The Longevity Acceleration Roadmap: A Technical Plan to Solve Aging by Nathan Cheng | Devcon SEA

[Music] take it away hi my name is Nathan Chang and I'll be talking about the longevity acceleration road map a technical plan to solve aging this road map is a foundational project at the lbf and it's intended to help guide newcomers to longevity space I can only do a speedrun now but if you're interested in the full thing check out the link below okay so the lbf is a nonprofit that I co-founded to mobilize the world's top talent to work on solving aging but why work on Aging uh well simply because life is good and death is bad and if you ask what is the thing that causes the most death uh it's aging so by far aging causes the most death 75% of deaths worldwide are caused by aging and this comes in the form of age related diseases like heart disease cancers Alzheimer's Etc and this is an emergency uh all 8 billion humans are on a exponential trajectory towards physical and cognitive decline and ultimately death but if we can solve aging we can Envision a future where people can live for as long as they want in Peak health and function but if you want to see this future uh like personally uh we we need to do something about aging today so where's the plan to solve aging well when we first started we couldn't find any clear plan to solve aging uh so we had to make one on our own and in our plan we wanted to uh have three key features so one uh we wanted to exclusively focus on Direct research and Technology paths that could solve aging completely and uh two um we wanted to uh focus on specific welldefined key technical objectives and three um we wanted it to be actionable so um have a good overview of projects in the space so that people could easily uh join or start them or or fund them okay so we got a lot of input from uh scientists researchers and entrepreneurs in the field and uh we identified three main strategies that could posibly uh self aging so one is biostasis this means uh pausing biological time and this is typically with uh cryopreservation at low temperature or chemical fixation uh two uh replacement so replacing old Parts with young um and most promising full body uh transplants less gradual brain replacement and three Advanced bioengineering so understanding and modeling biology and aging um and also developing genetic and cellular uh engineering tools okay so one mental model to kind of understand these three technology paths is a 2 by two Matrix so in one axis you're trying to solve aging uh or or by time and the other axis you're either trying to um understand aging or or uh bypass aging like the complexity of Aging altogether and just as a side note um some of these Technologies can also be thought of General defensive biomedical Technologies so um for for example in like uh replacement um could be useful for things Beyond aging so if you got in a car accident replacement could be life- saving okay so let's take a look at biostat this um so the strategy here is to pause biological time until the future where uh medical Technologies can solve aging um but uh you know there's a number of key objectives in the spread map I can't go over all of them so I'll just highlight one of them so um rapid even rewarming so this is needed to uh prevent ice formation and and the Damage associated with that but also to um prevent uh thermal fracturing so when you're uh trying to bring a body or or brain from low temperature back to to room temperature so there's a number of different projects and startups in the space but there uh still needs to a lot of to be done okay let's talk about replacement so um this strategy is divided into two parts so there's replacing the body with a clone body and uh knockout of the brain but then two for the brain uh you gradually replace the brain um with young neural tissue graphs bit by bit kind of like in the style of the ship Aus now in the body um this really uh has only become Within Reach uh since 2018 when uh Chinese scientists demonstrated the first successful cloning of primates and uh it's plausible that this could be extended to humans okay but uh you can create a clone body but you you don't want to create a brain at the same time a person so you'll need to construct a a a genetic construct to ensure that that the capacity uh to have Consciousness uh never forms in the cloned embryo and there's actually already a natural proof of concept uh for this it's the birth defect called Hydra and inphy uh where cerebral hemispheres uh never form and uh these bodies actually never have Consciousness but uh can develop to full maturity and last uh to put it together you have have to do some sort of uh head transplant and uh these have been done experimentally in the past uh in mice dogs and monkeys um with survival in some cases lasting days to to months but still needs to be improved okay so um let's move on to the brain uh as I said before you can gradually replace the brain with uh engineered neural neural tissue graphs made from a patient's own ipsc stem cells and um neuroplasticity of the brain allows migration of brain functions away from damaged areas or or um if done uh slowly and just recently the US rph program uh hired the leading researcher in brain replacement Jean habber to lead a $100 million Moon shot program in this strategy there's um a number of uh key technical objectives in our V1 road map uh most of the hard stuff is in the brain but also in spinal uh cord reconnection and there's a number of startups working in this field but uh most are still in stealth okay uh we also asked researchers to estimate the time and cost to um get a reasonable attempt on this on this road map and uh they came up with a a figure of $3.6 billion and and about 10 years hey last bioengineering um so this is the uh longest the most uncertain Road it will require the convergence of four um four different prongs so one large scale data collection um something like a protein Data Bank but but much larger scale um two um computational modeling uh which could include AI models and then three uh design of genetic or cellular interventions and four uh delivery of genetic uh interventions or or cell cells okay next steps so clearly there's a lot of work to be in uh to solve aging but unfortunately there's very few people or resources trying to um uh devoted to trying to solve aging um so if you feel an intense desire to defeat aging uh definitely join the lbf we're the biggest Community focused exclusively on building for indefinite lifespan extension um we run uh highly selective intensive Workshop Retreats our next one is in March in Berkeley California and um but uh fighting aging is not just for biotechs and scientists um we need everyone to get uh Society aligned on allocating Apollo program level resources to fighting aging and so if this resonates with you I'd encourage you to also join the vitalism community where we're building a social political movement uh to make fighting aging and death Humanities number one priority um and uh our community is organizing the biggest longevity event in the world it's going to be um a two-month uh pop-up longevity City in Berkeley California