#E31 Epigenetic Reprogramming Is the Key to a Longer Lifespan With Yuri Deigin
About Yuri Deigin
Yuri Deigin is a true pioneer in the field of longevity and biotechnology. Yuri is The CEO of Youth Biotherapeutics and he is s currently building rejuvenating gene therapies with the long-term vision to develop a combination therapy that can periodically rejuvenate multiple key organs, leading to systemic rejuvenation in healthy people or companion animals.
Read the HYPERSCALE transcript.
(00:20) Briar: Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of Hyperscale. Today I've got my friend Yuri on the show, and we recently just came back from a trip in Dublin, didn't we Yuri?
(01:47) Yuri: Yes, we did. It was great.
(01:49) Briar: It Was fun. So we were at the Longevity Conference in Dublin. What was your experience like? Tell me a bit about what it was like on your side.
(01:58) Yuri: Well, I love Aubrey's conferences. This was a conference by Aubrey de Grey. Was really a visionary of the longevity field, and he always brings great speakers and experts in the field. So it was great to kind of get a concentrate of what's really happening in longevity these days in those few short days. And great to meet people in person again and have conversations kind off the record on some of the things that, some ground-breaking research that's happening. Not yet being public, but like things that are coming down soon to the public domain. So yeah, it was a great conference.
(02:35) Briar: Extremely ground-breaking research, and I must say, what a fantastic group of people. Everyone was so warm and welcoming. Obviously Georgia and I were filming our documentary as well, and from futurists to transhumanists to biologists, scientists, people working in the longevity space. And I was so happy that I got to meet you, Yuri, as well. And tell us a little bit about your background. I'd love for our guests to learn more.
(03:01) Yuri: Well, thank you. Yeah, the pleasure was mine. Well my background is drug development. I've been doing drug development creating new drugs or translating research into therapies for close to 15 years now or maybe even longer. And then eventually I got introduced to longevity while in the process of just working on therapies for actual manifestations of aging, like for example, Alzheimer's. And when I was kind of told about aging being the root cause of Alzheimer's and many other age-related diseases, this was like a light bulb going on in my mind that actually, yeah, like why aren't we trying to target that root cause rather than going for the symptoms of aging and manifestations of aging, like trying to tackle cancer, trying to tackle things after they happen. And just realizing that the most efficient way to prevent those diseases is by going after the aging process itself. And I've been a very vocal advocate for longevity ever since. And then eventually was able to do drug development in the longevity space, working on therapies that actually go directly after the root cause of those diseases go after aging. And that's kind of in a nutshell my short story of how I came to work in longevity.
(04:26) Briar: Yeah, that's all super interesting. And you have actually got a personal story behind why you're so focused on Alzheimer's? I believe?
(04:36) Yuri: Yeah, unfortunately, it's a very personal story initially. My grandma, she passed away from Alzheimer's, and that's what got me interested in, well, in general in the disease, and then also did a DNA test and found out that I won the genetic lottery. And I have two copies of this certain allele, certain variant of a gene called APOE apolipoprotein E. And so I have the Epsilon four variant, two copies of that. And that actually increases my risk of Alzheimer's by like 15 to 20 times versus people who don't have a copy of that variant. And ever since I kind of dove into the manifestations of Alzheimer's, the reasons behind Alzheimer's and got into drug development to work on therapies against a Alzheimer's, and as I mentioned previously, just eventually realize that it's the aging process that predisposes you to Alzheimer's and actually is the, the root cause of Alzheimer's and many other age related diseases.
Well now we're developing a longevity therapy and one of the first indications that we're targeting is Alzheimer's itself, but we're not using the kind of the usual way of going after amyloid beta, for example, or tau protein, but we're going after the epigenetic pattern in gene expression in neurons, for example. So we're trying to tackle aging the aging process and rewind the epigenetic pattern towards a more youthful state in, for example, neurons. And that's how we're trying to either slow down Alzheimer's or eventually maybe even reverse Alzheimer's. But initially I got into drug development and longevity because of Alzheimer's. So it's definitely a personal journey for me as well as professional one.
(06:34) Briar: I bet. And it's absolutely fascinating the work that you're doing and actually just thinking that we could solve these yeah old age diseases at the molecular level because I think sometimes as a society we've just grown to accept that this is how things need to be. And I made a post on my LinkedIn recently actually, about how in the future I hope for a future where we don't have these old age diseases, these cancers, this suffering that we presently have purely because humans are living a lot longer than what we used to back in the day. We used to die in our thirties or our forties. Like some of us barely made it past our second birthday. Whereas now we're in this position where we've got science, we've got things that we've found out. And when I pose the question to people saying, well, in the future we could potentially live longer, so many people attacked me and said, you just want to live longer because you have a massive ego, and what about all of the other people on the planet? And all of these really crazy perspectives.
When I spoke to Dr. Aubrey de Grey about it, he said that it's tricky because what you are asking people to do is change their fundamental worldview. When people find out you're going to die when you're young. It's a very horrifying thought. And I think what a lot of these people forget is that we used to die of like cavities back in the day. Tell us a bit about where things are at with what you are doing.
(08:19) Yuri: Yeah, you're absolutely right that for millennia, we had to come to kind of peace with the thought that we're all going to die. And we've created a whole kind of school of psychology around this acceptance of death. And this is something that we do at a very young age. We just accept our mortality and just move on with life. And now that science is getting closer to actually not only allowing us to live longer, which is something medicines has been progressively doing for the past, a hundred years or 200 years, years starting with cavities or vaccines or antibiotics, people, used to die of leprosy. And now you just take an antibiotic. And this is all kind of showing us the path to the future that the more we are able to understand biology and the more we're able to manipulate biology, the fewer things we have to accept about biology ultimately with death and aging themselves.
Like we don't have to accept this reality, we can change it with our intellect. We're the kind of, well, for now we're the most intelligent species maybe until AI takes over this category. And so we can prevent the things that causes pain and suffering such as, well initially, leprosy and cavities, but ultimately all age-related diseases and death itself should be fully optional. I mean, right now it's unfortunately mandatory and it has its own schedule when we get sick and we die, but in the future, there's no reason why it shouldn't be something that it, once we fully master biology, something that will be fully optional. If people eventually would love to kind of finish their journey and their life, they should obviously have this choice. But right now, we don't have the option to live for as long as we want to be healthy for as long as we want.
And this is something that biology of, well, people who are working on aging and longevity medicine is trying to accomplish, basically give people this optionality to be healthy for longer and ultimately to be healthy for as long as they want. And we're definitely still at an early stage of being able to do that. But I think our understanding of the aging processes and consequently our ability to manipulate them is growing, very quickly over the past few decades. And I'm very optimistic that within the next couple of decades we'll have new therapies that will be able to prolong our lifespans significantly. And not just, well, health span initially just the healthy years, maybe we won't initially prolong lifespan that significantly, but at least we'll be able to keep people healthy for longer may making, 90 the new 60 or maybe yeah 50, the new 30. But ultimately, of course, the goal is to allow people to live for as long as they want and be healthy for as long as they want. So that's where things are and that's where the goals are.
(11:37) Briar: That's very encouraging to think that come 20 years’ time this technology could be rather readily available. And I'll dive a little bit deeper into that soon, but tell us a little bit about how your technology works and what's the difference between the way that you sort of manipulate the technology as opposed to something say like CRISPR.
(12:00) Yuri: Sure. Yeah. So basically we are working on gene therapies that use the reprogramming process. And people might have heard about this cellular reprogramming paradigm where it has been discovered in 2006 that there are four of these genes that are called ya- manaka factors or Ya- manaka genes that can essentially rewind a cell back in time, at least in developmental time. You take a skin cell or you take a brain cell. And by activating these Ya- manaka factors in that cell, you rewind it all the way back into embryonic like state. And also not only you rewind it back in developmental time, it turned out that you also rejuvenated physiologically. So you take an old skin cell that has all sorts of hallmarks of aging manifesting itself, and after the reprogramming process, that skin cell is fully rejuvenated. If you reprogram it back to embryonic like state, and then again you're reprogramming into a skin cell, you, the new skin cell that you've reprogram, it is fully rejuvenated.
This rejuvenating aspect of reprogramming has been seized upon from very early on in the longevity field in trying to essentially harness this rejuvenating power of reprogramming in the context of already formed organisms. And this is what's called partial reprogramming, basically using the rejuvenating aspect of reprogramming, but not using the cell identity changing of reprogramming. Whereas you take a skin cell activate reprogramming genes in it for a short duration of time, and you just get a rejuvenated skin cell, it remains a skin cell. And that's why you can then use this gene therapy in the context of an adult organism because, the skin cell remains doing its job and it's not being reprogrammed into a different cell type, like an embryonic like cell type. And this is what's essentially the foundation for this partial reprogramming paradigm of gene therapies that we and many others are building.
By now there's a dozen companies that are trying to translate this paradigm into therapies. So what we're doing is we're taking these rejuvenating genes like Ya- manaka genes delivering them into cells that we're trying to rejuvenate. For example, neurons your brain cells in the context of Alzheimer's, and then activating those genes for short periods of time with the goal of rejuvenating the gene expression pattern of those cells. And essentially making neurons a little bit younger, physiologically younger and gene expression wise, younger. And so we're delivering those genes using, for example, lentiviral delivery system. And there's many other different types of carriers that can take an external gene and deliver it to your cell.
(14:49) Briar: Sorry, when we're talking about carriers, are we talking about like popping pills or vaccines?
(14:56) Yuri: It's more of an injection, yeah. Also there's different modalities where, for example, the genes that you deliver, they're are not active until you take, for example, an activator molecule by mouth, like a pill. So as make it much more attainable, for example, like you don't want those genes to be active all of the time. You want 'em to be active only for short periods when you actually induce them to rejuvenate the underlying cells that you deliver them to what we're talking injections. For now it's a process of delivering them, for example, into a target tissue and then activating them using a small molecule like a pill. OF course, CRISPR is kind of the, the famous gene therapy approach and CRISPR itself is a molecular machinery that's more targeted towards existing genes.
Initially it was just molecular scissors that bacteria use for defensive purposes. And then humans kind of took that idea and turned it for something useful for ourselves. For example, if we want to inactivate some genes or change some genes that are not doing their job properly. And CRISPR yeah, you deliver CRISPR to cells and you give CRISPR a particular target, and then CRISPR can, for example, cut a particular gene once it's find, it's target or maybe change a particular gene in a certain way, but for delivering novel genes that are not, for example that are not active in the cell, it's easier to deliver those genes externally. And that's when we turn to viruses, viral carriers that we again, have repurposed the job that they're good at delivering their genetic material, and we just give them our genetic material that we want 'em to deliver. And of course, we modify viruses, so as they're not harmful to the cells that they deliver the genes to. And we are essentially, getting them to do our bidding for us. In addition to viruses there’s other technologies as well. And as I've said, the field has come a long, long way since like one or two decades ago in the gene therapy domain.
(17:04) Briar: So when it comes to CRISPR do they do work with people before they're born? Like in regards to, okay, we want someone who's more intelligent or let's take out this cancer gene that they'll be getting, because then when they're born, they'll have a life of suffering. Like is this something that you do at this level?
(17:24) Yuri: Right. Well, definitely CRISPR got a lot of attention. I think three or four years ago when the CRISPR babies were born, Lola and Nuna, I think He Jiankui, if I remember correctly, in China, modified I guess twins, twin embryos to I think inactivate one of the genes that predisposes you to HIV.
(17:46) Briar: Yes. And he ended up in prison. I was reading as well for about three years.
(17:52) Yuri: He did. Yeah. There was, I mean, initially some people were celebrating it and others were saying it is ethically problematic. And then I think China decided just in case let's put 'em in jail just so that, we don't have any PR issues and we're not condoning like human experimentation. Basically yeah it's a bit of a, like two orthogonal things. You can do this kind of modification, genetic modification with CRISPR or with like a viral carriers. If you want to introduce novel genes, you can do this at the level of the embryo. And basically then the person or the animal that you're doing this on will have those genes present or those changes to the genes present in all of their cells once because, an embryo develops from like just a single fertilized egg from a single cell.
It divides and it, if you do the changes at an early stage where it's only like four or eight cells in the embryo, it's much easier to make sure that all of the changes are in, all of the cells than if you have an adult organism with trillions of cells. And it's, it's really the delivery of those genes is still not perfectly solved, and you can only target a subset of the cells even in a given organ. And so by doing this at a level of embryo, you solve the delivery problem. And we've been doing this in animals like transgenic animals, transgenic mouse lines for a couple of decades now. But now when it comes to humans, of course there's still probably ethics is the biggest reason why it's not being done today.
Because yeah, obviously you can do all any sorts of genetic manipulation we do in mice. You can also do this in humans. And the only thing that's stopping us is kind of ethical guidelines. In some cases, laws, for example, in the US there's laws that you're not allowed to beyond a certain day of embryonic development to manipulate or allow genetically modified embryos to develop. But yeah, you could potentially introduce, say, rejuvenating genes in an embryo and allow that person to be born with those genes and then activate those genes. Of course, we're not yet comfortable, I think, to do this in human embryos because we haven't yet fully tested this in humans. And let's first get the gene therapy approved in adult humans for adult human use, and then we'll be able to see if there's some potential genes that we can introduce or change at a level of an embryo.
But there's Foss statin. We have this discussion in Dublin about Follistatin gene therapy that basically allows you to produce more muscle mass. And there have been Follistatin induced genetically modified animals, mice and cattle, for example, that have been born many years by now, but are like, should we introduce this at a level of an embryo for children to be more muscular? Maybe if you want a bodybuilder or a football player for your child, you could choose to do this genetic modification to your child potentially. But I think right now, especially in like the big countries like the US or Europe I think this is not being allowed, but you could potentially go somewhere offshore and do this modification if you really wanted to.
(21:21) Briar: Whereabouts offshore is this happening? Like what locations?
Well, I'm not sure if it's happening anywhere. Like I don't have first-hand information. Yeah. But there's definitely jurisdictions in other countries and in some of like smaller island nations that have kind of relaxed regulations around pre embryonic basically genetic manipulation, et cetera. And I think it's coming, yeah, like clinics, fertility clinics offering their clients, not just screening, because right now, like pre-implantation screening is a routine procedure. You can screen your potential child for all sorts of genetic defects or genetic problems and choose to, for example, abort or not even implant if you're doing a pre-implantation screening. Actually manipulating or changing their genome maybe to correct those genetic problems, and then changing their genome to enhance them somehow. That's a kind of second level that for some people, presents an ethical problem, but for others it does not. I'm sure eventually we'll have fertility clinics somewhere in, in friendly jurisdictions offering all sorts of genetic enhancements not just genetic corrections, but genetic enhancements to children, to parents who'd love to, yes, make their child more intelligent or more muscular, et cetera.
(22:53) Briar: I think it's interesting, and I was reading an article yesterday actually saying that when they did an experiment with parents, and they asked them who would like to enhance the intelligence of their child, actually one third of participants came back and said that this is something they would like to do. And just even by doing that, the chances of getting entry into a university was so much higher. And I believe that it was also impacted when they knew that other people would be doing it as well, then they would more likely agree to something like this. But of course, it does open a whole can of worms, so to speak, in terms of ethical concerns and things, and we already do have such disparity between the haves and the have nots, so to speak. So walk us through the ethical side of things a little bit.
(23:51) Yuri: Well, I'm not a bioethicist by any means. I'm more of a, I guess a practical person, a drug developer, but I mean, yeah, these issues have been explored for probably decades by now. I mean, Gattica came out probably 20 years ago, or even more, it's been a while. And well, yeah, absolutely, people always wanted the best for their children. And obviously the tools at our disposal have been getting better and better. And IVF itself has been initially viewed as something, ethically dubious or maybe playing God and eventually has come to be accepted. And also people were saying that, yeah, only the rich can afford IVF. And then, so, and as with everything, new technologies, initially they're more expensive, but as more and more people come to adopt them, the price decreases and becomes much more accessible to pretty much like most people on, well, at least in the developed countries. And the disparity between, developing and developed countries is a whole different question.
Like a geopolitical question that I don't think we should take into account, into like bioethics discussions about novel technologies. Should we develop them or not? Should we not develop something just because it will be expensive initially and only a few people will leave it able to use it? Absolutely. Because eventually it becomes cheaper and more and more people will be able to use it. Well, at least from my standpoint, I don't think we should stifle progress just because we have problems right now, like social problems right now and disparity between the haves and the have nots. And to me, everything, like all the progress that we're making scientifically, that is able to make people better, reduce people's problems, reduce pain and suffering, if we're talking about aging, if we're talking about diseases or make them less predisposed to possible diseases or make them smarter or better, I think all of those things are, are good and yeah, like personally, I don't see any good reason not to continue developing them.
(26:03) Briar: You raised some great points and just even thinking from how humans will continue to evolve. Say we eradicate lots of these diseases and we also eradicate things that potentially get passed down through generations. Are we going to end up with these almost like subgroup of human species? Like not even talking about the whole enhancing muscles, enhancing intelligence. Maybe I get some cool cat eyes in the future where I could actually see in the dark or, do some cool things like that. I have children born with little cat ears. I don't know. But do you think that we could end up with these like little subspecies of humans, so to speak?
(26:50) Yuri: Well, I mean, maybe in the context of like hundreds of years of evolution, you could have something like this, but I think the, like the, the progress we have is much, much faster that this really won't occur because. I think we'll transcend biology much sooner than we'll be able to do all these. Like, it takes several generations for kind of subgroups to evolve. And I think we're essentially on the precipice of like advanced general intelligence, being able to upload our consciousness to maybe like carbon-based or I mean silicon-based rather than carbon-based vessels. Because I mean, biology is so fragile and if our goal is to enable us to transcend aging and death and prevent death of our personalities, biology is probably not a great vessel for personalities. And we'll be essentially uploading our consciousness or merging our consciousness with some sort of silicon-based or some sort of like computer-based vessel for our personalities.
We might still retain biological avatars and we're getting into a bit of a, like science fiction territory. But I think the, the timeline of this happening is on the order of decades and maybe a hundred, 200 years, and for evolution to take hold of all the changes that we talked about just previously. It would take hundreds of years for like people to develop into subgroups. So I think we won't, this won't occur because of the transcendence that we're facing between man and machine and yeah, we're, we're just going to move away from biological evolution and biology altogether and like the world that we'll see in 300 years or a thousand years. Like we probably can't even fathom like how different it would be pending we don't destroy ourselves in the process with nuclear war. Maybe artificial intelligence just doesn't decide it doesn't really need these.
(29:08) Briar: I think it's so fascinating. This is something that I'm often thinking about is; are we doing enough as a human species to I guess, push forward innovation from the biological sense? Because what you are talking about now is this whole merging man with machine. And I sometimes look at these videos with robots and I'm often thinking about AI and hearing predictions from say, Ray Kurzweil who says that we're going to achieve singularity by like 2045. Like this kind of stuff's coming. I was actually reading someone yesterday who said that they thought it would be as soon as 2027. I'm like, looking at my calendar, I'm like, holy crap, that's like a few years from now sort of thing. So I often wonder if, because it seems like there's so much regulation on our side of things, on the biology side of things, and you spoke about before as well, how you've been doing animal testing, but we're not quite at that point with human testing.
With the regards to the China situation, this gentleman actually went out and created these babies that wouldn't be affected by IVF and then he gets thrown in prison because the country's all kind of looked at each other and realized, oh gosh, we don't have any regulations. We don't know how to handle this situation. Is it okay? Is it not okay? Nobody knows. It's just such gray area. So are we doing enough, first of all to yeah, encourage innovation from the biology standpoint? Or are there just so many roadblocks that make it all quite difficult and are there not enough roadblocks on the AI robotics kind of front?
(30:52) s Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, a AI is a free for all. There's just no regulation. And I think the world is like the political leaders of the world are terrified that there's just no way to control AI progress versus biology. There still is, and there's some kind of legacy laws that yeah, biology's way more cautious than AI research. And maybe it's a bit ironic because yeah, in the end, just AI could be the doom of humanity that brings, brings an end to it if we don't kind of solve the alignment problem. But in terms of biology, yeah, like I think all of the legacy frameworks are--, well, not preventing progress, but they're definitely preventing the translation of the progress that we have in animals in manipulating genes or creating, transgenic organisms into translating that into humans because people are just terrified of seeing a baby with maybe some non-human characteristics. And of course the do no harm mentality of medicine is probably more applicable to translational research than like the AI or computer science hacker mentality. Just move fast and break things. I think I've already repeating myself by agreeing with you completely.
(32:20) Briar: When do you think we'll be in a position where we can be doing human trials on these sorts of things with your technology?
(32:29) Yuri: Oh, well, with our technology like human trials, the gene therapies that we're delivering this could happen within two to three years. Like the particular disease that we're targeting, not Alzheimer's. We have another indication; it's a rare disease that we're targeting potentially, like if all of the things go smoothly and we don't see any problems in animal safety testing, the first patients could receive this therapy within three years, maybe even two years. If we can accelerate things Alzheimer's, maybe four to five years, like first patients potentially could test the therapy that we're right now actually just finished our animal testing in mice. And I know some companies are yeah, doing some of the gene, well, I mean gene therapies in general, there's like hundreds of different companies testing hundreds of gene therapies in humans. But the particular reprogramming gene therapies that we're testing and some other companies are planning to test like within two to three years. So I think relatively quickly we'll see first results in humans and if those are successful, I think the pace might pick up. We might have even more companies in the space. And I'm quite optimistic that like within a decade, partial reprograming therapies will be on the market for people to use, of course pending that there's no foreseen safety problems.
(33:51) Briar: So I mentioned to you in Dublin that I'm obviously on this massive quest at the moment to try and prolong my lifespan and potentially live forever or I think Max Moore said to everybody that with the rate of accidents that happen would probably only live till 800 years before we get hit by a bus or fall off something or whatever on average. So I thought that was quite interesting pretty good. It's still pretty good 800 years, I'll take it.
(34:21) Yuri: Half of which is spent in very unpleasant--
(34:24) Briar: Working, and suffering with the likes of cancers and Alzheimer's. Absolutely.
(34:31) Yuri: 80 if we're lucky. Yeah. 80 if we're lucky.
(34:35) Briar: What you're saying today sounds rather encouraging. Do you think that it is quite likely that in 20 years like we will be prolonging our lifespan? How long do you think we could prolong it to? Do you think that, not even from the biology standpoint, but even with the technologies that are out there, like what are the chances, do you think that this is actually probable or do you think that like, I might die at 80 for instance? Touch wood.
(35:04) Yuri: I think the chances are very good like that within 20 years we'll have therapies that we could use that extend our lifespan significantly, extend our health span significantly so that we can wait for the next thing. I guess this is the concept of Aubrey de Grey's longevity escape philosophy, that we don't need a therapy to make us, to live to 800 tomorrow. We need a therapy that can keep us healthy for the next 10 years, that'll give us 10 extra years of progress in the medical space and the next therapy will come that will maybe rejuvenate us and keep us even younger. And so, yeah, I think the next decade, not even two decades, the next decade will bring significant therapies that can significantly extend health span and will put us on our way to this Longevity escape velocity that in 20 years, within the next 20 years we'll have even more significant therapies that can actually potentially rejuvenate us.
Within the progress in those 20 years on, for example, the brain computer interface or some sort of consciousness uploading or maybe, cryo preservation technologies that will in combination enable us to, even if some bad accident happens, if we get hit by a bus that we're still able to preserve our personality and maybe revive it in the future when technologies like maybe a hundred years down the road when technologies become available to fully restore our personality, our consciousness or maybe even our current body that I'm, very optimistic that, yeah, like
36:47) Briar: Have you signed up to cryonics? Because we obviously were both at the that the networking event recently, weren't we?
(36:56) Yuri: Oh, yes, yes. I've been Max as well. He's no longer at Alcor, but I've been an Alcor member for many, many years by now. And I fully support the idea of cryonics and research that into cryonics that is still necessary to cryo preservation, not even just for ourselves, for cryo-preservation of entire organisms, but for organ banking and organ transplantation, that is a huge unmet clinical need in in, in the entire world. There's hundreds of thousands of patients just never getting their transplant because the technology that could potentially preserve those organs and mix and match people is just not up to standard right now. And I think cryo preservation research is definitely underfunded and underappreciated these days.
(37:45) Briar: So did you decide to freeze your entire body or you freezing just your brain?
(37:51) Yuri: Well for now I'm full body. But I'm kind of oscillating between should I go for just neuro because the standards of cryo-preservation of the brain, if you're able to basically just focus on the brain, are right now a little bit better than the whole body and sometimes even the question is raised, will you even need your body in the future because maybe it, like it's all will be just about uploading your conscious consciousness or maybe even creating a new body like a cloning you and creating like maybe just without, without the brain to avoid any ethical issues, but providing you with a new body, if hundred years down the road the technology is sufficient enough to restore you from cryo-preservation and just kind of just transplant your brain into the new vessel.
(38:44) Briar: I hope there's people out there that like me enough to want to revive me. . I'm kidding. I'm sure there's plenty of people, but I think it's a very interesting concept really of preserving your body or preserving your brain. And as you rightly mentioned in the future, we might not need these organic meat sacks so to speak. We could have various different avatars that we're plugging and playing. And I think you and I just as we were getting set up from the podcast earlier, we actually started talking about how perhaps in the future if we do have various different avatar bodies and we are showing up as different selves, we might perhaps have a little bit more empathy for, people who are a bit different from us.
(39:28) Yuri: Yeah, absolutely. You could actually literally walk in someone else's shoes and experience like being a very different person between, like genders, races, everything. And yeah, I think like if you're able to do that, if you're able to have these avatars where you can actually have like a biological experience of a completely different, person, I think yeah, this will greatly help for people to appreciate perspectives of others.
(39:58) Briar: That's what I love most.
(39:59) Yuri: Unfortunately, we're not there yet, and we still have to kind of survive the next few years
(40:03) Briar: And that's exactly what people are telling me. They're saying to me, I'm saying, what can I start doing tomorrow so that I can yeah, prolong my lifespan live forever. And basically everyone's just kind of saying, you know what, Briar, you kind of just need to hang tight, don't die in the next 10 or 20 years. And something is coming is basically what I'm hearing on repeat from all kinds of people in industries.
(40:30) Yuri: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's so much scientific progress right now happening and unfortunately like the geopolitical issues are getting in the way of this progress. And like the smart people who are really changing the world are getting kind of interfered by less smart people ruling the world. That's unfortunately the problem that kind of the Stone Age mentality of the political process is still ruling the world while the kind of the 21st century scientific mentality is just not being able to kind of transcend that and still has to be hostage, be held hostage to these Stone Age political processes. Very unfortunate.
(41:17) Briar: I feel like it's just some kind, everybody's out for themselves really, aren't they? They all want that next thing for themselves. So it's always this back and forth drama. And as you rightly said, it's almost like everyone's so distracted with fighting over the wrong things rather than fighting for the good fight, so to speak. And when I did some research actually about how involved, I guess funding the government funding is in the longevity space, I was absolutely appalled at how much money went towards catering towards the sick care society that we presently live in and the tiny little millions that went towards longevity projects and then the trillions that went towards funding things like nuclear bombs.
(42:08) Yuri: Yeah, it's, it's very sad. Definitely. Like the military industrial complex is getting way more money, way more funding than initiatives aimed towards figuring out how to prevent disease, how to eradicate cancer, how to eradicate Alzheimer's. It's like I said, Stone Age. Our political systems are still there. It's a very complex question.
(42:36) Briar: Yeah. What can we be doing? Like where does your funding come from? Is it from private? Like how do you guys get the funding?
(42:44) Yuri: Yeah, we're privately funded. So we get funding from investors who are longevity minded, translationally minded, and want to see the partial reprogramming therapies to actually be put on the market and hopefully earn some money. But obviously there's so many labs and so much research, fundamental research into aging, into longevity that's being funded by grants institutes like NIH And yet, as you rightfully absolutely rightfully say, the proportion of funding that goes into solving the problem is minuscule compared to the funding that actually goes towards dealing with the consequences of this problem dealing with sick care, as you said. So it's very unfortunate.
I think it also represents what we talked in the beginning, that most of the people, when you ask them, should we do something about aging, say no to them, they're still stuck in the mind-set, you know millennia past that aging is something natural. That's something you accept and do nothing about. Your mortality is something you accept and do nothing about, until of course you get hit by like cancer or something. And then it becomes a tragedy and you try to do everything possible to get a few extra years, with, for someone who's, your loved ones with cancer or recovering after, say heart attack or stroke. But until then people say, no, no, aging is natural. We all need to die. We all need to, get sick and die to make sure there's no overpopulation or something else. And unfortunately, this is something that I think we also need to try to change in society. This perception of aging is something desirable. We need to show that science is finally able to do something about aging, that aging is not desirable. And as much as kind of we would hate to get sick and die, we have to recognize that this is something that we're facing and something that we should try to avoid.
(44:50) Briar: I think it's so interesting and I, I agree. I think it's a perception thing. At the end of the day. It's communicating the knowledge of where things are actually at and what things could actually happen to the people, to the masses. But I think the problem is that in today's society, is that, yeah we've come to accept things at face value and I just believe that there is just too much distraction out there. We're slaves to our phones, we're slaves to these little dopamine hits that they continually provide us. We are too busy watching twerking on TikTok and we're too busy watching Love Island on Netflix. To actually go out there and be curious and actually do research and figure things out and actually see what is possible, we're all just too distracted, is the way that I see it.
And I feel very passionately about this, I guess as a media person, and I guess this is where my kind of role comes into play at bringing people's attention to the things that I believe are very important, such as solving aging or at least eradicating these old age diseases that we've just come to accept are okay, but there's so much cancer, so much Alzheimer's and so many diseases out there at the moment, and we are just accepting them at face value. We're just like, oh yeah, when we get old, we suffer and we die. And that's not good enough.
(46:18) Yuri: Yeah, you're absolutely right. I think it starts with public perception and people are just, they're not even aware that aging is something that you can change, I think, yeah, if you just educate people on kind of differences on how long different organisms live and the mammals that live for 200 years, maybe they'll start thinking about like, why can't we live for 200 years at least? And yeah, it starts with just kind of like this basic education and people, you're absolutely right. Pay much more attention to like entertainment or sports than to things that actually are much more important to their life. 'cause everybody is definitely getting some age related disease, be it cancer, heart disease, or dementia, or definitely their loved ones, their parents or, and the research that is happening in the longevity space affects them so much more closely and so much more deeply than love island on Netflix. But for some reason, yeah, it just, people pay--
(47:21) Briar: Priorities are wrong. Absolutely. Priorities are wrong.
(47:24) Yuri: Absolutely. Absolutely.
(47:25) Briar: Well, it's been so nice to have you on the show today and yeah, I'm looking forward to our next catch up. I think we'll probably see each other at another longevity event at some point, which will be very exciting.
(47:37) Yuri: Yeah, it would be my pleasure. And yeah, hopefully you can change some of the hearts and minds and get more people Interested.
(47:45) Briar: I hope so. I really want to, the more I interview people, the more I'm just like, you know what, this is what needs to be done. Yeah. Priorities are all wrong and someone needs to go out there and fight the good fight, so to speak, for all of you wonderful people that I get to meet.
(48:04) Yuri: Well, for all of us. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, thank you for doing that job.
(48:08) Briar: No, thank you.
(48:09) Yuri: Because Yeah, absolutely. Like yeah you have kind of the right channels to get at the hearts and minds of most of the people.
(48:17) Briar: Well, thank you so much Yuri. It's been such a pleasure to speak with you today. And yeah, love your awesome work that you're doing.
(48:24) Yuri: Thank you. The pleasure was mine.
