Notes on the 2019 Ending Age-Related Diseases Conference in New York

I recently attended the second Ending Age-Related Diseases conference in New York, hosted by the Life Extension Advocacy Foundation (LEAF). The mix of attendees was much the same as last year: an even split between scientists, entrepreneurs, investors, patient advocates, and interested onlookers, all focused on the treatment of aging as a medical condition. The presentations were similarly a mix of scientists talking about their research programs, entrepreneurs presenting on the data produced by their companies, and investors discussing the state of the industry. For my part, I have already presented several times this year on the work taking place at Repair Biotechnologies, while we were raising our seed round. So rather talk again on a familiar topic, I chose instead to discuss the terrible state of clinical translation in the life science industry - the institutional, widespread, ongoing failure to develop promising research programs into therapies. This is particularly the case for the treatment of aging, given that translational research in gerontology was actively suppressed by leading scientists for much of the last 40 years. This was an overreaction to the "anti-aging" industry of fraud, supplements, and false hope established in the 1970s, and probably set us back decades. Even now there is a great gulf between academia and industry, into which projects vanish. This gulf is built of many factors: scientists rarely have good connections to the people who...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Healthy Life Extension Community Source Type: blogs