Refreshing WSJ piece on longevity ‘guru’ David Sinclair

The piece from Amy Marcus is entitled A ‘Reverse Aging’ Guru’s Trail of Failed Businesses. 

I’ve been aware that Sinclair had numerous businesses, often related to his longevity research. What I didn’t realize and Marcus documents so well is how poorly some of these firms have done.

Yet at the same time Sinclair continues to attract more hefty investments in and excitement about longevity research that in my opinion isn’t close to the clinic.

Maybe it’s because he is arguably one of the highest profile anti-aging researchers in the world. If you ask laypeople which anti-aging researchers they know the name of, Sinclair could be the most frequent answer.

He’s been on TV countless times including an interview with Barbara Walters. Perhaps it’s not surprising then that investors have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into startups that he either founded or for which he has had a leadership role.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with being such a high-profile researcher or attracting a lot of investments for spinoff biotechs, but if hype is playing a major role then things can get highly problematic.

David Sinclair longevity businesses

Marcus details the struggles of some of these firms. The drug pipelines haven’t borne fruit. Still, the money keeps pouring in for more research that seems to me to largely be at the same preliminary level. It feels like a cycle.

Do investors realize that none of this is close to producing an FDA-approved longevity therapy and it’s possible none ever will? Here’s a quote about an older interview (emphasis mine):

The “when” here could be a decade or two.

Or never.

The WSJ piece touches on many Sinclair longevity firms including Sirtris, CohBar, OvaScience, Life Biosciences, and Tally Health. So far I don’t see anything concrete longevity-wise coming from these firms or other firms that might have acquired them.

Yet in the media it always seems like things are close to reversing human aging.

Current longevity efforts aren’t ready for prime time

The core idea behind much of this is that aspects of aging may be reversible.

It’s not necessarily wrong, but our knowledge of aging doesn’t really allow us to do much about it so far. Nonetheless, many are promoting various practices that supposedly can reverse aging. Biotechs start and then mostly go nowhere.

There is so much longevity hype on Twitter, in books, and elsewhere.

We see people health flexing about how they’ve supposed lowered their biological ages by doing various unproven things like massive doses of supplements. Or taking prescription drugs like metformin when you don’t have any real clinical indication to take it.

Someday something like metformin might have proven beneficial effects on some aspects of aging but we aren’t there.

Health flexing on biological age

Still, it’s not unusual to read quotes claiming things along the lines of, “This biological age test shows my biological age is now a decade lower than my chronological age.”

I can’t tell if it is more hype or wishful thinking. Probably both.

The biological aging tests are highly questionable at best in my view.

From Marcus:

Real research but also hype

One of the challenging things about questioning Sinclair and his statements is that he’s a Harvard professor. He also does real research that is often quite interesting to me.

For instance, I find his in vivo reprogramming work to be notable. However, this doesn’t mean the paper’s hypothesis is right or that the data are close to the point of founding biotechs and starting clinical trials on people.

In my view, it’s far too soon, too speculative, and could waste vast amounts of money. Marcus’ article includes a graph of  investments into Sinclair biotechs that peaks over $1B. Has that been wise? How much has been driven by hype in the media?

I have poked a little fun at some of the more extreme longevity claims including about so-called senolytics or senolytic drugs that kill senescent cells. Someday such a drug that is the real deal might be proven, but again we’re not there yet.

How to effectively push back?

With all of this in mind, what’s the best way to counter longevity hype? One thing is to continue pushing back. Some scientists like professor Charles Brenner are outspoken Sinclair critics. In the next few weeks I’m going to write more about Brenner’s pushback on the hype, which is interesting unto itself.

It’s also important to point out that probably the most important things for longevity are quite simple: exercise, eating a plant-based diet, sleep, and stress management. Some of this may even work through modulating our endogenous stem cell populations. I’ve written about these so-called possible natural stem cell boosts.

Even there, I’ve tried to be very cautious about what is known versus speculation. Boosting one’s stem cells, whether through increasing their numbers or activities, is also likely to come with risks.

Everything is more complicated than we might hope and figuring just one complex thing out often takes many years or decades. The longevity space needs to come to grips with these realities.