Hello everyone.

Can you hear me okay up the back? Good.

Can you understand my Australian accent

okay?

Good. Well, thank you for having me

today. I have 15 minutes to tell you

about uh what is one of the most

exciting changes for humanity that you

may not know is actually happening.

Uh I've Of course, I'm talking about

longevity

and the longevity revolution

that uh I here

stand to tell you about and represent as

a scientist in this field. Uh so, my

background briefly is I've been in the

longevity research field for 30 years.

I've watched its rapid changes.

Uh and I'm at Harvard Medical School uh

and I run a lab of about 25

PhDs. And we are pushing the boundaries

of what is possible with human health.

And it is clear to me

uh and many of my colleagues around the

world that

our generation is going to witness the

biggest change in health

since the inventions of clean water and

vaccines.

And what I'm talking about is our

ability to control our own biology.

And when that happens, and this may only

be between 10 and 20 years in the

future, we will look to back at today

at our current health care and think of

it like it is very old-fashioned if not

medieval.

So, I'm talking about aging today. And

for many years, we've

ignored aging.

If you go to a doctor, typically a

doctor says uh

"Well, you're getting old. It's normal

for you to lose your eyesight. It's

normal for you to have bad hearing. It's

normal for you to to get heart disease.

This is aging. It's normal."

And for too long, normal has equaled

acceptable. And I'm here to say that we

no longer have to think of something

that's normal being acceptable.

Everything else about our life,

the air in this room, the lights, the

clothes we wear, the cars we drive,

this is not natural. This is not normal

for humans.

But we change our world for the better,

and the same is going to be for how fast

we get older.

Aging doesn't have to be acceptable.

In my world, aging is a medical

condition

that's very common,

and it's increasingly

treatable.

So, what I show in this graph is how

rapidly the rise is of diseases as we

get older. On the bottom axis is the age

that we get,

and the diseases rise in risk as we get

older. And what I want you to see is

it's not a straight line, it's

exponential, and they all go up. So, by

the time we're 80,

almost

more than 50% of us have five or more

diseases.

And the older you get, the worse it

gets.

And the goal of my research, and people

like me around the world, is to push the

curve

in this direction, so that diseases come

later.

And the only way to do that is to tackle

aging itself.

Even if we cured all cancer today,

we would only live an average of an

extra 2 and 1/2 years.

Let that sink in.

All cancers gone today, we only live on

average another 2 and 1/2 years. Why?

Because all of the diseases are going up

at the same time.

So, we need to tackle all of the

diseases at once,

and that's aging.

Aging is the cause of these diseases.

They look different, right? In the

brain, aging is different. It looks like

Alzheimer's. In the heart, it looks like

heart disease. In the skin, it looks

like wrinkles. But, the same process is

the same in every tissue, and we can now

slow it down.

And what I'm going to tell you today

is that next month

we're going into human clinical trials

to test for the first time

in history

whether we can reverse the aging process

and cure diseases.

So, it's a very important moment.

So, this is a world forum. Uh

we want to talk about economics, I

think.

And we calculated, um my colleagues and

I in London

that the economic value to slowing aging

is tremendous. It can dramatically

improve the GDP of a country

even if you slow aging by 1 year.

You just make your population live a

healthy 1 extra year.

And for the United States, for example,

that's an extra $38 trillion.

Why?

Why? Because people are not sick, and

they are more productive.

If you extend our lifespan by 10 years,

now that's 360

something

trillion dollars. These are big numbers.

Why? Because our greatest asset as a

country

is not tech, it's not oil, it's not

gold. It's human resource.

Adult human productivity is the greatest

resource of any country.

And there's a problem now.

For most

of the certainly the Western world,

the rates of fertility are declining.

In 1960, the average

person was having

many more children

per thousand people

every year there were 25 babies in the

United States

in uh 1960, now it's around 10 babies

per thousand people.

For the first time, more than half of

the American states

produced fewer babies

than people died.

Half of the United States is declining

in population. So, we have less and less

people

to do the work.

So, there are only two solutions:

replace them with robots or keep people

alive and healthy.

The other problem is there's very little

research into aging.

Okay? In the United States, which puts

the most research dollars into aging,

you can see on this graph, it's only 500

million

compared to

many billions of dollars to target

individual diseases.

But, as I told you, if you target

individual diseases, you're not going to

extend lifespan by very much. You need

to tackle all of the processes at once.

Now, I'm going to give you a little

little bit of biology lesson, because

it's very important that you understand

why we can now tackle aging when we

couldn't do this even 5 years ago.

We can tackle aging because we now

believe we understand why we age.

And it's not wear and tear. It's not

that we just wear out like a car.

Our bodies are not like cars.

Our bodies are more like computers that

can be programmed and reprogrammed and

rebooted

to be young again.

And this graph from my uh good colleague

and friend Steve Horvath, Professor

Steve Horvath,

showed that you can even measure

changes, chemical changes on our DNA

in our blood or anywhere, we can take a

cheek swab from our mouth, and we can

measure how old we are.

Not by our birthdays,

which is called chronological age,

but by how fast of all, is getting

older. We call this our biological age.

And there's a very specific measure for

how old we are biologically.

And these are chemicals that get changed

on the DNA. Our DNA is not pure, it's

not just clean. It gets chemicals added

on and off as we get older and we can

measure those with sequencing machines

and predict not just how old somebody

is, but more importantly how sick they

will be in the future and even when they

will die.

And the in the United States, you can

buy a kit and take a cheek swab or take

a blood sample and the company will tell

you how old you are biologically and how

long you might live if you don't change

your health. And you can see on this

graph some people are much younger than

others even if they have the same

birthday.

Now, this is the theory that comes from

my lab at Harvard. It's called the

information theory of aging and this is

the idea

that we are like computers, not

machines.

One analogy and hopefully you all

remember what a compact disc is.

Uh I think you do. When I teach

students, sometimes I have to tell them

what is a CD.

Um but what we think it aging is, aging

is like

scratches on a CD.

The DNA is the music.

So, we get beautiful music when we're

young, but when we get old, we cannot

read the beautiful music. Our cells do

not read the DNA correctly. So, the

cells they become lost, they become

uh confused and our old cells do not

make the right proteins and they they

get diseases.

This we believe is aging.

But what's amazing is we found that you

can polish the CD, you can get rid of

the scratches

and rejuvenate cells so they're young

again.

And put to put it another way, you can

reinstall the software of the body so

that it's young again.

We can quite literally in my lab

reverse the age of cells

and of very complex organs and tissues,

including the eye, the most complex,

and the brain.

We can reverse aging

by 75%

in 6 weeks.

And I'll show you what happens when we

do that.

This is the opposite experiment we did.

This is what happens when you scratch

the CD, when you corrupt the software of

an animal.

We're putting those chemicals on the DNA

and making it get older faster.

And you can see the mouse on the right

is

uh the brother of the other brother,

born on the same day,

same age,

but one of them we accelerated the aging

process. We scratched the CD of this

mouse.

Good evidence that the information

theory of aging

may be correct.

And what we like to say in my lab is if

you can give something, you can take it

away.

So, we started working on how to reverse

aging, not just accelerate it.

So, the question was, is aging

in us

reversible?

We know that we can reverse it when we

have children.

Our baby Our babies are not born 30

years old or 40 years old, depending on

the parents, because on the seventh day

of fertilization, after you have a

conception,

on day seven, the baby goes back in age.

There's a reset of the age when we're

very young.

But can you do this

in our bodies

when we're older, when we're 40, when

we're 50, even when we're 90? Can you do

this? And can it be safe ever?

And I believe it can.

And so, because I only have 15 minutes

to talk to you today,

I'm going to give you a crash course in

the science of age reversal.

What we do is we use

what are called Yamanaka genes.

Yamanaka, Professor Shinya Yamanaka, won

the Nobel Prize in 2006 for discovering

that there are genes that can re-

rejuvenate a cell back to a stem cell.

Back to age zero.

Which we use all the time now in the lab

and in increasingly therapies.

But we don't want to create age zero

cells in our body, that would be cancer.

So, what we had to figure out in my lab

was, how do we reverse the age

to 75%

but not 100%?

So, we use

three of the Yamanaka genes. Just three,

not four, not five, just three. And we

discovered in 2020 that that

takes you back 75% but no more. It stops

at 75%. These three genes are called

Oct4, Sox2, Klf4.

They control other genes, but these are

the reset switch. This is the polish for

the compact disc.

We call these OSK for short. OSK.

This was the result that changed

everything for us and it got on the

cover of Nature magazine in 2020, the

world's leading scientific journal. And

the title on this

the cover of this journal was turning

back time.

This result

shows that you can rejuvenate cells,

make them young again,

and you can even regrow the tissue.

These are optic nerves in a mouse that

have been damaged.

The top one is the damaged one. The

bottom one is also damaged but

rejuvenated. Made young again so that it

can grow. And so, these mice had their

optic nerve regenerated. So, we actually

were able to show that using this

method, we could cure blindness

in in animals for the first time.

We could cure blindness.

But we didn't choose the eye because it

would work well. We chose the eye

because

we wanted to test if we could cure

blindness.

Since then, we've tested that we can

benefit and treat diseases such as

Alzheimer's disease in the brain of

mice,

multiple sclerosis,

um motor neuron disease or ALS,

um kidney disease and liver diseases.

It's not just the eye that can get

reversed and cured of diseases. It's

seemingly every part of

the body.

It's a universal reset

in the body.

And well, I believe that that's going to

be the the future of

pushing those diseases out. 10 years,

maybe one day 50 years into the future,

so we can spend our 80s and our 90s,

that decade being just as productive as

we were in our 40s and 50s.

There was a company

that I started 8 years ago called Life

Biosciences

and it's based in Massachusetts and they

are doing the clinical trials.

What they did was they tested whether

this eye treatment worked in

uh in animals higher than mice mice and

they actually tested this

uh in monkeys

and they were able to show that it also

works in animals just like us.

And as you can see from this graph,

the eye is just the beginning. We're

going to be treating

uh glaucoma, very prevalent in this

region of the world.

NAION, the next disease is a stroke in

the eye, so you can wake up blind.

There's three times more of this

condition

now than there was 10 years ago because

of the weight loss drugs.

Um the GLP-1 receptor agonist drugs

actually increase the frequency of

blindness by this NAION, like a stroke.

And then we're going to be working on

other tissues, the liver,

perhaps the lungs, hearing.

We believe we can treat every tissue

eventually, do a whole body reset of

the body to be able to be young again.

And it takes about 6 weeks.

And the world reported just last week

that the US FDA regulatory body

cleared

the way for the first age reversal human

trial.

It's a big deal. The FDA is very

supportive.

And we will know this year,

maybe in the next few months, if age

reversal works.

Initially in the eye for glaucoma and

myon to to treat blindness.

And then we will move on to the rest of

the body. And these are my colleagues at

Life Biosciences. The CEO

on the left is Michael Ringel from

Boston Consulting Group, COO. In the

middle, the lady is the CSO scientist,

Sharon Rosenzweig-Lipson. And the CEO is

Jerry.

We're very fortunate to have

some investment from this region

including from G42. So I'm very

grateful for their support.

We've just raised

around $80 million to do these trials.

And I do believe that we have a very

good chance of seeing success in the

clinic this year.

And if you're wondering,

how does this all work? What's the

biology? What should I do now to stay

healthy?

I'm going to give a shameless plug of

the book that I wrote

because this

talks about the future, talks about the

economy,

and all of the social benefits that will

come from this technology.

Thank you for having me.