Leonard Guarente's Anti-Aging Pill

http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2016/08/is-elysium-healths-basis-the-fountain-of-youth.html

by wallflower • 10 years ago

92 49 10 years ago

dang2• 10 years ago

We changed the title of this rather substantive profile piece to make it less baity, but if anyone can suggest a better (more accurate and neutral) one, we can change it again.

Retric2• 10 years ago

How about, A Fountain of Youth Scam

dang2• 10 years ago

Since that's not even close to neutral, it doesn't seem like you posted it in good faith. Please don't do that. I'm skeptical of the subject matter too, but flipping from hype to denunciation is not what we're looking for here. In fact those two things are variants of one another.

ceilingscorpion• 10 years ago

"Guarente has a third child ... but is unable even to find him, because he is a computer programmer specializing in encryption who has managed to scrub the internet of clues to his whereabouts" This made me chuckle

nwah12• 10 years ago

Bruce Ames is a similarly eminent scientist interested in anti-aging research. He's tried to commercialize his research into Acetyl L-Carnitine and R-Lipoic Acid.

RhodesianHunter• 10 years ago

I would imagine commercializing ALCAR to be be difficult at this point, considering you can get it cheaply in every form on Amazon Prime.

nwah12• 10 years ago

I think that is why there was a lot of hype about R-Lipoic Acid for awhile, as opposed to regular lipoic acid. And a lot of hype about Acetyl Carnitine Arginate.

You can patent the manufacturing processes on this stuff, even if you cannot patent the substance itself.

Nicotinamide Riboside and pterostilbene's manufacturing processes are patented by a company called Chromadex.

pboutros4• 10 years ago

This sounds a lot like Theranos.

blackbagboys• 10 years ago

Could you elaborate? Unlike Theranos, this company's founders are remarkably accomplished and upfront about the speculative nature of their product.

pboutros4• 10 years ago

Sure! And that's true. I'll also add that the board packs a far stronger scientific punch than Theranos's originally did.

It reminds me of Theranos because it meets the 'visionary founder(s) + unproven yet promising sounding scientific premise + extensive backing from prominent individuals = really great story to read/write about'. The caveat there is, as I mentioned, the significant scientific backing behind this.

I am very skeptical of dietary supplements (esp. when they aren't something like niacin, or iron, which have permitted claims). I am not a lawyer, but it would seem to me like their marketing might run close to afoul of FDA guidance on dietary supplement claims. See here (http://www.fda.gov/food/guidanceregulation/guidancedocuments...).

Here are a couple examples of them artfully avoiding making seriously problematic claims:

--- "Basis is designed to optimize NAD+ levels and sirtuin function in our cells to support our most critical metabolic processes like cellular detoxification, DNA repair and energy production." https://www.elysiumhealth.com/basis. Note the careful language use of 'support', which doesn't actually mean that it does it, according to the FDA guidance document cited above.

"It is closely related to resveratrol, a compound found in grapes and red wine, but more bioavailable, or easier, for the body to incorporate. Research has shown that pterostilbene, like NAD+, stimulates enzymes called sirtuins. They relate to critical cellular processes, from aging to circadian clocks to energy production." https://www.elysiumhealth.com/basis Note that they mention the critical cellular processes as related to it, without directly saying that consuming more of pterostilbene actually helps. ---

The claims themselves aren't direct enough to probably merit a warning letter (in my amateur opinion), but it certainly doesn't mean that they do anything. They aren't actually making any claims as to the product's efficacy, but if they were to, you'll also note that all of the research cited(https://www.elysiumhealth.com/basis, at the bottom) probably wouldn't actually substantiate any claims per FDA guidance, because the studies don't actually come close enough to testing the supplement itself.

I say all of this under the caveat that I am not a lawyer, just a regular human being who is skeptical of any miracle pills.

applecore• 10 years ago

A few of the molecules mentioned in the article:

Pterostilbene 50mg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pterostilbene

Nicotinamide riboside (NR) 250mg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotinamide_riboside

NR is a precursor to nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD+): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotinamide_adenine_dinucleot...

0xdeadbeefbabe• 10 years ago

“But frankly, I’m kind of shocked all those big-name scientists signed on to this thing that’s two very common, easily obtained supplement ingredients.”

I don't know why this is so shocking. It sounds pretty rational.

Dotnaught• 10 years ago

Tried it for two months. No noticeable effect. Didn't continue.

DennisP• 10 years ago

I'm guessing you don't feel noticeably older right now than you felt two months ago. So if the pill merely slows aging, rather than reversing it, it's not likely you'd notice any change.

godshatter2• 10 years ago

Even reversing aging would presumably take a not-insignificant portion of a person's life span. If the rate were magically the same as aging, just in reverse, it could take years to notice the difference depending upon your age.

WeEatnKid2• 10 years ago

been taking this supplement for several months. Improvement in sleep quality and wakefulness was pretty noticeable on the second day. Had no idea how 'brain-fogged' I felt prior to taking it. It seemed to help recovery time with respect to exercise and I overcame some plateaus while taking it. Another fringe benefit I've noticed is that hangovers from drinking are non-existent. Would definitely recommend trying it, but your mileage may vary.

Chromadex also sells the same supplement but I do not know of any differences between what they provide and what Elysium provides.

daveguy2• 10 years ago

Had no idea how 'brain-fogged' I felt prior to taking it. It seemed to help recovery time with respect to exercise and I overcame some plateaus while taking it.

Two questions:

1) What do you think about the idea of not taking it anymore?

2) Did you quantify your plateau breakthroughs and can you compare them to any previous plateaus?

WeEatnKid2• 10 years ago

1) I am reluctant to stop taking it. I am accustomed to the initial effects -- a missed dose here or there isn't noticeable, but I don't want to lapse into fatigue from abstaining or miss out on the benefits of sustained intake. There may not even be a benefit to long term supplementation so this concern is a bit unsubstantiated.

2) I didn't track or log differences in my exercise routines so I can't quantify anything. Qualitatively, its easier to exercise consecutively and I have been able to increase magnitude on my lifts by ~20% across the board. This could be attributed to shorter recovery time and reaping the benefits of adding volume to training. The strength gains plateaued 6 months in. I am in my 8th month of taking basis.

helloworld• 10 years ago

In a first-world, disposable income scheme of things, I guess $60 a month isn't bad. Your cellphone bill is probably higher.

But what Bill Gates said last year in a Reddit AMA resonates with me: "It seems pretty egocentric while we still have malaria and TB for rich people to fund things so they can live longer."[1]

I'm reminded of an inscription that appears on English gravestones going back to at least the 1500s:

  If life were a thing that money could buy,
  The rich they would live and the poor they would die;
  But God in His goodness hath ordered it so
  That the rich and the poor they together must go.

Maybe not for much longer.

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2015/04/04/tech-ti...

nefitty• 10 years ago

I agree with Gates's sentiment, but if you consider the state of specialization, some people are going to be skilled in combating diseases and others are going to be skilled in designing new longevity paradigms. Just because Mr. Robot is an amazing TV show doesn't mean all TV shows should be dramatized representations of hacker culture, for example.

tomcam• 10 years ago

About this quote by Bill Gates, whom I admire greatly:

"It seems pretty egocentric while we still have malaria and TB for rich people to fund things so they can live longer."

Bullshit. It sounds great, but what's it's really saying is that Bill Gates is a better judge of what should be done with Leonard Guarente's time than Leonard Guarente. That kind of talk is insidious. First of all--what are we going to do, all submit to Bill Gate's idea of what we should do? If not Bill, then, who will decide?

It ignores the fact that the research of people like Guarente could end up right in Bill's wheelhouse. Many great scientific discoveries were accidents.

It also completely ignores the fact the Bill himself became a great force for good not by doing what some factotum told him what to do, but by doing something that everyone told him not to do. Who knows, maybe Guarente will make a trillion dollars on his research (which I have absolutely no interest in). If Bill had done what his parents wanted him to do he probably would have been a white-shoe lawyer in Seattle or CEO of Planned Parenthood.

I think Bill is a severely underrated CEO and probably a well-intentioned human being, but Bill has no fucking business telling the rest of us what to do with our time.

porkloin• 10 years ago

It's called an opinion, and yes, even billionaires-turned-philanthrophists are entitled to them. :)

Don't worry, though - it'll be at least another 10 years or so until Gates starts sending his cronies out at night to black-bag folks into compulsory humanitarian aid work.

jessaustin• 10 years ago

...what are we going to do, all submit to Bill Gate's idea of what we should do?

I thought this was the point of the "Halloween Memos"?

melling• 10 years ago

You should donate malaria nets to help reduce the 440,000 deaths, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa. It's quite cheap.

https://www.againstmalaria.com

I've donated in the past. Then people with more ability can work on the harder problems.

KVFinn• 10 years ago

Reasons to be cautious:

Moreover, even if NR supplements do provide an immediate jolt to muscle mitochondrial metabolism in the way that the Harvard NMN studies suggest, it’s not clear that doing so is a good idea in the long term. NMN injections don’t improve mitochondrial function by repairing molecular damage wrought by the aging process in the organelles, nor in other cells and biomolecules whose damage with age results in a dampening-down of mitochondrial activity. Instead, NMN injections leave the existing damage in place, and induce the still-functional mitochondria to work harder and pump out more energy. This is rather like pushing harder on the gas pedal when your car is not running at full power due to damage to its cams and push rods: it may make the car go faster in the short term, but the underlying damage hasn’t been fixed, and will likely get even worse from the excessive wear.

http://www.sens.org/research/research-blog/question-month-12...

spaceheeder• 10 years ago

Isn't SENS the exact organization that Elysium's existence is premised on, err, not existing? They're actively doing research into the causes of aging, themselves being precursors to causes of age-related diseases. It's just that slow, rigorous, peer-reviewed research that leads to specific therapies with known human health effects take time and money to produce. Can anyone explain why so many scientists would rather attach their names to Elysium than to SENS? I want to hold them in higher regard than to assume it's just money.

reasonattlm2• 10 years ago

You probably recall the hype surrounding sirtuins in cellular metabolism, followed by the breathless marketing of compounds supposed to affect their expression such as resveratrol, all of which went to the usual destination for such things, which is to say nowhere. Some knowledge was added to the grand map of mammalian biochemistry, some people were fleeced, some people made a bunch of money on the backs of promises that never materialized, and that was that. This happens over and again. Every time a new link is uncovered in the complex chain of protein machinery relating to cellular repair mechanisms, upregulated in many of the ways to extend life in lower animals, or calorie restriction, a practice that extends life in short-lived mammals such as mice, and along the way alters near every aspect of the operation of metabolism, then the marketing begins for any supplement that can be linked, tenuously or otherwise, to that research.

If you recognize the general pattern, then you should be well placed to see how things will play out for nicotinamide riboside. This is yet another molecule that can be used as a supplement, and which influences some of the mitochondrial biochemistry associated with cellular maintenance processes. In mice it has been shown to modestly reduce some forms of age-related decline, either by spurring greater maintenance or greater stem cell activity. It is an open question as how much of this will be recapitulated in humans; short-lived species are much more readily influenced by this sort of thing. Their life spans are plastic, and so are their metabolic operations. Regardless, it is of course the case that a bunch of people got together to form a company in order to sell nicotinamide riboside as a supplement. That company is called Elysium Health.

The differences between this and past efforts of this nature are that (a) more reputable scientists from the aging research field are involved, more is the pity for their reputations, and (b) the whole affair is just a little closer to a sensible take on how to make progress in the field, rather than being an absolute money grab. In fact I agree with a fair bit of what cofounder Leonard Guarente has said in public on his motivations for doing this: that progress must be made more rapidly, that there is a space between the worthless supplement market and the highly regulated world of medicine in which good work can be done, and that it is important to put new approaches out there in the world to gather data. I just don't think that this particular approach has any merit in and of itself. My position on tinkering with metabolism via drugs and found compounds in order to gain tiny and dubious benefits is that it is a a waste of time and effort, and definitely not the road to meaningful outcomes in the treatment of aging. Further, even putting that to one side, the founders of Elysium haven't gone about this in the right way at all. They should have sold their product as an open trial of nicotinamide riboside wherein people pay for participation, doubled the price of the supplement, and used that extra money to collect data from participants. Instead they, as everyone is, are corrupted by the fiduciary duty that comes with running a company where the primary focus is selling a branded supplement - so now they are in the supplement business, not the science business. It should be an object lesson for the next group who are thinking of doing something like this.

I'm very much in favor of freedom. For my money, all of medicine should be as open as this: that anyone can invest the time and money to package and sell a product, that consumers can easily find all of the research online to read up on what the scientific community has to say, and that reviewers can take that information to provide digests for those who don't want to read the research. Freedom means the existence of marginal products as well as great products, and people doing things you personally think are a waste of time as well as people doing things you agree with, but you can always identify these as such. You just have to take a little time to read around the topic before you reach for your wallet. Freedom also means a far greater set of activity and greater experimentation and availability of new approaches than would take place if all of this was hammered flat beneath the cost of regulation, and that, I think, would be worth the price of admission. Successes will prove themselves by virtue of the fact that sellers will find it worth the cost of setting up formal trials to demonstrate effectiveness, for example.

aab0• 10 years ago

"After a rocky start — in his memoir, Ageless Quest, Guarente cops to quitting smoking when he was in third grade — he has lived a generally healthy life. Besides Basis, he takes a low-dose statin, aspirin, and vitamin D; weighs himself every day; eats a mostly Mediterranean diet (red wine included); and does a mix of cardio (on the elliptical machine, ever since his knees wore out and he had to stop running) and strength training three days a week at a gym near his home in the Boston suburb of Newton."

This is a pretty sensible anti-aging regimen. Vitamin D and baby aspirin reduce all-cause mortality in the elderly in the meta-analyses, statins are probably helpful, daily weighing will help avoid obesity and metabolic disorder leading to all sorts of bad things like diabetes, and likewise the cardio & weight training. Such a regimen is probably good for at least 2 additional years of life expectancy. If he was going to add anything more, it would have to be metformin or low-dose rapamycin, and those are speculative enough that one might want to wait for TAME/MILES results before deciding.

BatFastard• 10 years ago

Indeed it is sensible.

Honestly at this point in my life (58), I have more of a desire to feel great everyday then I do to have 2 more years of life when I am 93.

gozur88• 10 years ago

That's my feeling exactly. I'm pretty sure I have spent more than two years exercising, so I'm probably already into negative territory on time, but I'd like to be healthy enough in my 60s and early 70s that I can still walk and carry on a conversation without being winded.

agumonkey• 10 years ago

Same here. I wish I knew more about how to maintain and even improve my overal well being. Maximizing my potential on this bounded time.

I find society very lacking there. Feels even diminishing returns since our culture, driven by recent economy; optimizes for consumption of safe and regular but low grade and low diversity products. Also stressful lifestyles ..

stupidcar• 10 years ago

"But he has also seen public funding of aging research, never particularly robust, become even scarcer."

It seems like this part, at the end of the article, might explain while Guarante is risking his reputation with Elysium. In the absence of public funding, his only options are to depend on the largess of billionaires like Thiel, or form a business and try to retain enough control to set the research agenda.

I suspect Elysium will end-up with a breach between him and his business partners, much like his previous company. There's a basic incompatibility: Actual anti-aging research is expensive, and won't deliver practical results for decades (if ever), while actual profits in anti-aging come from selling regulation-skirting supplements that almost certainly don't work.

Since there's no actual reliance from the profit-making part of the business on the research department, the suits will see it is a large and unnecessary cost, sooner or later. The presence of Guarente and his peers provide a necessary veneer of respectability right now, as they're establishing themselves in the market, and guarantee publicity like this article that it would never otherwise receive. But once they're established, I'm guessing they'll decide they can do without the scientists and the research, and Guarente will be looking for another source of funding once again.

ilostmykeys• 10 years ago

Basis elevated my blood sugar quite dramatically. Beware, and check your blood sugar when you're on it (against your normal baseline) It did that on day one and day two so I quit taking it and now back to normal levels for blood sugar.

tahoeskibum• 10 years ago

After reading up on a bunch of papers on NR, I decided to try it for a month. I found that I have noticably better sleep in terms of deep sleep vs light sleep (as quantified by a sleep tracker) and faster muscle recovery after bike rides. I just signed up up for a 1 year subscription. YMMV

matt_wulfeck• 10 years ago

Eh, nature has already optimized for maximum human lifespan, and it seems to be a tad past 100. It's a nice round number. Personally I don't mind it, give or take a few decades.

It'll be great when we finally break through it. Think of all those extra years we can spend looking at websites on our cell phones.

thangalin• 10 years ago

nature has already optimized for maximum human lifespan

Doubtful. The bowhead whale, which lives over 200 years[1], has mutations that we lack. Given that mutations happen randomly and that the dolphin genome is basically the same as the ours (with a few chromosomal rearrangements)[2], it suggests that bowheads got lucky in ways humans did not. A mere fluke.

Evolution hasn't finished with us, either.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowhead_whale#Lifespan

[2] https://www.karger.com/Article/Pdf/15002

perseusprime11• 10 years ago

I am not sure if this is scientifically proven or not but I have seem people who stay off sugars, starches, and alcohol look atleast 10 years younger.

0xmohit• 10 years ago

I'm reminded of something heard long time back:

  Everybody wants to go to heaven but nobody wants to die.

Leonard Guarente's Anti-Aging Pill

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