Tag: Eurosymposium on Healthy Aging

2020 New Year’s and New Decade’s Message by Victor Bjoerk

2020 New Year’s and New Decade’s Message by Victor Bjoerk

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Victor Bjoerk

Picture of the M87 Black Hole – First-ever image of a black hole and a major accomplishment of the 2010s

Happy New Year and Decade, everyone!

I celebrated it this year in San Francisco, as I managed to get an opportunity in aging research here. I’ve always celebrated in Sweden before, with relatives or friends, and the last years’ celebrations have been with AI researcher Anders Sandberg. However, I’m certainly not stuck to any routine to mark it, and who knows where one may be in the future, if one may celebrate it in space even!

I still recall thinking about what would happen in the future back in 1999. Although, of course, our time calculation is completely arbitrary and not rooted in anything the universe cares about, we nonetheless like to set certain dates of when X event will happen when writing the history of humanity.

Back then I was a small child, and while I lacked a particular interest in aging research, I certainly read a lot of popular science and liked to think about what would happen during the upcoming millennia. Certainly, genetic enhancement of humans was high on that list and its happening now! Look, for example, at Luxturna and Zolgensma, the 2 approved gene therapies so far.

We should all be very happy to be alive now instead of during the previous 4 billion years life has existed. It’s been the best decade in history, ever. We have not only the basic logistics for keeping most people alive on a day-to-day basis with a good quality of life, but this also leads to a lot of spare time to develop technology.

Back in about 2008, when working in a nursing home as a teenager, I realized that I did not want to end up in that state within the next few decades. I did not feel that age-related disease belonged in an otherwise advanced high-tech society that respected human rights reasonably well. Since then, on most days, I’ve probably read new scientific papers on the topic, I went to university and studied molecular biology, I became director of Heales – which is a scientific think tank in Brussels – and set up the biannual EHA (Eurosymposium on Healthy Aging) conference series together with Sven Bulterijs.

I never intended to become a scientist for the sake of it; I just want to get the biggest problem in the history of humanity solved.

There are a lot of reasons for optimism. The 2010s saw unprecedented investment in this area, and many therapeutic aging interventions emerged. Among the ones most well-known are innovations in clearing senescent cells with senolytic drugs, leading to aging reversal.

So I just hope this trajectory of advancement continues as the public also becomes more informed. I’ve learnt that hype comes in cycles; lots of buzzwords and overoptimistic speculation flow around, but eventually also real products come out of the research (yes, even in biotechnology). The question is when enough therapies can be put together into an old person and systemically bring that person back to youth.

So I wish everyone a happy new year and decade, whatever your pursuits are, hoping that at the end of this decade we can summarize it, saying that we did what was possible.

I hope everyone had a fun celebration!

Victor Bjoerk has worked for the Gerontology Research Group, the Longevity Reporter, and the Fraunhofer-Institut für Zelltherapie und Immunologie. He has promoted awareness throughout Europe of emerging biomedical research and the efforts to reverse biological aging. He is now a molecular biologist and working for BioAge in San Francisco. 

New Year’s Message and Prospects for Anti-Aging Biomedical Research in 2018 – Article by Victor Bjoerk

New Year’s Message and Prospects for Anti-Aging Biomedical Research in 2018 – Article by Victor Bjoerk

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Victor Bjoerk

Happy new 2018, a new year and new opportunities to do things! Setting aside the arbitrary fact of how we measure time, it is nevertheless important to reflect back on the past year!

During 2017 over 40 million people died world-wide of causes that would not have happened to them if they had been biologically less than 40 years old. I think it’s completely superfluous to add that this is unethical on all levels and will eventually go down in history books like the Black Death.

There are widespread worries about global risks in everything from politics to environment, however let’s look at the statistics as I like to point out: If you are a young person in your 20s or 30s living in the western world, and you don’t age but just carry out your normal daily life with all the normal risks, you are approximately expected to live 3000-5000 years, depending on country. Also there is a lot of improvement in living standards in the rest of the world, so most countries are heading for the same demographic problem.

So the world is a very safe place to be if you are biologically young!

During 2018 I will continue to follow the biomedical research that is ongoing, and I am co-organizing the Eurosymposium on Healthy Aging in Brussels in November of this year, to bring together researchers, investors, and other goal-oriented people active in the field of aging research.

Before that, in only 2.5 months, we have the Undoing Aging conference in Berlin, which is rapidly approaching starting on the 15th of March this year.

Now there are many other interesting conferences also, but these are at least the major ones I have in mind right now when writing, since I’m not in a position to attend everything (I wish I could).

During the upcoming years, we will see a vast market flourishing to try to repair aging damage in people and extend life; some will be purposeful deceits, other things will work great in mice but not in humans; moreover, there are therapies that will work but will have unacceptable side effects. Some discoveries will make great headlines and increase our understanding, perhaps even lead to a Nobel Prize, but be useless when it comes to any reasonably short-term applications. Media will continue to publish a lot of unspecific articles about “how you will live to 150” – simplifying science and creating hype and cult of personality. Some scientists will continue to pop up in media and spread false pessimism that nothing can be done about aging. But eventually what is going to happen is that translational medicine will continue to grow and generate an incremental improvement, what has been popularized as a “longevity escape velocity”, because here we have a complex problem which no single intervention will fix. 

The question it all boils down to is, “How soon?” What can YOU do to have an impact here? How do we run clinical trials on the elderly while avoiding pitfalls that can easily hurt the field?

And here’s the thing I personally care about: there are a lot of scientists working on things that can be of use to combat pathologies and extend lifespan in the elderly, but they are themselves unaware of these applications! I’ve seen it so many times to my surprise. Is it due to archaic academic structures or a lack of transdisciplinary thinking? Nevertheless it’s an observation.

What 2018 brings remains unknown at this moment of writing, but I wish all of my friends to really make the best of it!

Victor Bjoerk has worked for the Gerontology Research Group, the Longevity Reporter, and the Fraunhofer-Institut für Zelltherapie und Immunologie. He has promoted awareness throughout Europe of emerging biomedical research and the efforts to reverse biological aging.