The annual AGE meeting is a place where bio-science leaders and researchers get together to discuss the latest in research and ideas about aging in humans and animals.
I'm at the 2018 AGE Meeting, held this year in Philladelphia. It was preceeded by the Nathan Shock Summit. Which wrapped up this morning and was pretty exciting. It included talks by Mark Bamberger, PhD; Steve Horvath, PhD; and Kristen Fortney, PhD of BioAge Labs.
Yesterday and this morning left me inspired. The tone at the Nathan Shock summit was one of tremendous enthusiasm for the progress science has made over the last two years; and optimism for what's possible over the next two.
I was particularly excited by the three speakers I mentioned above.
A compound, Elamipretide was the main focus of Mark Bamberger's talk. It reduces ROS in Mitochondria (the powerhouses within our cells). For those of you that don't know, ROS gets created in Mitochondria for a variety of reasons, usually under stress or when old. Once a Mitochondria has ROS, the ROS tends to multiply, eventually bloating and destroying the Mitochondria. The best compound on the market currently is MitoQ which is more-or-less a pure anti-oxidant. I'm not going to write up the details, but it looks like Elamipretide may be more effective than MitoQ.
Determining an individual's 'biological' age is something people have been trying to do for a while. The Horvath Clock is a relatively new way to do this, and is extremely reliable, but kind-of a pain to do. What I found particularly exciting about Steve Horvath's presentation is that his team expects to have a test-on-a-chip later this year that could open up this kind of testing to a much wider audience. This means more precise anticipation of disease manifestation, and better understanding of test results in the context of aging.
BioAge was awesome. The company is tackling aging head-on using existing big-data from multiple sources, and machine learning to establish correlations not previously possible. With their talent pool, this software-first approach is creating a tool-kit that will make them a powerhouse of novel insights in the years to come.
Already late for the next session. Expect an update in the coming days!