Making 100 the New 60

A recently launched project called Human Longevity Inc. intends, as co-founder Peter Diamandis put it, to "make 100 years old the new 60." How do they plan to get us there? And will it work?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking. Hey there, everybody, and welcome to Forward Thinking,
the podcast that looks at the future and says, may
you stay forever young. I'm Joe McCormick and I'm Lauren

(00:22):
bock Obama. Our other co host of Jonathan Strickland is
out on vacation this week. So Joe and I are
forging bravely ahead by ourselves into the future, into the
future where we will all be immortal. Uh wait, wait,
wait wait immortal. I mean really, we've talked about this,
the future. Everybody knows that in the future, everybody's gonna
live forever. Forever sounds like a really long time, and

(00:44):
also like we might have to be vampires. And I'm
not entirely sure that I'm into that, but but there
are some some researchers who are planning some slightly more
concrete ways of creating greater longevity in the human population. Yeah.
I'm skeptical about the living forever, but I'm I'm into
the living longer. That seems kind of doable, longer and

(01:05):
also healthier. Right, that's a big one. Yeah. Yeah, And
there's a specific group of researchers who have started up
a company called Human Longevity, inc. Um that that has
has a whole plan for this. Right. They have just
announced launch about a month ago, and that's what we
wanted to talk about today was Human Longevity Inc. There
sort of plan for the future and what it means

(01:27):
for longevity, uh and the idea of staying healthy, not
just living longer, but but preventing the diseases of aging. Right.
Their specific plan is to create a business that consequences
many as a hundred thousand people's genomes, microbiomes, and like
bloodstream biochemicals every year um. All of this in order

(01:48):
to create a for profit database for research, thus help
helping people live longer and healthier and making some money
while they're at it. Okay, yeah, so we wanted to
talk about their plans. But before we get to their plan,
I think we should talk about some of the big
wigs behind this launch. Yeah yeah, because the founders, although
you may not have heard their names, you've definitely heard

(02:09):
about some of their projects. So who are we dealing
with your job? Well, the big one, the main founder
is J. Craig Venter uh known to some as Darth
Ventor some of his His less adoring contemporaries would probably
refer to him that way on the internet. But he's
a he's a big influencer. Yeah yeah, And he's been
working in this for a few decades now. He was

(02:32):
the leader of the private sector venture to sequence the
human genome back in the I guess it started maybe
like late eighties, early nineties, but ranging through the early ops.
While the Human Genome Project was heading forward to map
the human genome with public funding, uh, ventor was coming

(02:53):
in on the side saying, let's race them to the
finish line, basically from the private sector side. Right. He
was doing this through a company called cela Um, which,
as much as we want it to be, is not
the celery mafia, right. Whenever I hear that, I think
it's some big agribusiness thing where they you know, all
the celery in the world comes through us. We're the
only game in town for celery. But no, they were

(03:15):
for genetics and genomics, yes um and and this entire
race caused a lot of controversy in the genetics community
because they started out holding their data for for profit
instead of sharing it publicly, all the while using public
data from the Human Genome Project in order to complete
this work UM so, so they they experienced a lot

(03:37):
of kind of nasty pressure from other genetics and funding companies,
and eventually released their findings, albeit with a download per
time period maximum, to the public for use. But you know, whatever,
whatever your opinion about Seller's motivations and policies, they did
pioneer and approach to sequencing that the Human Genome Project
wound up using UM because of its its terrific speed

(04:00):
and accuracy. So so that's awesome. Yeah. Absolutely. Vnor himself
has a whole lot of critics you'll find on the internet,
as we mentioned with his other cute little moniker earlier,
but he he's somebody who you kind of can't ignore, like, uh,
whatever criticisms you might have of him. Some people think
he's an egomaniac, some people, you know, they're all kinds

(04:20):
of things. People say, he's definitely done some really important
pioneering work. Absolutely. Yeah. So after that, we have Peter Diamandis.
He is somebody who you may have heard about from
us with reference to space tourism, right, yeah, we did
that that whole series of space tourism space travel episodes

(04:41):
in January, and that is because he founded Space Adventures,
which is one of those space tourism companies. He's also
the chairman and CEO of the X Prize Um, which
is that that thing that awards funds to ventures and
awesome stuff like a like private space flight and a
hundred mile per gallant equivalent cars. He's also a co
founder and chairman of Singularity University, along with no less

(05:04):
than Ray Kurtzweil. Um of course, Singularity University being an
uncredited extra weird stuff Silicon Valley educational institution. So who
is our third co founder here? It is Robert Herreri.
That's right. He's the founder of um anthrow Genesis, which
is aging therapy company that was purchased by cell gene
also not about celery, and no, it is they study

(05:26):
the genetics of celery. I cannot tell if you're messing
with me right now. I'm totally kidding, excellent. It was
purchased by celging in two thousand three, and uh, and
they focus on stem cell research and specifically placental stem
cell research for for treatment of debilitating diseases and also
like organ and tissue degenerations. So so all of these

(05:48):
have very practical applications in the study of aging and longevity. Okay,
so we got our big wigs together, and what do
they do. Let's tell the story of the launch of
Human longevi the inc. Okay, in early March, of Human
Longevity announced UM that they existed, a UM and and
and be, that they had generated seventy million dollars in

(06:12):
startup funds, and furthermore that they are working in partnership
with several organizations right now, mainly UM University of California,
San Diego's Mores Cancer Center. They are planning on starting
with a relatively conservative forty thou genome sequences per year,
which is what the two Ilumina high s x ten

(06:32):
machines that they bought can handle. I have no idea
if if that string of words that I just said
is how you actually pronounce that machines name. Apparently they
are really fancy schmancy genetics machines. I I don't. I
haven't used one personally. Yeah, apparently they cost about ten
million dollars apiece. But they can reduce the cost of
sequencing a person's genome too. This is predicted now about

(06:54):
a thousand bucks now let's compare that to how much
it has cost in the past. Um, the Human Genome project,
I believe was just under three billion dollars. It was
like two point seven billion dollars, which it was was
under budget, So that's impressive. Um, I mean it was
it was like point three billion dollars under budget, which
is terrific, but still each Yeah, Venor cites his first

(07:17):
sequence costead of around a hundred million, he brings that
number up. Uh so it's definitely come down over time,
huch improvement. And that thousand dollar mark Joe you pointed
out was was actually a kind of unofficial goal for
the genetics community for a long time, right, Yeah, people
have been talking about this for years since I think

(07:37):
just after two thousand, people start talking about the thousand
dollar genome because this is a problem, like we know
that we can learn a lot from the data provided
in our genes, but if it costs so much money
to sequence a genome, it's a lot of trouble getting there. Yeah. Yeah,
If it's billions of dollars every time, that's a difficult
thing to fund, certainly, right. So essentially just putting together

(07:59):
a whole lot of money and reducing the cost of
sequencing a genome can take us a long way in
terms of learning more about the relationship between our genome
and the ways we age and the diseases we get.
The disease that the company is going to be focusing
on first is cancer UM and that's why they're working

(08:19):
with UC San Diego's Mores Cancer Center. UM. They're planning
on sequencing the genomes of cancer patients, both their healthy
cells and also tumor cells in an attempt to better
understand these patients and the course of their disease. They're
they're starting out offering the sequencing free of charge to
the patients, although the company has stated that that they're

(08:39):
planning or kind of hoping to be able to charge
for the service later on down the line. Yeah, we
don't know when that will happen, but that that's I
think the eventual goal. Yes, So what does this mean?
Why does it help a cancer patient or anybody at
all really to get their genome sequence to well, So
we'll start with the broad The broad view is that

(09:01):
genome sequencing data can be gathered in conjunction with massive
amounts of other general data about health UH and the
health of the sequencing subjects. So hopefully by combining and
cross referencing these data points, we can learn a lot
more about how to treat diseases, especially age correlated diseases,

(09:22):
and eventually more about aging itself. And Venera said he
wants to put together basically a new age of a
quantitative approach to health, connecting all the pieces of data
that people have been collecting separately for all these years,
so we can sequence a genome and we can collect
data about you every time you go to the doctor.

(09:43):
He wants to put this info together in a massive
way and look for correlations. Right, And we've talked a
little bit, I mean a lot actually about about the
genome and um, the microbiome before on this show. If
you want a really full treatment on genes, you can
check out our pot cast episode Genes one oh one,
which published back on August um. But but basically every

(10:06):
time we've we've said on this podcast that humans are
really complicated biomachines and that we're really going to need
more research if we're ever going to understand why are
our bodies work the way that they do. We were
talking about these three broad categories of of genes and
microbiome and blood chemicals. You know, the genome is kind
of like like our code. The microbiome is like a

(10:29):
kind of like a network of other users that are
in the system. And and the blood content um is
data that that we, being the sort of system administrator
and along with the other users, put into the system.
The system being our body. Um. So, so if we
can control all of these elements, then we'll be able
to live longer and healthier. Pypathetically, not just control them,

(10:51):
but understand the relationship between them. Yes, definitely, um yeah, Okay,
so that's sort of the broad view. But to sort
of zero in on what this means for the individual patient,
I think we should talk about a few ways that
getting your genome sequenced with this technology that they have
can make a big difference in your own health profile.

(11:12):
And these are practical applications that are going on. Now.
This isn't this isn't in the future. This is right.
We are living the incredible future, right, this is already
for real, and learning more about different correlations between elements
of the genome and diseases that we experience will take
us even farther. So the first thing I wanted to
talk about was preventative medicine. So having your whole genome

(11:36):
sequence can help you know what diseases you have a
predisposition for. So if you know what diseases you are
at the highest risk for, you can take preventative measures
towards specifically those diseases, preventing them before you get them,
rather than treating them once the symptoms appear. Uh And
and the founders of this company have talked about this

(11:58):
that we have kind of a active approach to health.
Right now, you wait to get sick, and then you
treat the sickness, you try to do something about it. Well,
what's obviously much better than that is knowing how you
are most likely to get sick based on who you are,
based on your genes, and then taking steps to stop
that before it happens, or to watch for early warning

(12:21):
signs and catch them early enough to to really do
more good. Right That's certainly true, because with lots of diseases,
the earlier you catch it, the much better project uh And.
One really interesting example of this comes from Vnor himself.
Ventor actually had his own genome sequence, and one of
the things that he found out from doing that was

(12:43):
that he had a particular gene variant. He had the
APO E four gene variant, which is one of the
forms of the apollopope protein E gene from chromosome nineteen,
and that's a gene that creates a protein that affects
cholesterol and fat in the bloodstream. Research had shown that

(13:04):
people who have this E four variant that Ventor had
are at a greater risk for developing Alzheimer's disease, UH
much greater than people who had other common variants like
E two or E three. And because this gene variant
was associated with fat metabolism as well as Alzheimer's, Ventor
announced that he started taking preventative fat lowering drugs after

(13:26):
he found out he had this gene variant. That's I
that's that's great. UM. I don't know if the fat
lowering drugs he was taking had any effect on the
Alzheimer's outlook or if that was just specifically for fat
content in the blood. But one thing that is true
is that years later he he had his brain scanned

(13:49):
basically to look for early signs of Alzheimer's. There's plaque.
I think that that shows up in brain scans. The
amyloid plaques, and he went in there looking for because
he knew he had this predisposition, and they saw nothing. Uh.
And so another thing that that shows, and that's important
to point out, is that there's not necessarily a one
to one correlation between the disease you have a predisposition

(14:11):
for and what you will definitely, Yet like having a
predisposition just means you're more likely, right, And especially in
the case of this gene variant, I think that the
fact that he has it on on one of his
chromosomes means that he's got like a thirty percent chance
of developing Alzheimer's. And he said himself, you know you
can't get thirty percent Alzheimer's. That's that's not how the

(14:33):
disease works, um, Right, Either either you have it or
you don't, right. But but it's it's really cool to
to know that you have this chance and be able
to therefore get more testing done and and figure out
whether there are more steps that you need to take. Um.
And this isn't the only disease that they have found
this kind of stuff out for. There's a breast cancer

(14:54):
is a big one, right right, There's the b r
C A one and b r c A two genes,
and these are a big deal, especially in the news
since an announcement by Angelina Jolie right in UH last
year in she announced that she had undergone a preventative
double missectomy to to avoid breast cancer because she had

(15:15):
tested positive for one of these genes well or for
mutations for a bad mutation on one of these genes,
and that was known in the scientific literature that Okay,
we've seen that this certain mutation in the b r
C A jeans makes you very likely to get breast
and or ovarian cancer. And so she took preventative steps,

(15:37):
and a lot of people were praising her basically for UH,
for doing this and for announcing it publicly, and yeah,
sort of as a public health consciousness thing. Yeah, it's
definitely a drastic preventative measure, and and it's not the
right one for for every person. Jolie is is very
fortunate to have the kind of funds to UM to

(15:58):
undergo that surgery pri at LEE and also have really
excellent reconstructive surgery afterwards. UM, and not everyone has access
to that kind of healthcare. Well, even more than that,
it was would be the cost of the gene sequencing itself, certainly,
which used to be a lot more than it is now.
And that's one of the big reasons that bringing bringing

(16:18):
down the cost matters a lot. If it's so expensive,
that means a lot of people won't have these kinds
of options. Um, but the cheaper you can make it,
the more widespread you can provide the service. And it's
definitely really cool that we've got a sex symbol like
Angelina Jolie talking uh frankly in public about this kind
of issue. Definitely, Okay, So there, So there's preventive medicine

(16:41):
we just talked about. Let's say that you don't catch
something before it happens. Let's say you find out, oh
I already have cancer or I already have some specific disease.
Is there any way that having your genome sequence can
help you? Then? Well, actually, yes, it's still to help
you a lot. There's this idea of personalized medicine. That's right,

(17:04):
because right now, treatments for diseases are are based on
a kind of imaginary average person. At any time that
any kind of testing on on a drug or treatment
is done, it's it's with a relatively small population of
people that may or may not represent what you are,
and doctors are kind of guessing as to how your
body is going to react to that treatment, right, well,

(17:25):
I mean, and even whatever kind of population it's targeted towards,
there's no one single person. Yeah, it's this, it's this
average approach. Uh. Wouldn't it be so much better if
we could look at your genome and say, hey, you
have these five specific genes that we know respond really
well to this combination of treatments, as opposed to your

(17:47):
next door neighbor who has variants of all those genes
and would respond better to a different drug. Um and
So there are actually examples of this you can find today.
There is the anti cancer drug resultantib SO. I know
the name of that drug sounds weird, but if there's
evidence that you get a really good response rate for
a certain type of gene variant, it makes a big

(18:09):
difference to know whether or not you've got that gene
variant that responds well. Yeah, there's also a gene that
predicts um breast cancer patients response to a specific drug
called her sceptin, and uh, yeah, you know it's having
having this kind of information beforehand can save a lot
of time and money. Um, well not just time and money,

(18:30):
but your life. Like I mean, if I guess that's
important too. If you say you have a cancer outlook
and you're being um, you're talking with your doctor about here,
you know, three different treatment paths we could try. It
certainly will save you time and money not to try
one that's not going to work on you. But it
will also possibly save your life because if you you

(18:53):
spend time going down one road, um, while you have
cancer progressing, and it turns out actually, based on your genes,
it would have been better to go down a different road. Yeah,
that's time that you might not have and make a
big difference in whether or not you survive or how long.
Cancer has really been the most successful UM disease group

(19:14):
for this kind of uh personalized medicine as of yet. UM,
there's there's also been some some other research and in
other fields, like there was an association of certain differences
in a group of genes called CYP for fifty with
patients reactions to ss r s as are selective serotonin
reuptake inhibitors, which are a type of antidepressants. But the

(19:38):
association hasn't been corroborated in clinical studies yet, and this
particular example is sometimes cited as exemplifying the current problems
with personalized genetic medicine. UM. You know, the the association
was announced by one group of researchers, Some doctors and
genetic testing companies started using it in their practice, but
further clinical trials haven't proven the association yet. And there's

(19:59):
worry that we're wasting patients money and time, albeit slightly
less serious time than with something like cancer, while we're
getting all of this sussed out. Yeah, which is exactly
the reason. It's good to have a whole lot more data,
like they're talking about here, to just just harvest it,
bring it in, have tons to work with. Um. It's

(20:21):
a big problem when you you have just enough data,
you know, to suggest a correlation, but you don't have
enough to feel that you have a very strong model. Okay.
And so after these, uh, the next thing, sort of
the long term goal that they've talked about less specifically
and more generally is aging itself. So, as Venor points out,

(20:45):
aging is basically the number one risk factor for like
most diseases, basically everything, Yeah, tons of stuff and Right now,
aging is considered inevitable. It's just part of life. But
the question is could you neetic research like this genome
sequencing bring about anti aging techniques and so long term,

(21:06):
the company says its goal is to defeat diseases of
aging and perhaps even aging itself, with a combination of
this genomics research and also with stem cell therapy, which
is not to be overlooked. And that's something we've talked
about in other podcasts before. So obviously this matters on
a person to person basis. I mean, most people would
like to live longer and to be in better shape

(21:29):
and healthier for more of their lives, so that that's
sort of a no brainer. Yes, that's the thing we want.
It could make a big difference for society as a whole,
for example, because if you are having a harder time
getting around and doing all the things you want to
do as you get older because of this thing we
call aging, it makes it harder for you to say,

(21:51):
continue to work, Oh sure, you can be more productive.
You can. You can have all of that great quality
time with with working that we all look forward to
in our old age. I mean, well, I mean the
personal benefits some people probably enjoy their work. But beyond
working there, there's also just having the quality of life
that you want to be, the ability to go out

(22:13):
and do the things you want to do, of course,
and also freeing up a lot of UM talent and
minds and time from the kind of end of life
care that that we provide pretty long term in some
cases these days. Right, So it's not just about living longer,
but it's about being able to do more in the
years that you do live. And it's pretty cool that

(22:33):
all of this is coinciding with UM, with big data
technologies and and analysis techniques, because it's you know, we've
we're already pouring a lot of UM processing power and
thought into how to sift through this amount of information.
So so I think that that is UM very fortunate

(22:55):
and or logical that is happening. At the same time,
I'm sure it's not a coincidence that that we are
gaining uh and not entirely a coincidence that that we're
that we're gaining all of these powers at the same time.
Oh yeah, well, I mean it totally makes sense this
kind of thing is becoming enabled in the Internet age,
So I'm sure it's what we what the way we're

(23:17):
advancing is not just in terms of our ability to say,
take some d N a substance and and analyze it
chemically to see what all is there, but also in
our analytics capabilities, right having the processing power to to
do just that, to handle that kind of computation, to
store all this information, to to automatically cross reference it

(23:38):
in a meaningful way, that that makes a huge difference,
I think. But at the same time, I would say
that while this is a big boon for human life
in a lot of ways, it's also something that I
think we should be cautious about the era of big
data and genome sequencing certainly doesn't come without its worries. Uh, certainly,

(24:00):
there there are some privacy worries. Ventor himself kind of
brushes those off that that first genome that his private
company sequenced, sequenced was partially his, and there was a
little bit it was a composite, just the way the
same way that the Human Genome Projects first genome was
was a composit. But at any rate, um, he hasn't
withheld any of its contents from the public. Um. I'd

(24:23):
like to note, however, that as an eccentric millionaire. He
has a little bit less to lose than many average
humans might by making their genes open source, even with
anti discrimination acts in place, right, And I think it's
important to have all of that kind of legislation in
place that says, Okay, if your genome is becoming something

(24:43):
that is accessible to the public, even if we find
out something about the contents of your genome, that's not
something we can use against you to say, like not
hire you or something like that. Yeah, I'm definitely worried
about things like like insurance and employability um as it
relates to my full genetic code being on file with
with a big research database that anyone that wants can

(25:05):
have access to. Yeah, I think that's definitely something that
is worth being cautious about and something that is very
important to remind our legislators about as this becomes more common. Sure,
there's also the fact, like we mentioned at the top
of the show, Ventor's previous genetics project met with a
bunch of controversy because it was for profit, and so

(25:27):
we have to ask the question, is it ethical to
do medical research with this potential scope and hold it
for profit. I feel like I don't know enough about
genetics and genomics and how this business works to really
ethically make a pronouncement on that issue. My feeling is
that I want all health things to be free wherever possible.

(25:49):
But then again, can can they actually happen that way?
Or do you need to have some kind of investment
incentive to make this work? Yeah? The flip side of
the question is, really, is it goal to deny medical
researchers the same um, the same opportunities monetary opportunities that
we afford most other people. Um? And is it ethical
to use taxpayer dollars for this research when um, more

(26:13):
companies and bigger companies might be willing to provide funding
if there's a potential dollar profit in it. Um And
you know, like like note that this project has a
really expensive buy in. You know, genomes are huge, and
the variants that lead to particular diseases can be very
very small and very rare, So lots of sequences might
be necessary to create any kind of useful findings for

(26:35):
any given field, I'd agree, Um. Yeah, So what's the
bottom line, what what's the outlook for this? Well? These
are these are really big and really valid concerns. And questions.
And I'm not just saying that because I wrote them down. Um.
I I do think that that it's something really important
for for humanity as a whole to to be thinking about. Um.

(26:57):
But you know, the reason that there so big and
and so valid is that the whole field is so
wide open and wild west ish right now. You know,
we're only a little bit more than a decade out
of having a single full human genome sequenced or a
compositive a single full human genome sequenced. And Vnor himself
has said that the genome race was the race to

(27:20):
the starting line. Um, We're we're all running around with
this huge wealth of untapped data inside of us and
and harnessing that could could let us be better people.
But like you were just saying, we we also need
industry ethics and laws to to catch up to what
technology is making possible right now. Uh So, I don't know,

(27:40):
you know, I really hope that Human Longevity Ink succeeds
at the at the very least in driving genetics forward
and and forcing people to ask themselves these questions, you know,
potentially especially lawmakers and other people in the genetics community,
no doubt. Okay, Well, I guess that about wraps it
up for human longevity in doesn't it. Yeah, that is

(28:01):
about all that we have to say about it. If
you guys have anything to say, then you should get
in touch with us. You can. You can go to
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(28:23):
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So thanks for more on this topic and the future

(28:44):
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