Name: ‘For Every Drug, We’ll Save 100 People and Kill 3’: Inside the Race to Fight Aging
Uploaded: 2024-12-16
Duration: 7 min 11 s
Description: Senior health reporter Alexa Mikhail shares key takeaways from the Longevity Investors Conference in Gstaad, Switzerland. Experts discuss current research, potential future developments, and practical advice for living a longer, healthier life.

Senior health reporter Alexa Mikhail shares key takeaways from the Longevity Investors Conference in Gstaad, Switzerland. Experts discuss current research, potential future developments, and practical advice for living a longer, healthier life.

‘For Every Drug, We’ll Save 100 People and Kill 3’: Inside the Race to Fight Aging

Health

Longevity Investors Conference: Experts discuss research and advice for healthier, longer living.

Now for every drug, we will save hundreds of people and kill three. So we have to choose the right, hundreds of people and not to include the three, right? So this is the challenge. Hello, my name is Alexa Mchale and I'm a senior health and wellness reporter at Fortune Magazine and I'm here in Gustad Switzerland for three days for the Longevity Investors Conference. It's been really fascinating to talk to different people at the forefront of the business of living longer as well as researchers who are at the edge of new biotechnology to potentially extend life. Here's what they say about how to live a longer life. So sleep is the most important thing and it's very hard especially to comments like this when you're socializing 14 hours a day and networking and getting to know people because every single conversation here is fascinating, but you need to prioritize sleep and most of us are absolutely terrible at that. So a lot of my bio a and that I introduce my patients, the things I do myself is we optimize it in my sleep. If you go back 10 years ago when I was a plastic surgery consultant. I was running a number of plastic surgery clinics. You actually would look at my sleep and think, oh, my goodness. This guy is going to die in his fifties and now I can sleep really easy and really comfort for eight hours. And this is, uh, this is through a combination of winding down the evening, have evening routines. The things you saw, teach to your Children as they're growing up are things that we can really do with as adults. So avoiding that sort of blue light in the evening, trying to re have that sort of routine, rewind down and potentially using supplements as well to help optimize that. Experts recommend sleeping eight hours per night for optimal health and longevity and spending at least one hour without screen time before bed. If you can, I really think that we should not treat our body as a snapshot, but a story and the story can only be written if you have more words. So which means that you should test the body continuously. And now we have, for example, digital devices. So we have smart watches, we have smart rings and these devices help to monitor the physiology. So we can already measure and monitor the temperature, the heart rate variability, we can measure the glucose levels with a continuous glucose monitoring device. So we can we have the capability already. So there are four drugs that are FDA approved, which means they, they went through clinical trials, not only that they had through multiple clinical trials and all of them have showed that they target the process of aging that if you give them to animals, they live longer, but more important that if you give them to humans and those are drugs that were not approved for aging, they were approved for something else. Um, and, and you give them for something for something else and they prevent bunch of diseases and also prevent overall mortality. The the most known one is the Ozempic kind of drug, right? The G LP one that was developed for diabetes and I'm a diabetologist. So I've been using it for more than seven years, right. So I know a lot about this drug or this kind of drug. Ozempic is relatively new, but we were using these drugs before. So it was developed for diabetes and it was shown to actually decrease obesity and it was shown in obese people to prevent heart disease, to prevent kidney disease, to prevent Parkinson's to prevent Alzheimer's to prevent liver disease because it actually targets the mechanisms of aging. So in my mind, you should any any elderly patient that you have that is obese or even overweight, you should consider giving him this drug. There is a new field developing, which is A I based drug discovery. So these are compounds, these are molecules like pieces that will be then created into medication and they can be very precisely designed and then synthesized with help of A I into something that will be working on one of a specific process of aging fibrosis, like the our organ structure is changing or ovarian aging or, or some other uh hormonal receptors. One big question I had at this longevity conference was, how will this all be paid for and who will have access to these life extending innovations? I believe I'm most excited about the fact that it will permit the public sector. Um So coming from really a public sector medicine, I really want this to be accessible and affordable for all. And I think as the diagnostic is getting more abundant, the cheaper it is right, just like cogen sequence, it costs bef before it costed like thousands of dollars. Now it can be done for, you know, even $500 or less. So that will make a big difference. Um in order for us to be able to apply it to a broader um broader, you know, amount of patients. And through that, we will generate more data and with this broader amount of data, we can be even more precise and scale even further. Um That is something I'm very excited about. And second again, going back to the A I, I'm really excited about A I based drug discovery because I believe that this is the only way for us to really scale and be more targeted and rather than using something that is already existing repurposing and adjusting, we can just create something that will target specifically. One of our problems in aging, I think, you know, for for immediately some some of the things are very basic so they are really affordable because the your hearing and vision and smell and taste that doesn't require too much of cost. And a lot of that can be covered by the health care system. The other things are of course, um not as easily available but, but still still, you know, for a good middle class, probably accessible right now in some of the countries. So to get a brain MRI and then to fuel it into um some of the companies who do the brain algorithms that's quite inexpensive at the moment. So that's already available. Um And even just talking to a family doctor and asking, hi, you know, c could I get an assessment with a neuropsychologist? Um in in many cases, probably the answer would be yes if the people will request. And I guess that's also one of the things when there will be more requests coming from patients, the health care system will respond better and faster than if only us doctors will push for that. This event highlighted a lot of promising innovations around aging and longevity. But the experts I talked to noted that the main pillars of healthy aging are lifestyle changes, especially for healthy young people, not every drug that's good for old people is good for young people. But the things that are good for young and old are exercise, diet, sleep and social connectivity. So you can always maximize that.