LINKS:
Alex Zhavoronkov: https://www.linkedin.com/company/in-silico-medicine-inc
Insilico Medicine: https://insilico.com/
"The Ageless Generation": https://www.amazon.com/Ageless-Generation-Advances-Biomedicine-Transform/dp/0230342205
Young.AI Aging APP: https://www.young.ai/
Steve Horvath: https://horvath.genetics.ucla.edu/
Aging Clock: https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/ucla-scientist-uncovers-biological-248950
TRANSCRIPT:
ALICE: Today’s question is: How do you measure your age?
We are speaking with ALEX ZHAVORONKOV, PhD, expert in artificial intelligence for drug discovery in aging research. Alex is CEO of Insilico Medicine, a Baltimore-based leader in the next-generation artificial intelligence and blockchain technologies for drug discovery, biomarker development, and aging research. He is also the author of “The Ageless Generation: How Advances in Biomedicine Will Transform the Global Economy”
Alex, tell us about your focus on longevity.
ZHAVORONKOV: If you put your mind to it, you can easily convert time into money, but you cannot convert money into time. And that's a very big problem, right? So nature is very unfair.
I decided that I want to focus on aging more than anything else to find ways to make more time.
ALICE: Imagine, To make more time! What a wonderful way to describe longevity.
ZHAVORONKOV: We basically take a very large number of features about you, about the person, and predicting their age. And then we start predicting their disease status at the same time. So you train on age, then you retrain on diseases. And started looking at what the features are different between aging and disease. So what can we tweak in order for the person to be disease-free or possibly, younger to the deep neural network.
We decided that aging research-- those biomarkers of aging that we were developing using deep learning-- they're also valuable but they do not fit necessarily into Insilico. And that's why we decided to start another company called Deep Longevity to focus on measuring aging.
ALICE: Humans already measure their age, that’s their birth-day, right?
Alex, how do you measure aging?
ZHAVORONKOV: We launched an app called Young.AI, which you can install on your iPhone and start tracking your aging process and time. And very few people have even selfies that are taken every day or every week or every month, so you don't really remember how you used to look a few years or a decade ago.
Not talking about other data types like gene expression, like protein expression, like blood tests, like microbiome. So we don't know what kind of bacteria were living in your gut 20 two years ago. And this tool allows you to track that and also predict whether you are younger or older than your chronological age. My dream is to maybe in a few years, build a medical center where a person would go into and get treated like you would go to a mechanic to get your car serviced. In addition to really advanced diagnostics, you would be able to roll some clocks back using the technologies that are currently available and proven to work. And currently, there are very few, but we see that there are many coming up.
ALICE: Repair shops for humans will increase longevity! Are repair shops and curing disease the same thing?
ZHAVORONKOV: Imagine there is a world without cancer-- you add just maybe two to three years to the average life expectancy on the population level. It's not going to be dramatic. If you completely eliminate heart disease, you are also going to add maybe three or 3 and 1/2 years to the average life expectancy in the developed countries.
Completely eliminating diseases-- imagine that-- there is no disease-- is not giving you a substantial increase in life expectancy. And there are many mathematical models to show that. However, if you do a longevity intervention, it gives you a very substantial increase in life expectancy. So even things like good diet and exercise may add more years to life expectancy in a developed country than curing cancer, for example.
ALICE: Wow. That's so counterintuitive for my human half!
Is that how the "Young AI" app works? A longevity intervention?
ZHAVORONKOV: We are designing algorithms that are currently using very simple interventions like diet, exercise, sleep, and optimizing those to give you an additional edge in longevity to either slow down or even reverse some of the processes. As the person develops the understanding of how it works and uses it to the extent where they become expert, we provide access to longevity physicians.
The longer you expect to live, the younger you are going to behave. So even understanding the possible roadmaps for yourself, the possible future where you can live to 120 or 150 and in reasonable health, that gives you an additional kick from a psychological standpoint. So you start behaving as a younger individual. So you start thinking, OK, well now, I'm not halfway through. I'm just maybe 25% through my life. And there is a lot of advances coming up that might stretch the longevity horizon even further.
So the app does this. So it helps you get onto the right mode. And then it gets you into the careful hands of physicians that are trained in longevity medicine. So we are now developing a course in longevity medicine for physicians, so to give them the basic understanding of the biology of aging, the various processes that transpired during aging that later manifest themselves as diseases. And we also teach them about AI. So about the very basic principles of deep learning, reinforcement learning, how do those technologies enable physicians to do a better job. And how do those technologies enable researchers to do a better job and do things that were previously impossible.
So the app is a very good introduction to the field. It's not going to make you dramatically younger right away, because currently, even though there are many promising geroprotectors, we are not allowed to put them into the recommendation engine. However, in the near future, we will be able to add some of them.
ALICE: Did you just say geroprotector? Please explain, what is a geroprotector?
ZHAVORONKOV: Geroprotector is any kind of intervention that would protect you against aging-- either slow it down or reverse it. So think about metformin, for example, a very simple drug targeting diabetes. It's actually the most popular drug on the planet I think by volume and by revenue, because diabetics need to take it for their entire life, right? Aspirin, you take it just when you need to or after a certain age in a very specific dose. Metformin is taken by many diabetics and pre-diabetics. It is reasonably cheap. It's already off patent.
And some studies demonstrate that diabetics on metformin will live longer than non-diabetics. And that's a very good kind of indication, very good stat, showing that yeah, there is some geroprotective effect. It needs to be proven in a clinical study setting, and there are clinical studies. And that's an example of a geroprotector.
However, you might think of some other interventions like for example, if you take a hot sauna for a very short period of time to induce heatstroke p...
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