member of the _literati_ of the 20th century, an obscure writer called Charlie Chaplin: > To those who can hear me, I say - do not despair > The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed - the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress > The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people > And so long as men die, liberty will never perish In the optimist's world, where everyone gets to live forever, we do not get to pick and choose who attains that status. Josef Stalin, Fidel Castro, and Francisco Franco all died of old age while actively maintaining regimes that actively harmed their people. On the balance, any one individual can do more harm than good. ...And this is not even discussing the problem of population dynamics—how do we maintain balanced numbers? What kind of work will still need to be done? If people stopped aging suddenly, would there be people trapped in shitty jobs for centuries? (Some of this also applies to mind-uploading.) If the reaction is, "but surely we can advance robotics to achieve fully-automated luxury gay space communism like Iain M. Banks wanted," then let's do that first, before we let a handful of grossly wealthy private equity goons forge the Rings of Power for themselves. There's no rush, right? Right?
hinterlands 1y ago
I think there's a fundamental disconnect here: the article says that you should be focusing on strategies that, for the most part, make aging more dignified. The goal shouldn't be even curing cancer. And maybe that's right. But the reason billions of dollars are poured by SFBA VCs into aging research is probably just that they're getting older, they don't want to die, and they figure that they can put some of their money into anti-aging moonshots. It's not really different from rich people getting cryogenically frozen. If you have more money than you can possibly use, why wouldn't you try?
- spandrew 1y ago
  It isn't right. Curing cancer is a noble pursuit. And researchers on planet earth aren't a monolith. Even "longevity" research can take vastly different shapes across the labs driving towards it. The mess of research towards a goal is kinda the point; nobody knows where the universe hid the nuggets of world-bending discoveries. It's not quite pray and spray; but the shapes are diverse and irregular by design. Cancer, alzheimers, cell senescence — all of it's fair game. Why are we pretending like anybody knows how to police this thought work?
  - rhet0rica 1y ago
    Here is the hottest of takes for you: curing cancer is not, in practice, entirely noble. 1. It is partially self-inflicted. Fallout from nuclear incidents, particularly in the US (testing in Nevada) and northern Europe (Chernobyl), is still a measurable contributor to cancer rates. Its prominence in medicine after the middle of the 20th century reflects these self-inflicted injuries from the Cold War. Likewise there are numerous cases of regulatory capture and corporate dishonesty resulting in cohorts who have suffered from carcinogenic chemicals like nicotine, glyphosate, and teflon. Nevertheless, heart disease has now overtaken it as the leading cause of death in the US. The further away you get from the US, the rarer it is as a cause of death. 2. The label is nearly meaningless in public funding. So much money has been poured into cancer research that other lines of biology have adapted by contorting their mission statements into tangentially cancer-related programs. Want to study how neurons develop in nematodes? Too bad—there's no money for that. But make up some BS about how it's a model organism for studying the spread of neuroblastomas, and you've successfully perverted the grant process into supporting research that the bean-counters tried to starve. This verges on fraud, even though no one wants to talk about it because the starved areas of research are usually areas of fundamental science that are highly regarded by other biologists. 3. The sheer abundance of charitable organizations handing out money to cancer-related causes results in a lot of science, much of it low-quality or poorly-vetted. In grad school I had an entire seminar class that consisted of, "here's a novel ML method applying SVMs to detecting disease; let's talk about it" and at least half of the randomly-selected papers promising significant results had blatant reproducibility problems like overfitting or bad methodology. These papers are easily published because they can be shat out in some generalist journal that tangentially touches on the relevant subject but does not have the editorial expertise to analyze the math involved. Retraction counts always follow hot topics, and the gross intersection of emotionally-motivated funders, siloed reviewers, and fame-chasing has ensured cancer research regularly produces too much low-end material to ever hope to check it all for reproducibility.
lesuorac 1y ago
I wonder how much the prohibition of stem cell research set back anti-aging. I just don't see how you can get humans to live super-long without replacement of parts. It's how every complex thing in the world lasts a long time. Stem cells are literally how we built the parts in the first place so it seems to me to be the first place to look on how to build them a second time.
- peterlk 1y ago
  Creating stem cells from blood samples is a well-established industry practice now. I don’t think limiting embryonic stem cells research is significantly hindering stem cells research, is it?
- southernplaces7 1y ago
  To my knowledge stem cell research is clicking along just fine, and I can guarantee you that certain other countries (looking at you here China) don't give Shit One about the ethical/religious hangups around it in the West. From what I've read (and I'd love to be corrected here because I really don't know deeply about this), the progress on actually creating replacement organs and so forth is the case simply because it's really hard to achieve so far. There's too much we just don't know or at least don't know how to make work in applied practice.
Bluestein 1y ago
Wouldn't this be an anti aging company?
rippeltippel 1y ago
Aging well requires a both biological and lifestyle interventions. One company called Nuraxi [1] is geared precisely to support that, They aim at studying the super-agers in the Sardinia "blue zone", and build digital twins (for the rest of us) on which simulate all-round interventions based on the insights from super-agers. Sounds like a promising way to get personalised longevity recipes. [1] https://www.nuraxi.ai https://www.nuraxi.ai
- morleytj 1y ago
  I was under the impression that the majority of recent analysis pointed to the interpretation that most of the claimed blue zones were primarily marked as such due to poor record keeping rather than true super ager status. Is Sardinia an exception to this?
- amy_petrik 1y ago
  > build digital twins (for the rest of us) on which simulate all-round interventions based Digital twins, what a freaking crock. Imagine claiming to simulate the biochemical pathways of a trillion cells and 3 billion basepairs and a gorillion chemicals and sequestration zones. Least they could do is take a little tissue and screw around with a patient-derived organoid. If someone made a digital twin that worked proper they'd be making a killing in pharma trials and drug development
  - rippeltippel 1y ago
    My understanding of a "digital twin" is not as something that aims at simulating human biochemistry. It's rather a model that captures specific aspects, not necessarily biological ones. There's a good amount of literature on that subject, e.g. interesting meta-studies studies as [1] and [2], and more [3]. [1] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/10379674 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/10379674 [2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41746-024-01073-0 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41746-024-01073-0 [3] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=digital+twin+health&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5 https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=digital+twin+health&hl=...
iceboundrock 1y ago
As a co-founder of Ginkgo Health[1], this is a refreshing discussion to see. The "Is this aging?" article perfectly articulates the philosophy that drove us to start the company. We saw a huge disconnect between the longevity industry's focus on hype and moonshots, and what the science actually shows is effective for improving healthspan. The article's point about focusing on frailty and sarcopenia is spot-on ; functional health is one of the most powerful and evidence-based levers we have to improve quality of life as we age. That's precisely why we built Ginkgo Active. We wanted to create a genuine "geroprotector" that was accessible to everyone, not just a theoretical treatment for the wealthy. When we responded[2] to the recent CMS RFI[3] on the Health Technology Ecosystem, we outlined this exact approach. Our goal is to provide a practical solution to functional decline and chronic disease, which are massive burdens on the healthcare system. Here’s how our thinking aligns with the article's main points: Focus on Function, Not Just Biomarkers: Instead of chasing clocks, we focus on delivering personalized exercise prescriptions designed to improve strength, balance, and cardiovascular health. Our AI platform uses over 170,000 rules from authoritative sources like the American College of Sports Medicine to create these plans. Prevention and Healthspan: Our platform is built to help people before they get sick, preventing or delaying the onset of 18 different chronic condition risk factors. This is about adding healthy years to life, which is the core of a real aging intervention. Accessibility and Equity: We believe this kind of preventative care should be a right, not a privilege. We intentionally designed our platform so that it doesn't require expensive wearables or equipment. Our goal is to provide the same expert-level care to everyone, regardless of their income or where they live. We believe the first real, scalable product of the longevity industry will be one that improves healthspan for the many. That's the problem we're dedicated to solving. [1] https://ginkgo.health https://ginkgo.health [2] https://www.regulations.gov/comment/CMS-2025-0050-0264 https://www.regulations.gov/comment/CMS-2025-0050-0264 [3] https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/05/16/2025-08701/request-for-information-health-technology-ecosystem https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/05/16/2025-08...

69 points by apsec112 1y ago

nashashmi 1y ago

Diabetic medication can be a significant factor for increased healthy longevity.

tracker1 1y ago
But is it the medication, or reduction in oxidative stress and glycation? Medications almost always come with some form of negative side effects for a portion of those prescribed to. I think part of it needs to come from awareness of what we're putting into our bodies in the first place. I think a large part of it all comes from what we're taking in that wouldn't be considered food by most reasonable people knowing what goes into processed "food". "Food is medicine," also means food is poison. Not all are created equal. This isn't to completely decry all advancements in food production, or even all processed foods... but there's definitely more that needs to be looked into.
- lawlessone 1y ago
  >I think a large part of it all comes from what we're taking in that wouldn't be considered food by most reasonable people knowing what goes into processed "food". we're not going to natural food our way to 150.
- nashashmi 1y ago
  Neither. It is the prevention of high sugar to prevent steady organ damage. For those with diabetes, there is no way to reverse it. They just have to reduce their intake. And all organs will continue to be steadily damaged over time.
  - bobmcnamara 1y ago
    Interesting recent news about diabetes! Type 1 has been reversed through pancreas and islet transplants, recently in at least one individual by stem cell transplants, now he makes his own insulin. For some type 2 individuals diagnosed early enough, blood sugar can be managed through diet and exercise, and insulin response can be normalized back to typical levels. This seems to work best when caught early, and when the person has the ability to make long lasting lifestyle changes. And the risk of relapse seems to remain much higher than in the general population.
    - tracker1 1y ago
      I know a lot of people that manage their diabetes just with keto/carnivore diet and moderate activity. That said, it's not easy and doesn't address a lot of the underlying issues that bring people to overeat to begin with... Overcoming the hormones once you're there and even maintaining are really hard.

Maultasche 1y ago

The headline is confusing. This is not about a company that's becoming older. It's about a building a biotech company that treats the symptoms and causes of aging.

lawlessone 1y ago
Strange because in a way we've already had these for a long time for the visual signs of aging, moisturizers , wrinkle creams etc. And we've been trying to treat all the symptoms of aging for a long time too. Alzheimers, heart disease , arthritis etc. They just haven't been explicitly "anti-aging"
izzydata 1y ago
Wouldn't this be an anti-aging company? Aging is bad and not aging is good.
- nowahlot 1y ago
  Is aging bad though? Seems like natures way of helping humanity evolve. As individuals it may seem bad. As a species, keeping old ideas in the form of ossified biology around seems like a bad idea. For example: see 70-80 year old politicians ageist assault on future generations. Physics is ageist and its march towards entropy unstoppable. Anti-aging is just more first worlders who can ignore externalities thanks to fiat wealth, engaged in vain wank.
  - izzydata 1y ago
    That is a much more philosophical point than I was trying to make, but it definitely raises some interesting questions.
  - gopalv 1y ago
    > Is aging bad though? Seems like natures way of helping humanity evolve. We're not undoing death, dying healthy would be better than aging the way we do right now. Increasing healthspans as a society would be great in a more family integrated society rather than an individualistic one. I'd love my retirement years to be spent helping my kids and grand-kids instead of the other way around. A senior community that can stay involved actively has been part of the "it takes a village" until very recent times.

idopmstuff 1y ago

"A successful aging treatment would be something that: prevents diseases of aging, ideally more than one; preserves a healthy function that normally declines with age (like fertility, immune function, cognitive function, resilience, or physical fitness); or reverses the course of at least one age-related disease." I think a lot of the anti-aging companies out there would say that the real answer is a combination of the second and third - reversing the course of age-related decline. Also, I think it's sort of contradictory to have two of these points focus on diseases of aging but in a subsequent section say that oncology isn't anti-aging. Cancer is in many ways a disease of aging (it's very clear from the numbers that increasing in age causes increases in likelihood of developing cancer, generally more than any other single factor). Curing cancer obviously isn't going to get you a general-purpose anti-aging treatment, but that's why it seems odd to say that reversing the course of an age-related disease is a successful aging treatment.

hyghjiyhu 1y ago
From an anti aging perspective, cancer is the most visible symptom of DNA gradually becoming more and more damaged. The anti aging solution that happens to solve cancer as a side effect is then to figure out how to repair DNA damage, and/or replace cells with damaged DNA with cells with intact DNA.
- lawlessone 1y ago
  We all get cancer everyday, normally our immune system destroys it.
  - Jalad 1y ago
    Wouldn't it only be cancer if your immune system doesn't destroy it? If your immune system can handle it, that's just normal. The DNA damage that the parent was talking about would lead to cancerous cells which your immune system cannot handle, which is different from the ones that your immune system can handle
- avogt27 1y ago

rhet0rica 1y ago

Unpopular opinion: Any medical intervention that delays or defeats the aging process will disproportionately benefit the wealthy, and is therefore unethical. The last thing a healthy democracy needs is millennium-old acolytes of Peter Thiel pulling the strings from the shadows.

DelaneyM 1y ago
The distance between a scientific revolution being accessible to the ultra-wealthy and the average consumer is measured in years, and shrinking rapidly. I would rather billionaires get anti-aging technology 10yrs before I do than never get it at all.
daemonk 1y ago
This isn't an unpopular opinion. I would argue this is the mainstream argument. I think all medical advances benefit the wealthy first and then becomes more affordable over time. The term "aging" seems to trigger a lot of people and lead to philosophizing over the importance and morality of death. They are important topics to discuss, but I also think it is worthwhile to also hear out the optimist perspectives rather than the endless dystopic cynicism we hear on the daily basis.
- rhet0rica 1y ago
  It's certainly not the mainstream position here on HN, according to this informal study of provoking commenters with incendiary remarks... It's true that there are many age-associated diseases that are morally trivial to oppose: a good society should want to minimize preventable suffering. However, dementia, cancer, and cardiovascular research programs already exist, both privately and publicly funded, and these initiatives have existed for many decades without needing to be labeled "aging" research. So let's be clear and refer to these initiatives as life extension rather than anti-aging, because that is the actual goal. The best optimist narrative I can come up with is as follows: without the looming fear of death over our heads, humanity will be liberated from (a) the grief of losing loved ones, (b) the suffering of old age, and (c) the capacity lost when someone dies. In particular, (c) might mean that geniuses stay productive forever. A little more fancifully, it is sometimes suggested that the value of a human life approaches infinity as human lifespans approach infinity, so the fear of violent death would effectively prevent all violent conflict. There is then often an emotional appeal about how much more time we would be afforded for exploring the universe and undergoing personal growth; at this point of the conversation you can really tell that the person trying to sell you on the anti-aging agenda is from California, and has tried LSD (or at least pot), and maybe knows a thing or two about Buddhism and Star Trek. (Perhaps they're even fans of Iain M. Banks?) Just think of all the good someone like the Dalai Lama could do if he could literally meditate for centuries, achieving ultimate enlightenment! What if Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams never died? How can you afford to say no?! The answer to this all comes to us from a lesser-known member of the _literati_ of the 20th century, an obscure writer called Charlie Chaplin: > To those who can hear me, I say - do not despair > The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed - the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress > The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people > And so long as men die, liberty will never perish In the optimist's world, where everyone gets to live forever, we do not get to pick and choose who attains that status. Josef Stalin, Fidel Castro, and Francisco Franco all died of old age while actively maintaining regimes that actively harmed their people. On the balance, any one individual can do more harm than good. ...And this is not even discussing the problem of population dynamics—how do we maintain balanced numbers? What kind of work will still need to be done? If people stopped aging suddenly, would there be people trapped in shitty jobs for centuries? (Some of this also applies to mind-uploading.) If the reaction is, "but surely we can advance robotics to achieve fully-automated luxury gay space communism like Iain M. Banks wanted," then let's do that first, before we let a handful of grossly wealthy private equity goons forge the Rings of Power for themselves. There's no rush, right? Right?

hinterlands 1y ago

I think there's a fundamental disconnect here: the article says that you should be focusing on strategies that, for the most part, make aging more dignified. The goal shouldn't be even curing cancer. And maybe that's right. But the reason billions of dollars are poured by SFBA VCs into aging research is probably just that they're getting older, they don't want to die, and they figure that they can put some of their money into anti-aging moonshots. It's not really different from rich people getting cryogenically frozen. If you have more money than you can possibly use, why wouldn't you try?

spandrew 1y ago
It isn't right. Curing cancer is a noble pursuit. And researchers on planet earth aren't a monolith. Even "longevity" research can take vastly different shapes across the labs driving towards it. The mess of research towards a goal is kinda the point; nobody knows where the universe hid the nuggets of world-bending discoveries. It's not quite pray and spray; but the shapes are diverse and irregular by design. Cancer, alzheimers, cell senescence — all of it's fair game. Why are we pretending like anybody knows how to police this thought work?
- rhet0rica 1y ago
  Here is the hottest of takes for you: curing cancer is not, in practice, entirely noble. 1. It is partially self-inflicted. Fallout from nuclear incidents, particularly in the US (testing in Nevada) and northern Europe (Chernobyl), is still a measurable contributor to cancer rates. Its prominence in medicine after the middle of the 20th century reflects these self-inflicted injuries from the Cold War. Likewise there are numerous cases of regulatory capture and corporate dishonesty resulting in cohorts who have suffered from carcinogenic chemicals like nicotine, glyphosate, and teflon. Nevertheless, heart disease has now overtaken it as the leading cause of death in the US. The further away you get from the US, the rarer it is as a cause of death. 2. The label is nearly meaningless in public funding. So much money has been poured into cancer research that other lines of biology have adapted by contorting their mission statements into tangentially cancer-related programs. Want to study how neurons develop in nematodes? Too bad—there's no money for that. But make up some BS about how it's a model organism for studying the spread of neuroblastomas, and you've successfully perverted the grant process into supporting research that the bean-counters tried to starve. This verges on fraud, even though no one wants to talk about it because the starved areas of research are usually areas of fundamental science that are highly regarded by other biologists. 3. The sheer abundance of charitable organizations handing out money to cancer-related causes results in a lot of science, much of it low-quality or poorly-vetted. In grad school I had an entire seminar class that consisted of, "here's a novel ML method applying SVMs to detecting disease; let's talk about it" and at least half of the randomly-selected papers promising significant results had blatant reproducibility problems like overfitting or bad methodology. These papers are easily published because they can be shat out in some generalist journal that tangentially touches on the relevant subject but does not have the editorial expertise to analyze the math involved. Retraction counts always follow hot topics, and the gross intersection of emotionally-motivated funders, siloed reviewers, and fame-chasing has ensured cancer research regularly produces too much low-end material to ever hope to check it all for reproducibility.

lesuorac 1y ago

I wonder how much the prohibition of stem cell research set back anti-aging. I just don't see how you can get humans to live super-long without replacement of parts. It's how every complex thing in the world lasts a long time. Stem cells are literally how we built the parts in the first place so it seems to me to be the first place to look on how to build them a second time.

peterlk 1y ago
Creating stem cells from blood samples is a well-established industry practice now. I don’t think limiting embryonic stem cells research is significantly hindering stem cells research, is it?
southernplaces7 1y ago
To my knowledge stem cell research is clicking along just fine, and I can guarantee you that certain other countries (looking at you here China) don't give Shit One about the ethical/religious hangups around it in the West. From what I've read (and I'd love to be corrected here because I really don't know deeply about this), the progress on actually creating replacement organs and so forth is the case simply because it's really hard to achieve so far. There's too much we just don't know or at least don't know how to make work in applied practice.

Bluestein 1y ago

Wouldn't this be an anti aging company?

rippeltippel 1y ago

Aging well requires a both biological and lifestyle interventions. One company called Nuraxi [1] is geared precisely to support that, They aim at studying the super-agers in the Sardinia "blue zone", and build digital twins (for the rest of us) on which simulate all-round interventions based on the insights from super-agers. Sounds like a promising way to get personalised longevity recipes. [1] https://www.nuraxi.ai https://www.nuraxi.ai

morleytj 1y ago
I was under the impression that the majority of recent analysis pointed to the interpretation that most of the claimed blue zones were primarily marked as such due to poor record keeping rather than true super ager status. Is Sardinia an exception to this?
amy_petrik 1y ago
> build digital twins (for the rest of us) on which simulate all-round interventions based Digital twins, what a freaking crock. Imagine claiming to simulate the biochemical pathways of a trillion cells and 3 billion basepairs and a gorillion chemicals and sequestration zones. Least they could do is take a little tissue and screw around with a patient-derived organoid. If someone made a digital twin that worked proper they'd be making a killing in pharma trials and drug development
- rippeltippel 1y ago
  My understanding of a "digital twin" is not as something that aims at simulating human biochemistry. It's rather a model that captures specific aspects, not necessarily biological ones. There's a good amount of literature on that subject, e.g. interesting meta-studies studies as [1] and [2], and more [3]. [1] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/10379674 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/10379674 [2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41746-024-01073-0 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41746-024-01073-0 [3] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=digital+twin+health&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5 https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=digital+twin+health&hl=...

iceboundrock 1y ago

As a co-founder of Ginkgo Health[1], this is a refreshing discussion to see. The "Is this aging?" article perfectly articulates the philosophy that drove us to start the company. We saw a huge disconnect between the longevity industry's focus on hype and moonshots, and what the science actually shows is effective for improving healthspan. The article's point about focusing on frailty and sarcopenia is spot-on ; functional health is one of the most powerful and evidence-based levers we have to improve quality of life as we age. That's precisely why we built Ginkgo Active. We wanted to create a genuine "geroprotector" that was accessible to everyone, not just a theoretical treatment for the wealthy. When we responded[2] to the recent CMS RFI[3] on the Health Technology Ecosystem, we outlined this exact approach. Our goal is to provide a practical solution to functional decline and chronic disease, which are massive burdens on the healthcare system. Here’s how our thinking aligns with the article's main points: Focus on Function, Not Just Biomarkers: Instead of chasing clocks, we focus on delivering personalized exercise prescriptions designed to improve strength, balance, and cardiovascular health. Our AI platform uses over 170,000 rules from authoritative sources like the American College of Sports Medicine to create these plans. Prevention and Healthspan: Our platform is built to help people before they get sick, preventing or delaying the onset of 18 different chronic condition risk factors. This is about adding healthy years to life, which is the core of a real aging intervention. Accessibility and Equity: We believe this kind of preventative care should be a right, not a privilege. We intentionally designed our platform so that it doesn't require expensive wearables or equipment. Our goal is to provide the same expert-level care to everyone, regardless of their income or where they live. We believe the first real, scalable product of the longevity industry will be one that improves healthspan for the many. That's the problem we're dedicated to solving. [1] https://ginkgo.health https://ginkgo.health [2] https://www.regulations.gov/comment/CMS-2025-0050-0264 https://www.regulations.gov/comment/CMS-2025-0050-0264 [3] https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/05/16/2025-08701/request-for-information-health-technology-ecosystem https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/05/16/2025-08...