Mikhail Batin and the Open Longevity Project

The Life Extension Advocacy Foundation folk recently spoke to Mikhail Batin, long-standing advocate for radical life extension, and noted the latest venture from the Russian community, Open Longevity. In keeping with the spirit of the times, this is focused on setting up the infrastructure to run public human trials of interventions that may slow aging, on actually getting something done. That is admirable; we certainly need more of that in this era of stifling, overbearing regulation of every aspect of medical progress. I hope to see this effort succeed and grow. That said, I can't say as I think their initial choices are worth chasing: calorie restriction mimetics and a polypill approach that mixes existing drugs used to lower cardiovascular disease risk. If there were no other options, then yes, a polypill might be a surprisingly good choice, and calorie restriction is certainly better than nothing. But there are other options, and those options are far, far better. For example, it should be perfectly possible to set up open, responsible trials of some of the senescent cell clearance drug candidates such as navitoclax or piperlongumine, given that their pharmacology is well characterized already. Jailbreaking these compounds from the regulatory establishment would be a worthy exercise, assuming their effects on senescent cells in mice hold up in humans. Alas, each to their own, for better or worse. As an aside for those readers come more recently to Fight Aging!, I ...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Activism, Advocacy and Education Source Type: blogs