Welcome to the stage: founder and chairman of the XPRIZE Foundation and co-founder and executive chairman of Singularity University, Peter Diamandis, as well as co-founder and CSO of Regenerative Medicine Institute, Dr. Vincent DiPepa, and the CEO of BioViva Sciences, Liz Parish. Go!
Oh, this way over here. Thank you. Hey guys, welcome. It is so great to be here. Hello everybody! Yeah, that's a much better response. That's great. Let's go. So this conversation is going to be for those of you who love life and want more of it. Hopefully that's you.
Yes, great. Take a second to introduce ourselves a little bit further. Peter Diamandis. I am someone who is passionate about driving breakthroughs in a wide range of areas. The last decade, it's been really a focus on extending healthspan and longevity. I've founded some 25 companies, a few different books. You may know my work from the XPRIZE Foundation as well, and I'm proud to be on stage with these two amazing pioneers and researchers. Liz, would you say a few words about yourself?
Oh, sure. So I'm the CEO of a company called BioViva. I've been in the regenerative medicine space for 11 years, but the last nine years have been focused on genetics after the diagnosis of type 1 diabetes of my son. So I became very interested in why we die and actually how we could stop that from happening. So that became a necessity case in order to do that, and since then we've touched a lot of lives, and we hope to touch yours as well.
Vince? Yeah, so my background goes way back to forming the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine close to 30 years ago. I was one of the founding members, was the first president of the American Board of Anti-Aging Medicine, which helped us really formalize how we train doctors to treat the aging process. My last decade has been really focused on putting together what I believe is a world-class stem cell institute, the Regenerative Medicine Institute in San Jose, where we're in an environment where we can do things that we could never do here, and we've helped hundreds if not thousands of people with stem cell therapies that should have been available here or in the United States, I mean. And we're looking forward to a whole range of all-new technologies that will really take healthspan and longevity to another whole level.
I should mention, while I'm an MD, I've never practiced. Vince has spent many years in surgery and medicine and regenerative medicine. So thank you, Vince.
What I'd like to do is I want to give a little bit of an overview on this field, give some context, what I think is very important, and set the stage, and then have a fireside conversation with Liz and Vince. So we're in a coming age of longevity, and the next decade is very different than the last century, and I want you to realize that in your heart and soul. And if I can get the clicker working... there we go. Yeah, we forget how amazing the world is and how rapidly we're progressing. I love this saying that our ancestors would consider us as gods. We're in a period of time where it's not just any one technology, but it is a range of these exponential technologies that are all converging and reinventing every industry. And for me, the most important industry that they're reinventing, besides every other industry, is healthcare and longevity. Now, there's no greater wealth than our health, and I think if we had the ability to bestow upon those we loved extra decades of healthspan, I think that's the one thing that we might choose. So what's going on? What's making this decade different is, in fact, AI. AI is driving this longevity and healthspan revolution. There's a quote I had Elon on my stage last year at the Abundance Summit, and said by 2029 or 2030, digital intelligence will exceed all human intelligence combined, and that is what's fundamentally not considered when we look at the implications of our future. This is Moore's law on that first slope. This is a doubling every two years of computational power. We've entered a period of time where we're seeing a 10x increase per year, and it is accelerating, and this is what's enabling things to occur. My co-founder of Singularity University, Ray Kurzweil, said 2029 is when we'll get human-level intelligence. Elon's prediction was 2025 is where they'll be vastly smarter, and 2030 is where AI will be more intelligent than the entire human race combined, and I believe him. And this is data coming from a multitude of places. The healthspan revolution, and to talk about this, I want to get some context. We were never designed to live past age 30. So if you're under 30, congrats. If you're over 30, it's all downhill from here. We would be in puberty at age 12 or 13. We'd be pregnant, you know, immediately. By the time we're 26 or 27, our kids were having kids. We were grandparents. And if you wanted to perpetuate the species, the very best thing you could do was die and not take food from your grandchildren's mouths. This was a time where food was not abundant. There was scarcity everywhere. And so if you look at every aspect of our body, from our stem cell populations to our hormonal levels to our thymus, it is a very rapid decrease after the age of 30. So one of the questions is, how long might we live? I think many of us know people who... some people finally got it here. Some people might know folks who make it to 100. And I think there's a pretty good probability that many people here, if you take reasonably good care of yourself, can make it into your 90s and even get to 100. But did you know that there's a species of bowhead whales that could live to 200 years old, and that the Greenland shark could live to 500 years old and have babies at 200 years old? And when I was in medical school, I asked myself a very simple question: if they can live that long, why can't we? And I said it's either a hardware problem or a software problem, and we're going to have the technology to fix that, and that's what we're seeing before us in the next 10 years. Here's another point I wanted to give context. When you're born, you have 3.2 billion letters from your mom and from your dad. That software is the entire software that you're running throughout your life. You've got the same genes when you're 20, when you're 50, when you're 100. So why don't you have a six-pack when you're 100 years old? Why do you look differently? It's not the genes that you have, it's which genes are on and which genes are off. It's your epigenetics, and the hottest area of research right now, and we'll hear some about this, this is epigenetic reprogramming. Can we turn back the clock of time? We're seeing amazing things like CRISPR-based cures for a wide range of diseases. We've seen a Nobel Prize given out for AlphaFold, AlphaProteo, the ability to design in AI the perfect protein that's needed to cure not any disease, your specific disease for your genetics. One of the things I'm proud of is I launched about a year ago this month the largest XPRIZE of its time. I raised $141 million for a $101 million purse to reverse by 20 years your muscle loss, immune loss, and cognitive loss, right? To bring you back 20 years younger. And this is one of the teams competing in that competition. You'll hear about them in a moment. And it needs to be delivered in a therapeutic of under one year. We have 460 teams competing for this, and so proud of what's going on there. When I think about this, there are two parts of this journey. One is the diagnostics, not dying from something stupid. The second that we'll talk about here is the therapeutics. So I'll just point towards the diagnostics and ask the question: do you know what's going on inside your body? For most of us, the answer is no, right? I had started with Tony Robbins and Bill Kapp, something called Fountain Life to do this. It turns out that 70% of heart attacks have no precedent. You know, they just have it, and half of those folks are dead. You don't feel a cancer until stage three or stage four. 70% of fatal cancers are from glioblastomas or pancreatic cancer, which we don't normally scan for, right? So the question is, how do you know about these things? You have to look, and there's a revolution in diagnostics that's going on right now. In fact, our belief is that you can in fact prevent at least seven out of the top 10 causes of death by this multimodal combination of imaging, genetics, biomarkers, and AI. It's now possible to know what's going on right now and what's going to happen to you, and how do you optimize yourself? We have four centers today. We'll be announcing our next four centers in 2025, and then on a growth path for an additional 25 centers. Here's the results, just to give you a little bit of fear: 2% of people who come through our centers, we find a cancer they don't know about, right? We're all optimists about our health. 2.5% have an aneurysm they don't know about, and 14.4% have neurocognitive disease, cardiovascular disease, metabolic disease, something that they urgently need to take care of, right? Then I'll skip through these, but they're amazing diagnostics that are available across the board. And at the end of the day, right, it's understanding your genome, toxins, microplastics, gut microbiome, all of these things impact you. But at the end of the day, it is in fact not dying from something stupid, understanding that your body is beginning a slow glide down after the age of 30, and then saying, I refuse to let that go on any further, which is where my colleagues come in, which is how do we deliver you therapeutics that are able to regenerate your body, take you back to an optimal state of health. So I'm going to turn to you guys.
Well, Peter, first I have a thing. Yeah, I hear you're coming out with a new book. I'd like to hear a little bit more about that.
So next month in December, I've got a book called Longevity Guidebook. Thank you. Please. It's really focused on what you can do right now in terms of diet, exercise, sleep, mindset. I'll give you one key point, and this is a great room for it. A study of 69,000 women, 1,500 guys, one of the only studies, more women than guys, found that optimists live 15% longer than pessimists.
And it's, you get a double benefit for being an optimist. So please join me in being optimistic. But the book then looks at all of the coming regenerative medicine. It's really the subtitle of the book is how to slow, stop, and reverse aging and not die from something stupid. So super excited about that coming out. All right, let's jump in, and I've got some fun questions for you guys. So let's begin first with how did RegenCell come about? I'm going to let you take that away.
So you know, my whole focus has been on...
And explain what RegenCell is.
So RegenCell is a company that Liz and I have decided to put together the technologies we've been developing for over decades, that is a combination of stem cells and specific genes where we can create a personalized approach not just to dramatically impact the hallmarks of aging, but also to reverse some of the genetic gene activity profiles that basically cause the functional loss. We all have loss of cognition, loss of muscle, loss of cellular energetics.
Defend ourselves against what Darwin gave us.
Exactly. So we decided to, how do we think out of the box and literally impact what we know are all these processes that occur with the hallmarks of aging? How can we literally turn those down, but at the same time, I think restore one of the most important hallmarks of aging, which is the loss of your stem cells. That's your human regenerative system is really the fact that we have stem cells, but why does that go bad? Because we lose the numbers.
And stem cells in every compartment of your body, right?
Every compartment of your body.
And what's the order of magnitude of the stem cell reduction that you get over your lifespan?
So we're going to have a slide to show that, but frankly...
Looking forward to that. Yeah, let's go to the next slide.
So as you see, we're literally born with a fixed number of stem cells. So by the time we get to be age, we're 18, adults, we've lost 60% of those stem cells that we were born with. That pisses me off. We hit 30, we're down to, we lost 75%. And by the time we're 60, excuse us, because there's many of us in that, we're down to 5%. Now we're talking about three types of stem cells: the stem cells that are responsible for your immune function, those that are responsible for maintaining your blood vessels and keeping blood flow to your organs, and the third type, probably the most important or one of the most important, is our mesenchymal stem cells that can turn into muscle, bone, cartilage, brain tissue. So imagine you're now 50 or 60 and your body, your body cells are accumulating all this damage, but you don't have the stem cells you had when you were 30 to fix that. So what happens is we lose healthspan, we're starting to decrease our potential for cognition, for function, but also we're getting towards the last decade of our life when we shouldn't be. So the RegenCell, the whole purpose was to undo this and to come up with the way, which we believe we've done, and I'll take us back a slide and go over the genes.
So if we go back, you want to go back? Thank you.
So our company on my side that Vince was reaching out to, and I was so happy that he did, and we formed this new company. We actually focus on genes that target the hallmarks of aging. So when we look...
Can I take one second? There was a paper published in Cell years ago that looked at what are the root causes of aging, and they originally had, was it nine?
Nine original, and now it's 12 or 13.
Yeah, and these are like the reasons that we age, right? Like, why do we age? I don't know. Well, they decided to come up with a very specific set of reasons, and stem cell exhaustion is one of them. And you went after the genes instead.
Yeah, so we actually decided to focus on the genes because you can get a large impact by doing that. And with gene therapy, what we can do is we can give you the therapy, the therapeutic goes into your blood system and it targets a multitude of cells in your body, thereby replacing the genes that either go down as we age or ones that were not turned on in cells.
So most of the super long-lived species, or the ones that we call immortal species, have a gene called TERT, reverse transcriptase, turned on. So when we upregulate this one gene, we have a paper out in PNAS, we were able to get 41% life extension in mice, and mice don't typically die of TERT. It's just one of the things that affects them. What that means is if we took that and it was equivalent to humans, if you were going to live to about 79 years, you would easily, with that one single gene, live to over 110. So that's a super big impact from one gene. But we're a George Church company, and George Church, if you don't know, he works at Harvard, he's a professor of genetics, and our goal is multi-gene.
He's the best. He's started how many unicorn companies?
Oh, like lots. And the whole idea of the company is to get an affordable gene therapy that is a multitude of genes, and we'll talk about that later.
Are you going to talk later about adeno-associated virus and the carrier vehicles and what a gene therapy is, or should we mention that now?
I think we do have a slide about that. And so anyway, when we look at these genes, and these are just a few of the genes that we work with, they all target some parts of hallmarks of aging. The initial hallmarks are the new hallmarks, and again, this list will grow, and some of the hallmarks, of course, are an offset of the original hallmarks going wrong. But TERT, reverse transcriptase, and just trying to put this into your mind, just one single gene can target a multitude of hallmarks. And then when we bring in the other players, the idea is to get the super wave of output. So how do we make it so you live as long as you want?
So if you don't mind, just to put in context, what you've been doing is using gene therapies, again, the ability to inject a specific gene into specific cells: muscle, kidney, lung, brain.
Do you have concerns about the safety of that process?
You know, that's the beautiful thing about what we do at BioViva. We do somatic cell delivery, so we're not actually doing CRISPR, we're not editing the genome, and what we're doing is creating an episome.
So what that means is, I asked a question before, are you willing to talk about what you've done to yourself?
Yeah, and there's a slide about that.
So this slide just shows you what gene therapy is. Essentially, the gene therapy is going into the nucleus of the cell and transcribing for a gene, and the gene then codes for a protein, and that changes you. So all of the cells of your body have genes in them, and they have your chromosomes in them, and that really is an expression of who you are physiologically. It can have some expression in how we behave. We know that the microbiome also, that genome makes up how we are as well. So editing that will be an interesting thing to do in the future. But I was so excited about this technology...
We'll move right forward to your question.
That in 2015, I was the first subject to treat biological aging with gene therapy.
Now you have to understand, when I first heard Liz that she did that, I was like, holy, that's amazing, how ballsy of you, and where can I get myself some? So you have to understand, you did this with an AAV, right?
So an adeno-associated virus is a virus, you take out the viral genome and you put instead inside this capsid the gene you want delivered, and the virus is a robotic heat-seeking missile that goes to the right cells, injects your gene of choice into those cells.
And it goes in, you said, as a plasmid or as an episome, so like a microchromosome. So this is really important.
And I don't mean to interrupt.
But here's the thing, that gene doesn't get incorporated into the cell's genome.
So it's sitting in the nucleus.
In the nucleus, not the cytoplasm.
Nucleus, the cytoplasm within the nucleus, and it's like a new chromosome, but it's not in any way interfering with your personal genome.
Right, so that new gene produces a protein that goes out of the nucleus into the cytoplasm, goes to the cellular machinery, and creates the protein that normally the cell, for instance, if you were 25 years old, you'd be making a lot of follistatin to keep your muscle mass up.
Well, and for instance, one of the genes that we're looking at putting in now in stem cells is follistatin, and what's already being used without stem cells, but with unbelievable impact, and augmenting muscle mass without interfering with your genome.
So the idea here is you've been dealt a set of cards from your mom and your dad, and they are what they are. And by the way, as you age, certain genes get silenced and certain genes get turned on and off, and sometimes it's the genes you don't want turned on or the genes you don't want turned off, and this gives you much more control. How many gene therapies have you done to yourself?
I've done seven gene therapies, four different genes.
Four different genes. And you mind just rattling off what they are?
Yeah, so Klotho, it's associated with better cognitive performance.
How many... we had this over lunch, what kind of IQ points have you scored?
On average in patients, we can increase their IQ by a standard deviation, so anywhere between 9 and 15.
These are the holy moments that you guys should enjoy. And this is a single injection, probably maybe only once in your life. And that is the power of that for some people to think about it. If you had someone who's very low performing, this could get them functioning and living on their own. If you had someone really high performing, this could be the difference between genius. Okay, so Klotho was the first. What was the second?
So you're seeing here the slides of follistatin that was injected into my muscles. It blocks myostatin, so it increases your muscle mass. It should stay with you for at least 10 years. So you can see my muscles in my legs before and after. So after, there's increased muscle mass and less intramuscular fat.
Do you have a percent muscle increase that you know?
You know, it differs. Men get a better increase, and unfortunately, mice get the best. So if you just touch mice with follistatin, they will literally, like, you can look at our published papers, it's just like insane. They get really huge really fast. We, not so much. But this is a gene therapy that's been through safety and efficacy in the United States with Becker's and Duchenne's muscular dystrophy, and it's been through every animal model, including non-human primate.
