Tag: Victor Bjoerk

2022 New Year’s Message by Victor Bjoerk

2022 New Year’s Message by Victor Bjoerk

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Victor Bjoerk

Happy New Year 2022!

The year 2021 went way too quickly; more than ever I feel time moving at an extremely fast pace. The definition of a year is rather arbitrary, and it does not even match when the Sun is actually is at the lowest/highest point. It does not feel that long ago I was a kid counting down the seconds to the year 2000, and people were talking about all the changes the new millennium would bring.

What is time really? If there is no united answer in physics except being a property of the universe that gets heavily warped when matter travels close to the speed of light, then to what extent does it matter? (Pun intended.)

So yes, New Year’s celebrations might be an arbitrary tradition, but that can be said about any holiday, and I think it is good to have a “set point” to think about the past and what can be improved in the future.

A lot of things happened during 2021 for me; as in previous years I am motivated by the mission of impacting the longevity field and I am happy to know so many wonderful people in the process.

I also want to say thank you to the Rejuveron Life Sciences AG, Foresight Institute, LongevityTechFund, Vitalic, Heales, as well as others I have collaborated with during the year to help grow the longevity space. Our initiatives in the longevity ecosystems are enormously important to make therapies happen!

Think about the perspective of this: life is 4.5 billion years old… The chain of evolutionary events that has shaped what we define as a human is nothing short of incredible. Now you, the person reading this text, happen to be exactly on the cusp where we can use all molecular tools to eradicate diseases deemed incurable in the past. Whether we die from dementia, cancer, and cardiovascular disease or not is up to us and the correct funding of the biotech companies involved.

With that I wish you a happy fruitful 2022!

Victor Bjoerk (Victor Björk) has worked for the Gerontology Research Group, the Longevity Reporter, the Fraunhofer-Institut für Zelltherapie und Immunologie, BioAge, and Ichor Therapeutics. He has promoted awareness throughout Europe of emerging biomedical research and the efforts to reverse biological aging. In his honor the U.S. Transhumanist Party organized the Victor Run 2020 and 2021 Virtual Races. Watch the USTP Virtual Enlightenment Salon with Victor Björk, which took place on June 13, 2021, here.

On Sunday, June 13, 2021, the U.S. Transhumanist Party invited molecular biologist Victor Björk to discuss his work in longevity research, his extensive advocacy for reversal of biological aging, as well as his interest in running and the Victor Run Virtual Race, which was organized by the U.S. Transhumanist Party in his honor in 2020 and 2021. Victor Björk is a Director of the Healthy Life Extension Society (Heales), a Brussels-based NGO think tank that organizes conferences and events on aging biotechnology. He studied molecular biology at Uppsala University. He is an expert on aging, drawing upon over 12 years of experience tracking companies and daily reading of scientific publications on aging. He previously worked at two leading companies in the field, BioAge Labs in San Francisco and Ichor Therapeutics in New York. He has been a speaker at multiple conferences and for different organizations on the topic of aging.

2021 New Year’s Message by Victor Bjoerk

2021 New Year’s Message by Victor Bjoerk

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Victor Bjoerk

2021 has arrived, and it’s time for my yearly New Year’s message!

Since we all know how the world has been affected this year, there’s no point in mentioning the virus, but quite a few things happened for me.

At the beginning of this year and spring I was living in San Francisco and working on aging at BioAge. However, BioAge had to temporarily shut down because of COVID, but this wasn’t a big deal for me since I was able to transfer to Ichor Therapeutics in Syracuse, New York, which remained operational. So I got to work at two awesome leading biotech companies in the Longevity field, where I gained a lot of specific know-how which I am very grateful for!

I returned to Europe a few weeks ago, and shortly I’ll have some more exciting things to announce that I will be working on!

So yes, a lot of lemons were handed out this year worldwide, but I felt I did a decent job at making lemonade out of them. I’m a very positive person with a grand vision of wiping out all age-related disease within the next few decades, so that everybody can live as long as they want in a 25-year old body.

Some do not have that approach, they think “Longevity” means some slight health improvement by diet/exercise. Others study some aspect of aging because they want a PhD and some academic credentials (using aging as an excuse to refer to for that); however, this causes a generalized lack of a big-picture perspective for what’s going to work.

That is not me. I robustly and consistently keep up the interest until the mission is fully accomplished. In my personal roadmap I’ve developed for impacting aging, I emphasize the transdisciplinary scientific fields that are going to produce good outcomes (that may be hidden as, e.g.,“proteomics” rather than explicitly stated as “anti-aging”).

I also put an equal weight on the “business aspect” here, since your impact won’t be that big without the correct biotech business know-how, especially as AI and robotics wipe out the lab workers. Drug development and clinical trials are complex fields with 15-20 years from initial discovery to approved product. In addition, raising capital and advocacy to the public are as important as knowing the basic biology itself.

A lot of things in history have also been grotesquely mismanaged and squandered because of predictable human error, not because of the intrinsic difficulty of the science itself. There are a lot of golden nuggets laying around the labs in the world right now, and lots of resources and techniques are at our fingertips, but how will they be combined and implemented into an individual in order to cure them from aging? And how will this cocktail of interventions that forms the ultimate cure of aging be implemented across the world just like the efforts currently underway with the COVID vaccine?

A lot of setbacks are reversible and temporary, such as a lack of money and success or whatever people feel this year has caused them; aging is profoundly more serious.

During the year I read, as usual, many hundreds of scientific papers to keep up with the aging field, and also I have several publications I’ve produced, coming out now during 2021 (unfortunately peer-review takes time). I participated in many aging conferences, including one in Curacao, which meant a week of swimming in the tropics (how enjoyable!).

So yes, I felt I did many things well despite the challenges. Of course, things could always have been done better in retrospect, but that’s what one always says.

My New Year’s celebration this year isn’t very special because of all restrictions, but I wish you all a happy new year!

I have some typical New Year’s resolutions like getting fitter (but not motivating with all gyms and pools being closed, so some coaching is required), and of course continuing with the aging mission. So I’ll leave the question now to the reader: What have you done this year, and what good do you feel you can do for next year?

Victor Bjoerk has worked for the Gerontology Research Group, the Longevity Reporter, the Fraunhofer-Institut für Zelltherapie und Immunologie, BioAge, and Ichor Therapeutics. He has promoted awareness throughout Europe of emerging biomedical research and the efforts to reverse biological aging. In his honor the U.S. Transhumanist Party organized the Victor Run 2020 Virtual Race on June 5-7, 2020. 

Results of the Victor Run 2020 Virtual Race – June 5-7, 2020

Results of the Victor Run 2020 Virtual Race – June 5-7, 2020

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Gennady Stolyarov II

The United States Transhumanist Party (USTP) is pleased to announce that its first-ever virtual running race, the Victor Run 2020, has come to a successful conclusion with 29 runners participating and $1,290 raised to help longevity researcher Victor Bjoerk relocate to a paid research position with Ichor Therapeutics in Syracuse, New York. This virtual race has inspired numerous runners to undertake bold and challenging feats during the weekend of June 5-7, 2020, for the advancement of longevity, health, and fitness. Victor Bjoerk himself participated in the race and ran his first marathon, self-supported – a great achievement! Congratulations to Victor and to all of the runners for taking part in this experiment. All participants will be rewarded with custom finisher medals, and there will be additional awards to the top 3 finishers by gender. Medals are currently in production, and it is expected that they will be sent to participants in late June 2020.

This race embodied the goal of indefinite longevity by setting no limit on how long participants could run. Indeed, it was a race that rewarded the most persistent! The scoring for the race relied on a unique metric that combined distance, speed, and elevation gain in a manner that gave any participant the opportunity to win with sufficient determination.

We congratulate the top 3 finishers in each gender category:

First-Place Male and Overall – David Ravarino
Second-Place Male and Overall – Chris Badolato
Third-Place Male and Overall – Bill Andrews

First-Place Female – Jess Haltom
Second-Place Female – Carla Katz
Third-Place Female – Karen Carlson

Overall Race Standings

Top 3 Finishers – Overall/Male and Female

Male Finishers

Female Finishers

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. 

2019 New Year’s Message – A Call for Medical Progress and Preservation of the Good – Article by Victor Bjoerk

2019 New Year’s Message – A Call for Medical Progress and Preservation of the Good – Article by Victor Bjoerk

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Victor Bjoerk

I celebrated the end of 2018 like normally with neuroscientist Anders Sandberg and several other “transhumanists” or “technoprogressive people” in Stockholm!

Why am I in that place to start with? Well, I’m quite frustrated with the human condition in the first place; I’ve always questioned everything from social norms and different kinds of problems in the world, and there’s still so much misery around that we need to unite and fix. (I know it sounds cliché, but it’s true!)

As people reading this know, the vast majority of human misery worldwide today occurs due to our bodies damaging themselves with the passage of time, the biological process we call aging. This occurs because evolution has no goals and our ancestors died at the age of 30-40 prehistorically, and therefore there was no pressure for evolution to create humans that could repair themselves molecularly to live thousands of years. The closest we get among Eukaryotes/Vertebrates are Greenland sharks, which can live to 500+ years; that is easy to understand since they have no predators and just have to open their mouths to get their daily food. On the opposite side we have as a prominent example the mouse, with a very poor molecular repair system and subsequent 2.5-year lifespan, easy to understand when you realize how dangerous life is in the wild if having a mouse body.

Thanks to our technology, we have created the “paradise Greenland shark scenario” for humans during the past century essentially, creating very comfortable existences where nearly everyone survives.

So if you’re 25 years old, life is really great nowadays in Western countries (unless you like to complain about everything!); the existential risks are so low in the absence of aging that you would live many thousands of years just by being a young person living in Sweden.

So I’ve worked a lot in nursing homes both before and during my studies in molecular biology, and what those people have to endure would be strictly illegal in most countries if we knew how to change it. Imagine if, for example, Saudi Arabia allowed its citizens to age while the Western world had abolished it; wouldn’t Amnesty International intervene?

But what can be done with the human body? Well, I assume quite a lot! We are seeing so many people who can’t stand the medical monopoly and the 17-year bench-to-bedside status quo, which isn’t an abstract academic complaint but which impact their daily lives, so they start self-experimenting with, for example, senolytic medicines to kill their senescent cells, making themselves “younger” in certain aspects, which is pretty cool!

However I’m not someone who constantly calls for change and “progress”; I mean, if something is nice, then why not keep it? As far as I’m concerned, for example, the beautiful architecture from the past can continue to stand for thousands more years. These buildings fulfill their purpose and look nice; I’m quite conservative on those points – but please accelerate the medical research, and it is crucial to spot the techniques that actually do work and to not waste resources on hype!

2018 has brought me many good things, those which one can call “achievements” and those which are not visible. The Eurosymposium on Healthy Aging in Brussels became a success! (And there will be some events during 2019 that I am also announcing for everyone who enjoyed it!)

I’ve been learning a lot about CRISPR and many other techniques both practically and theoretically, though I have not exactly used them to change the world. Medical progress takes forever to achieve, and it’s not exactly helped by a massive web of bureaucracy/hierarchies/prestige/laws, all contributing to slowing down progress for people in need. What can really be done? One needs to focus on the positive and go where the biotech companies can succeed!

So if things are working out for me as I hope now in 2019, I hope being able to really work full time to impact the longevity industry, I really feel like an overripe fruit that needs to get things done, because implementing stuff is what matters and not becoming some passive “longevity encyclopedia”. I’ll keep everyone as usually updated!

So happy new 2019 everyone! And make sure to take good care of yourselves!

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. 

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.