#087 Human Longevity 101 — Dr Nir Barzilai

Dr Nir Barzilai is Professor and Founding Director of the Institute for Aging Research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and the Director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for the Biology of Human Aging Research and of the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) Nathan Shock Centers of Excellence in the Basic Biology of Aging.

Essentially he is an OG (original gangster) in human longevity research. When describing him, David Sinclair writes “Not only is he a world leader in aging research, but also happens to be one of the best science communicators on the planet”. Barzilai is also the author of Age Later: Secrets of the Healthiest, Sharpest Centenarians.

He has over 270 peer reviewed papers and also co-founded CohBar, a publicly listed biotech company developing mitochondrial therapies for ageing.

In his quest to fight ageing — he has consulted or presented to institutions such as the Vatican, PepsiCo and Singapore’s Prime Minister’s Office.

He also leads the TAME Trial which is looking at a cheap and commonly used diabetes drug called Metformin — to see if it can slow down the process of ageing.

Metformin first gained interest in the longevity space, when people began to notice that diabetics on metformin seemed to have lower mortalities than diabetes on other drugs. In fact, diabetics on metformin had lower death rates than similar people — who didn’t have diabetes and so were not on metformin.

Just to be clear, diabetics on metformin with a serious medical condition — which is one of the big four killers in the developed world — appear to have lower death rates than non-diabetics who aren’t taking metformin. That’s crazy.

In his TAME trial he’s investigating if metformin can delay the progression of age related diseases in older adults.

Barzilai is part of a movement in longevity research or geroscience, who aim to treat ageing as a disease in itself — instead of treating one disease, only for another to take its place.

In a 1990 paper in Science, it was estimated that if we cured all cancers — we would extend the average lifespan by just three years. That’s not to say that developing therapies for cancers is wrong, but to really move the needle on health and lifespan extension — we need to think of tackling ageing and not just individual manifestations of ageing such as cancer, diabetes, heart disease and Alzheimers.

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