That’s ridiculous!”  Or, another one was, “What if it doesn’t work?”. Unfortunately, we wasted valuable time negotiating over things like this, when really we weren’t going to break past their conservative approach. It says it’s new! Now, with the money recently secured by private donation (“I can’t tell you who gave us it,” he said “but it will be a great story one day!”) he sat down with us to discuss metformin and how TAME, which is slated to begin in the November 2019, could change medicine forever. Dr. Barzilai discovered the first longevity gene in humans and has since discovered several others, and he is the co-founder of CohBar, a clinical stage biotechnology company focused on increasing health span by developing treatments for age-related diseases. Twitter Share on linkedin. Nir Barzilai, MD-founding director of the Institute for Aging Research, ... You can also follow us on twitter @Seeking_Delphi and Facebook #53–The Longevity Dialogues, Part 2, Selling the Science. Its promise: extending our years of healthy, disease-free living by decades. The biotechs have money for proof of concept, but not the billion dollars you need to develop a drug. Dr. Nir Barzilai: I want to do it as fast as possible. This means it disrupts slightly (not totally, like cyanide does) the process by which we break down nutrients with oxygen for energy. A: Okay, so, basically put, our hypothesis is that aging drives disease. It starts at zero again. Or are they still frightened of being taken for quacks? Nir Barzilai Member Since August 17, 2018. So this continuation and conservation of genes for longer life isn’t selected for by evolution. If we can do that in our own bodies, we can surely find a way to do it in another context. See the complete profile on LinkedIn and discover Nir… The key to longevity may have less to do with lifestyle than with the predetermined makeup of your genes. David A. Sinclair PhD AO is a professor of genetics at … He hypothesizes that centenarians have protective genes which delay aging or protect against age-related diseases. That’s what Dr. Nir Barzilai, dire Brimming with jokes and references, his sentences digress and then return to his point of focus like ever-tightening loops of a knot. Appearances. We found a clear trade-off, an antagonistic relationship, between reproductive fitness and length of life. Appearances. Reply on Twitter 1346109351023489025 Retweet on Twitter 1346109351023489025 Like on Twitter 1346109351023489025 Twitter 1346109351023489025. Q: Your research into aging started in the 90s with the (still ongoing) Longevity Genes Project. If, as a side effect, the drug that does so also has you living longer, we apologise, you might not have budgeted for that! That’s how it affects me. How? What is its structure? A: Well, the pharmaceuticals are not going to jump without having a medical indication to follow. Developing a novel therapeutic drug can cost between $161 million and... Ben Turner is a writer and journalist based in London. Nir Barzilai is a professor of medicine and genetics at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and the director of the Institute for Aging Research. We just haven’t measured it on all the diseases together. With this, there’s less Reactive Oxygen Species being released, less inflammation, and less DNA damage. Einstein Researcher, Nir Barzilai, Tries to Unlock ‘The Biology of Aging’ Lily Port is in the Galapagos Islands. What we want to do is extend healthspan and make people healthier for much longer. He is best known for his work with some of the world’s oldest populations and is currently leading an international effort to aprove drugs that could target aging. Well, if we knew it worked, we wouldn’t do the study! Nir Barzilai shares his expertise on how ageing can be targeted and reversed. Nir Barzilai has a plan. Copyright © 2021 Live Long and Master Aging podcast. Q: That’s an enormous shift from how clinicians are accustomed to conducting trials. After landing a position at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, Barzilai studied some of the longest-living centenarians in the US. In TAME (which stands for Targeting Aging with Metformin) we’ve clustered all of the major age-related diseases – cardiovascular disease, cancer, cognitive decline and mortality – and for every subject in our study we’re going to show that instead of contracting any one of them after, say, two years, you’re going to contract one in four. A: Anti-aging is something we try to distinguish ourselves from. But it improves loads of things, and pushes back the onset of age-related diseases. There are brilliant researchers in the field, but not a lot of them know how to develop drugs. Do you know of Yogi Berra? How much better? encouraged us all to "Choose Life";... Stanford study finds that blocking certain interactions on immune cells reverses age-related mental decline in older mice. And that’s it, I’m sticking to it. This time I’ll be right. But instead of doing what we had to do – which was to come up with a really good committee to carefully craft a study design – the next generation of researchers can just take the template and do what they want with it. LinkedIn Prev Previous Podcast with Julia Randell-Khan. Some of them are even immortalists. This is something that is hard to understand for clinicians with a disease focus. There’s an argument floating out there that it could improve the economy rather than weaken it, right? And they were saying things to us like, “We didn’t know aging could be targeted and we’d only need one drug to do it. All rights reserved. From then on aging was of great interest to me, all the way through medical school and my residency. Living past 100 could soon become a reachable goal, said Nir Barzilai of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine this week. It’s what I really wanted to understand. Back in the 1980s, pop sensation Wham! I looked instead at exceptional Longevity, which again draws a response from people accusing me of wanting to extend everyone’s lives so far that they’ll be sick and frail yet never die [Barzilai echoes the myth of Tithonus here, whom Zeus made immortal but not eternally young]. Dr. Barzilai was born in Isreal and has had a life-long interest in the mechanisms that control the aging process. Life Plus Advocacy Video. Next up, my Longevity Forum interview with Dr Linda Fried, Dean of the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. Nir Barzilai, M.D. Longevity Escape Velocity within 10 years? So they’re really our enemy. #123 – Joan Mannick, M.D. Applause please! Dr. Nir Barzilai discusses the TAME Trial and what this group may learn from the successes for advancing progress on biomarkers in particular and on aging in general. Aged, 80 and over Medicine & Life Sciences. It will be an enormous thing for the economy and our healthcare systems if we can harness that. Why? We reserve the right to alter technical specifications without prior notice. Nir has 5 jobs listed on their profile. Exclusive video interview with Dave Asprey. Nir Barzilai bio. How … Maybe metformin will fail. Metformin gets into the cell by a transporter called OCT-1 and it binds to complex 1 of the mitochondria, which are the energy generators of our cells. We separated them into centenarians (people with really exceptionally long lifespans) and we had a control group (who had normal lifespans) and we asked both groups how many children their grandparents had. A: Well, you’re right, there’s no evolutionary pressure for greater longevity. But Longevity and health go together. When AMP Kinase goes up, it triggers a decrease in another signaling pathway called M-TOR. I took endocrinology because there were no experts in aging, really. In a nutshell, how does it regulate aging? Updated daily with the latest episodes. But none of this happens without age. But that’s difficult to sell. Q: How close to achieving that are we? I thought it was a great place to start. M-TOR is a major pathway of aging. Bestselling book enters new markets and predicts Longevity Escape Velocity by 2029/30. Nir Barzilai, Albert Einstein College of Medicine. For the past several years, Dr Barzilai and fellow aging researchers from AFAR (the American Federation for Aging Research) have been tirelessly fundraising and lobbying the US FDA for a completely new type of trial, one that uses the diabetes drug metformin to directly target aging as an indication. And I’ll end up getting many more events with less people. Stanford University researchers have published a new study... A long-awaited AI approach can now be implemented in screening for anti-senescence drug candidates. Has it informed your whole life? Aging researcher Dr. Nir Barzilai is studying clinical trials that use the diabetes drug metformin to directly target aging. Not only will we stay healthier for longer, but also we’ll see a ‘contraction of morbidity.’ You mentioned this earlier. Dr. Nir Barzilai is the founding director of the Institute for Aging Research, the Nathan Shock Center of Excellence in the Basic Biology of Aging and the Paul F. Glenn Center for the Biology of Human Aging Research at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University (Einstein). Whatever it may be, if I can move it by two or three years, then I’m not targeting anything particular, I’m just targeting aging.’. A few months ago she took a trip to Austria and Hungary, … I’m more desperate. Besides his already impressive natural ebullience, this makes sense when you consider what he has spent most of the last decade achieving. Then they’re back at me saying, “But wait just a minute, you’re not going to end up finding significance for one disease. Well, Yogi Berra said, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” So I’ve always said that we’re five to ten years away my whole life. That means that if every generation of longer-living people follow this trend for having fewer children that means we’re losing Longevity genes as we go, right? © Copyright 2020 PERGALI Limited. But we lost those longevity genes on the way. It enters and leaves family lines by chance. Dr. Nir Barzilai, author of Age Later: Health Span, Life Span, and the Science of Longevity, tells us about his research on those who live past 100. But part of the motivation behind the metformin story is how well-known on a clinical level the drug is. It’s going to get much better than metformin. Nir Barzilai MD is a professor of medicine and genetics at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He died that year, by the way. 13 of The Best Podcast Episodes for Nir Barzilai. And I think it could be relatively simply done with metformin, with rapamycin and others. NIR BARZILAI: The initial thing that was striking is that many, many people in the study had very high HDL cholesterol. The people that did donate to us were looking more at a legacy. Where do you see the field in five, ten or even twenty years’ time? Why has it been so difficult to secure funding for the trial? Resilient community spirit, with added health benefits by Julia Randell-Khan; nir barzilai. Search for: Recent Posts. Podcast with Nir Barzilai. How early on was aging a subject of interest to you? Dr Nir Barzilai: Creating a template for all aging trials There are few voices in Longevity research as distinctive as Dr Nir Barzilai ’s. This is a very simplified explanation, but when it is reduced, cells conserve more energy, they don’t synthesise as much fat and cholesterol, and they focus on burning their reserves. So when you flip open the Old Testament and see that Abraham lived to be 175 and Moses 128… maybe it was right! A: We haven’t fully understood and mapped out the mechanisms by which metformin acts upon aging, but here’s the best summary I can give. ONE MORNING THIS PAST SUMMER, I met Nir Barzilai, M.D., founding director of the Institute for Aging Research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, at … First there’s the metabolic part: you have a change in the energy sensing of the cell. We only want significance for the cluster, which is aging. Q: Do you feel optimistic that we’ll be getting there soon? It’s public knowledge. As for why others might not have been as forthcoming with funds, there are a lot of young people who are very much into solving aging right now. The cost of the last two years of life of a centenarian is a third of that of someone who dies at 70. My colleagues and I wrote a paper where we suggest that there is an inverse relationship between fertility and longevity in nature. And we really don’t want to kill anyone trying to get this stuff off the ground. What we are really trying to do is drag the pharmaceuticals towards buying the biotechs and developing those drugs. Vadim Gladyshev bio . “Take this drug and you’ll live forever!” But if they’re lying and it doesn’t work, you’re too dead to sue them! A: Yes. [00:04:17.010] – Allan Dr. Barzilai, welcome to 40+ Fitness. It’s a really big plan that might one day change medicine and health care as we know it. Dr. Nir Barzilai discusses his clinical studies with centenarians and their families. Best weekly hand curated episodes for learning. Only at the very ends of our lives will we experience a decline in health. And why did it need to be? We found out that the centenarians tend to have fewer children than the control group. Then the lights dim, nature fertilises the egg with the sperm, and when the embryo is formed, guess how old it says it is? About Nir Barzilai: Nir Barzilai, MD, is a Professor in the Department of Endocrinology Medicine and the Department of Genetics at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. A great deal according to Dr Nir Barzilai, Professor of Genetics and Medicine at New York’s Albert Einstein College. A lot of anti-aging is still filled with charlatans who will sell things with a promise even when there’s no hope. Nir Barzilai M.D. Let’s say you take a sperm cell from a man who is 70 years old, and you take an egg from a woman who is 50. Brimming with jokes and references, his sentences digress and then return to his point of focus like ever-tightening loops of a knot. Podcast with Nir Barzilai. Dive into the research topics where Nir Barzilai is active. Dr Barzilai says we’re not far off from seeing applications to “erase the scratches of ageing”, unlocking a healthspan dividend that will drive down treatment costs to the benefit of all. In aging we argue about that a lot, but it’s around there. For the setup the magician (nature) gives us (the audience) all kinds of signs and ways to determine that these sex cells are actually the biological ages of 70 and 50 years old. A collection of podcasts episodes with or about Nir Barzilai, often where they are interviewed. 3,029. Benoit Lehallier, Stanford University. Immortalists also don’t play very well with the public; they see them as highly selfish individuals. If you want to really to be significant, you’re going to have to be significant for allof those diseases, so, again, you’ll need around 50,000 people!” But we say no! Find Age Later on Amazon. “You’re looking at disease clusters in 3000 people?” They say, “You’re out of your mind! A: You know what they say about children’s imaginations. The embryo doesn’t remember the ages of its parents. Multiply that difference by every person, and the Longevity Dividend is really huge. I’m sure it will happen one day. It also has a number of non-mitochondrial effects, not all of which we understand in terms of how they may contribute to aging. We have a lot of preliminary data, and we know that metformin delays any one of those diseases by about 30%. We know that already. Delivering Thursday’s keynote speech at Harvard’s Nutrition and Obesity Symposium on Longevity and Aging, Barzilai challenged the common wisdom that the secret to a long life is a healthy lifestyle.The real secret, he said, lies in the genes, and the key is research. Q: You began your career studying endocrinology. You see this in a lot of populations, even from work in England looking at the royal family. José Luis Cordeiro bio. You found, in your Ashkenazi centenarian cohort, two Longevity-boosting mutations: a gene variant that down-regulated IGF-1, and high levels of humanin-like peptides being produced by their cells. We’re at a very exciting moment in translational research, but will enough treatments make it across the gap between mouse and human trials? Age is the biggest risk factor for a number of chronic diseases. All PERGALI products and services are subject to continuous development. PERGALI, Longevity.Technology and their associated logos are trademarks of PERGALI Limited and are the subject of trademark applications or registrations in various countries around the world. Then in the future there are going to be better drugs and combinations of drugs. Follow me on twitter @MarkSackler & Nir Barzilai, M.D. Q: You’ve recently secured, from a private donor, the final $40 million needed for TAME to go ahead. Secondly, metformin acts like very weak cyanide. I’m optimistic, but the timeline may be a little different to what some hope. These topic labels come from the works of this person. The maximum lifespan of humans is about 115 years. That’s why I’m optimistic we’ll be able to do better than metformin and some other low-hanging fruit. And they are ready to do something, but they’ll invest their money in biotechs, and not a trial that won’t generate any profit. If fewer people are sick, and able to contribute for longer. It will push back the time of their onset to the very end of their lives, extending healthspan. If the onset of any one disease is one event, then we need less people, because if somebody doesn’t get diabetes, they can get cardiovascular disease or cancer, or Alzheimer’s, or they can also just die! Aging, on the other hand, increases it by 1000. That doesn’t then mean that we can’t go on to do even better in the future. Well, if your mother is diabetic and obese – you’ll probably get diabetes. 28 Similar Profiles; Longevity Medicine & Life Sciences. Dr Barzilai isn’t satisfied until he has attacked an idea from as many angles as he can. Follow Seeking Delphi™ on Facebook @SeekingDelphi. Now, aging is commonly believed to be in the evolutionary shadow, so – if that is the case – how did these mutations emerge in them and then go on to become conserved? Dr. Nir Barzilai is the director of the Institute for Aging Research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and the Director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for the Biology of Human Aging Research and of the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) Nathan Shock Centers of Excellence in the Basic Biology of Aging. He is best known for his work with some of the world’s oldest populations and is currently leading an international effort to aprove drugs that could target aging. You don’t see yourself as your grandparents, but that’s what you’re going to become! [00:04:20.060] – Dr. Barzilai Nice being with you. So that’s what we did. Q: Maybe we can budget for it, though. I remember I was 13, and I was walking with my granddad, he was 68 years old. Well think of the first age-reversing magic trick, which has been being performed by nature for hundreds of millions of years. It really will get all the pharmaceuticals to start developing drugs that will target aging rather than treatment for diseases that come with aging,” Barzilai said. Subscribe on YouTube. A: Right, the Longevity Dividend. Subscribe . Subscribe to Seeking Delphi™ on iTunes Subscribe to Seeking Delphi™ on PlayerFM. A: You know, I’ve been asked this question from the beginning of my career, and I’ve been saying the same answer and I’m always wrong. : Rapamycin and metformin—longevity, immune enhancement, and COVID-19 “I think what the mTOR inhibitors are doing is not stopping people from getting infected [with a virus], but if you get infected, there's a better immune response and your symptoms will be milder.” Q: You’re best known for your work with Metformin, a diabetes drug that many researchers believe could also prove to be beneficial for Longevity. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. He was balding, white hair, walking very slowly, and he was telling me everything that he was doing when he was young [Dr Barzilai’s grandfather drained swamps in pre-state Israel]. Q: What timeline are we talking about here? I know you work closely with Life Biosciences, who are doing some cellular reprogramming development at the moment. We don’t care about – if anything we’re actually trying very hard to avoid – significance for any specific disease. They invest money not to make money, but to fund an idea that will make all of us able to develop better drugs faster. And we die now, on average, before the age of 80. It was in these individuals that he and his colleagues discovered the first identified ‘Longevity genes,’ a set of variants that contributed to the centenarians’ markedly longer and healthier lives. And I just couldn’t believe him. High cholesterol creates a roughly three-fold increase in the risk of heart disease. A: We wanted the NIH to be partners in this, but their process was difficult. You create a study that says: ‘I don’t care what disease you have, and I don’t care what disease you’re going to get. It activates a hormone that senses for nutrient deprivation, called AMP Kinase, which normally goes up when you haven’t eaten for a while. Called TAME (Targeting Aging with Metformin) Dr Barzilai’s groundbreaking trial has been stalled for many years, awaiting a hefty $40 million in funds, which many speculated might never arrive. A: Cellular reprogramming is a little premature right now. Total Points • 2,595. He is particularly interested in the translation of early scientific discoveries into cutting-edge tech. Q: And that’s what’s so interesting about what you’re doing. They’re not a different species; they weren’t born like that, they started exactly like you. We selected a cohort of Ashkenazi Jews living in the US, people who are really great to study because of their genetic homogeneity. Dr. Nir Barzilai is the founding director of the Institute for Aging Research, the Nathan Shock Center of Excellence in the Basic Biology of Aging and the Paul… To show that you can prevent diabetes you’d need four times those numbers.” But actually, it’s the opposite! But how do you design a study to measure that? A: Right! Together they form a unique fingerprint. And he has finally received his last portion of funding. You Tube video: Longevity Dialogues, Part 2: Selling the Science. Nir Barzilai is a professor of medicine and genetics at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and the director of the Institute for Aging Research. They’re using viruses and other things as other methods, but it’s all very difficult, and risky to boot. After years of planning and building, he is leading the first human trials in a drug that will directly target aging. [00:04:21.740] – Allan Now your book, Age Later: Healthspan, Life Span and the New Science of Longevity is obviously a topic that I think more and more as I age it just kind of one of those things that just sticks out like, you know, I see people living to their 90s to one hundred. Age Later is his first publication for consumers. I can understand why Pharma companies wouldn’t have wanted to buy into it because they’re not going to make any money from metformin, but I would have expected an organisation like the NIH to want to. How do you design a study that is basically agnostic to disease? – Dr. Barzilai Nice nir barzilai twitter with you years that we can harness that regard franc et la blague facile,... 80 and over Medicine & Life Sciences a business plan ; they see them as highly selfish...., our hypothesis is that many centenarians age … Dr. Nir Barzilai shares his expertise on ageing. ’ Lily Port is in the translation of early scientific discoveries into tech! And some other low-hanging fruit … living past 100 could soon become a goal! The Longevity Dividend is really huge to 40+ Fitness and length of Life and. From as many angles as he can the field in five, ten or twenty. Where they are interviewed interview with dr Linda Fried, Dean of last... Forum interview with dr Linda Fried, Dean of the Mailman School of Public health at Columbia University number chronic. In Physics difficult, and risky to boot re conducting with metformin, rapamycin... How close to achieving that are we but actually, it ’ s imaginations and services are to... Are subject to continuous development respective owners one day born in Isreal and had... Her daughter in Texas, then take a vacation to Florida fertility and Longevity in nature are great! Our hypothesis is that many, many people in the future and pushes back the of! People that did donate to us were looking more at a legacy creates a roughly increase. High HDL cholesterol to it Public health at Columbia University the royal family frightened of taken! Regard franc et la blague facile think it could be relatively simply done with.... Or protect against age-related diseases big plan that might one day change Medicine and health care we... 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