I attended Longevity Summit Dublin which had a super-impressive lineup of speakers presenting updates on longevity research, biotechs, investment and advocacy. 

This is by no means even a summary of those talks, more just some key points that I personally found interesting that I thought I’d share, accompanied by a slide grab where I could. Apologies to anything/anyone missed – it was 4 long days so couldn’t watch and keep up with everything.

Andrea Maier - National University of Singapore

Since Longevity Med Summit in April, they have decided to name names on the NMN label claim study.

Andrei Seluanov - University of Rochester

Although naked mole rats don’t age biologically, can visually tell old and young apart

Aubrey de Grey - LEV Foundation

Provided details of the robust mouse rejuvenation project (RMR), and also announced front-runners for the next run (RMR2).

Bryan Johnson - Blueprint

Aubrey interviewed him…

• Scanned in an MRI machine fortnightly

• Never flies more than 2 time zones to prevent sleep disruption

• It would be tragic to not be alive when superintelligence arrives

Doug Ethel – Leucadia

Blood brain barrier (BBB) stops plasma that would clear interstitial area, so brain produces Cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) instead.

cribriform plate porosity declines with age

Body inversion (e.g. yoga’s downward dog) might be good at clearing detritus.

Jamie Justice – XPRIZE Foundation

Planning to launch $101m XPRIZE Healthspan in November

Lada Nuzshna - Impetus Grants

30% approval in first round

Lou Hawthorne - NaNotics

Targeting signals not cells with Nanots – core, capture agent, shield and stealth layers produce a molecular sponge.

Myelin sheath gets rebuilt once macrophages reduced.

May also reduce senescent cells immune protection.

Matt Kaeberlein – Ora Biomedical

Million-molecule challenge is a moonshot project to rapidly advance longevity intervention discovery.

Able to screen up to 144 populations of C. elegans in parallel with a single WormBot.

Max More - Biostasis Technologies

Biostasis includes cryonics - but there are other methods.

Scotch McClure - Maxwell Biosciences

The major sponsor of the conference (including a very generous bar!), Maxwell Biosciences were promoting an amazing DARPA funded synthetic immune system. Turns out his name is Joshua, but he was only refered to as Scotch as the conference.

Maxwell’s First-in-Class CLAROMER drug-discovery platform produces molecules that mimic the pathogen-agnostic core peptide of the innate immune system, and which have the potential to replace all current antibiotics and all current antifungals, safely and affordably without developing resistance.

And they’re not afraid about being aggressive with their targets – stating that over 120 years of healthy lifespan might be possible.

Steve Austad - University of Alabama

Mice age ineptly - so easy to make them live longer.

Over 90% failure rate translating preclinical to clinical trials.

Steve Horvath - Altos Labs

Can derisk clinical trials by doing tests in other mammals and measuring mammalian clocks.

Cannot translate epigenetic age to lifespan prediction as highly non-linear, e.g. 10 years younger biologically may mean only living 3 years longer.

Tanya Jones - Keinice Bio

Using hyperbaric chamber to cryopreserve organs.

Larger organs easier than small ones - opposite to normal cooling approaches.

CT scan shows no fractures.

Tilman Grune - German Institute of Human Nutrition

Lipofuscin may aggregate toxic metals so may have to be careful when breaking it up.

Tom Lawry - Second Century Technology

Medical info doubling every 72 days - not a problem but an opportunity.

Vera Gorbunova - Rochester Aging Research Center

Seaweed is SIRT6 activator.

Vinit Majahan - Mitrix

Spoke about bioreactor-grown mitochondrial boosters (or mitlets) which could be make a range of organs more youthful again. A particularly interesting slide was one that showed the prospect of boosters being given past 140 years of age!

Vlad Vitoc – Maia

Over 80s will triple by 2050 so market increases too

THIO works in 2-3 days but treatment cycles every 3 weeks

Kills all cells expressing telomerase including stem cells but they don't express it all the time

Conclusion

This was a great conference, and the closest one to attend for people in the UK – although there was not a massive UK presence, which was disappointing, and I’ll examine in another blog.

Having listened to so many talks, and chatted with some interesting attendees, the 3 main points I came away with were:

1. We need more than mouse models – they are poor agers so improvements in them may not translate to humans. Especially as they’re not even living their best lives in a cage, so their healthspan and lifespan can be improved with, effectively, lifestyle improvements rather than drugs (just like for many humans).

2. There are some fantastic and total novel therapeutics on the horizon, which will have a massive impact on ageing (and particularly cancer) – nanomedicines have barely started yet so will be very interesting to see how these develop.

3. We need to spread the word. Many of the speakers present at multiple longevity conferences around the world, but are often talking to the same people – or, at least, people who are already interested in longevity. How about longevity researchers presenting at disease-specific conferences – which might open others’ eyes to the possibility and addressing a wide range of problems by targeting ageing?

PS a lowlight of the event was the minimal UK presence – read more in Where were the UK longevity companies and researchers at Dublin summit?