Transcript 

Emil Waehrens  

Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to our webinar about longevity and how research is shaping the future of aging. 

My name is Emil Waehrens and I'm delighted to be your host today. We will dive into this fascinating world of longevity research and explore how cutting-edge advancements are reshaping our understanding of aging. 

Joining us today, we have two amazing experts who are at the forefront of this field. First, we have our founder here at Supertrends, Lars Tvede. He is a seasoned futurist, serial entrepreneur, best-selling author, and has a deep expertise in identifying emerging trends and their impact on our future. 

And alongside Lars, we have Victor Björk, a physician, longevity expert, and research scientist focused on aging and life extension technologies. 

Together, Lars and Victor will share their insights into the science and tech and opportunities emerging in the field of aging. 

The first part of this webinar is a 45-minute discussion between Lars and Victor. And after that, we will have 15 minutes for a Q&A session. So,  feel free to post questions in the Q&A section throughout the webinar. 

Enough from my side. Let's dive in, and I will leave the screen shortly and hand over to you, Lars. Maybe you can start by sharing your perspective on the current state and future of longevity research. 

Lars Tvede 

Thank you very much. So first I'll say that you were so kind to present me as an expert on the field. I'm not sure Victor will agree on that. I have, as I told Victor, I have, together with a potential co-author, submitted a book proposal for a coffee table book about the long, healthy life. That's not really because we're experts; it's just because we like to write books and then we’ll talk with the experts. 

But I've seen this theme getting, you know, invading my life in a positive way. A few months ago, I had a meeting in the UK with a gentleman who was full of life. He was very athletic, talking about some huge business prospects. We spoke for three and a half hours, very lively conversation, and during it, he told me that he was 83 and had hired a consultant to help him to become 120. 

He was concerned that some of the people who should inherit his money might not outlive him. So that was one experience that stimulated others, like me, because I’m thinking I want to do the same. 

I hang out with different people socially, mostly entrepreneurs and some business leaders, and I've seen them change lifestyle quite a lot over the last, say, five years. When I talk with them about why, part of it is that they're beginning to believe a little bit that if they can just stay alive and healthy for, say, 10 more years, then new fantastic medications might give them 100 bonus years after that. 

So I don't think any of them feel completely sure, but they're beginning to feel it's a possibility. Of course, maybe you don't get 100 bonus years, but perhaps 20 bonus years because of the things Victor and his colleagues make. 

So, if I can frame it a little more, we all know that there are things you can do to be healthy now: sleep well, eat and drink well, exercise, try to be happy. Happiness comes from good social relationships and working on something interesting, maybe doing sports. 

Victor, you are not doing research in health testing, are you? 

Victor Björk  

No, no.  

Lars Tvede 

But I think it's part of the story because the things you can do right now to live a healthy life, we get a better understanding of them all the time. But there's this new range of technologies that actually to a large degree work already. Will you take us through them, or shall I? Will you give it a start?  

Victor Björk  

Yes. So, of course, there is very little human data when it comes to anything beyond the diet and exercise and sleep and stress management. But there are many, many interventions that can extend life and improve health in mice. For example, the drug rapamycin is a gold standard, it’s approved for organ transplants in humans, but it’s not approved for any aiding purposes in humans yet. It extends life in lab mice and there is a community that is exploring that further. There is a diabetes drug that is very common and very cheap called metformin that also extends life. There’s some human data also showing improved health outcomes for people taking it. There is also a huge research field that is trying to develop more intervention and translate new findings into humans.  For example, you can kill off senescent cells. Senescent cells are essentially damaged cells that are too old and don’t divide and participate in a function any longer. They linger around and they cause aging. If you remove them, you get healthier, at least in lab mice. There are some human clinical trials ongoing there. 

 So there's a lot of fields. All the things that you can potentially start doing yourself and if you have the data and the things that are potentially emerging from the market as well. 

Lars Tvede 

I think it would be super interesting to drill into some of these in more detail to understand them, but I look at what my friends do and some of what I do myself already. I take a huge blood test like two times a year on average or so and normally I mean the blood test would be just for minerals and vitamins and maybe for there's something called CRP for detecting general inflammation in the body, but you can also screen for very early signs of cancer. 

This is called liquid biopsy, right? How many different cancers can you screen for in one blood test? 

Victor Björk 

I don't know that actually off the top of my head, but quite a few. 

Lars Tvede 

Yeah, I've been told, that, if you take the full package, there's something like 50 or 70 different kinds. And there's something about cancer that when I've been reading about this, I was not aware of. I thought, okay, so you have a local cancer and you hope that it has not spread, but apparently they all spread. 

The point is that even if you have an early stage cancer and spreads a little bit, the body normally handles it until it becomes overwhelming. 

So anyway, so you'll find very early traces of that in their blood and then if you see there's something wrong, then of course you look specifically for where is it and what do we do about it. But then you can do a full-body MRI. 

I've never done that, but if you do that, you can look for signs of cardiovascular disease, especially looking at the heart, but you can also look for problems with the veins, with the tendons, lots of other things, and catch things early. 

And then people wear wearables. I don't know, do you use wearables, Victor, like a watch or step counter or this ring or something? 

Victor Björk 

A few, but not very advanced, I admit. 

Lars Tvede 

Right. So, I see quite a lot of people who do that. Some of them do it maybe for two weeks to learn about their body and then they take it off to not be, you know, too focused on health and then maybe after some months they try again and so on. So just to learn how the body reacts to the morning croissant and the evening wine, or what distorts your sleep and what doesn't and so on. 

And then one of the things that we know a lot about in Supertrends is AI. And we expect that 2025 may be the year where personal AI breaks through where you have this AI on your phone that you can allow to know you really well. 

And of course that AI can, in principle at least, take all such information and put it into a kind of wellness panel that tells you what's going on in your body, what you need to adjust. 

And you can also do a full DNA sequencing. I haven't done that, but I know a lot of people who have. And then you get advice based on that. I don't know what is your opinion about. Is that a mature technology? 

Victor Björk 

Well, it depends all on the studies because many, if you could call it biomarkers for aiding itself and not a particular disease, are still a bit under the debate, which is actually the best proxy for actual aiding to intervene in that represents a disease before the disease is really there yet. 

So AI is super useful, but it's only as good as the data you have a program to begin with. 

Lars Tvede 

That's quite a few years ago that I first heard about women who get such a screening, and then they get told that they have a really elevated risk of getting breast cancer. And then they get a breast amputation and implants in order to avoid that. 

But what I hear from people I know is more about nutrition. They tell them, you know, eat this, not that. And I don't know how valuable that is, but I have a daughter who loves meat, she has loved it since she was very small. She really loves meat and then she went and did a test like that and then she said one of the outcomes of the test was that she should eat a lot of meat, so she kind of got confirmed why she felt so good when she was eating meat. 

So these are technologies to look for if there's something wrong in your lifestyle or maybe you have a bigger health problem growing. And then there are also some medications that you and I have spoken about already. There are some exciting medications coming up, like cancer vaccines, where let's say that you discover from your DNA that you do have an elevated risk of some specific cancer. And in principle, you could actually do a vaccine against that cancer. So if you get it, you will not discover it. You raise your hand when I say something wrong, Victor.  

But then there's another area, which is what you call reverse vaccine. There are three big areas that typically kill people. Eventually, there's cardiovascular, and then it's cancer and then it's autoimmune diseases like Crohn's disease.  

Victor Björk 

Yeah, to some degree it's also dementia, which is very big as an indirect cause for frailty, the inability to fight off infection, you could say.  

Lars Tvede  

Is that also a common problem?  

Victor Björk 

That's very common in really old people, like the people who are age 90 plus, weakening of the immune system. 

Lars Tvede 

So they die from a common flu?  

Victor Björk 

Yes, yes. 

Lars Tvede 

So there has been, within the last year or two, some fundamental breakthroughs that indicate that reverse vaccines will be developed over the next years. So, you can, for instance, get a vaccine against type 2 diabetes. It's not working yet, but I think the community believes that it will work. And then step by step, they will roll out these different solutions. Lots of things you can do to stay healthy in general, to screen your health. And if you have serious problems brewing, we'll have fairly quick development in better solutions all the time over the coming years, also because of AI technology for analyzing protein folding, chemical reactions between different protein molecules, and so on. Alpha fold, PMC fold.  

Victor Björk 

Yes indeed. So that's a main part of aiding as well. That's loss of proteostasis. So there's a problem with the protein manufacturing in the body, and you accumulate proteins in the wrong places, like amyloid beta in the brain, and the tau protein, and the transthyretin amyloidosis, like a protein, a bit like atherosclerosis, but you get these grains in your cardiovascular system, which makes the heart struggle with pumping when you get really old. And in theory, you could start breaking those down with antibody therapies. So you can really talk about intervening in fundamental aging processes.  

Lars Tvede 

Yeah, so that's where I think we're getting to that now, because these specific anti-aging medications, they are their own medications, I guess. I cannot go to my doctor and say, give me some anti-aging injection or some anti-aging pill, not really, I think. Most doctors would say, I'm not sure I know what you're talking about, but I can soon, right?  

Can you take us through, maybe in chronological order, what you think is going to work over the coming five years, 10 years, 15 years, perhaps. I know these are all wild guesses. And explain exactly what it is.  

Victor Björk  

Yes, that is indeed a very hard question to answer because predicting timelines is notoriously difficult because we don't know how it is going to translate. And if there turns out to be serious side effects, things are going to take a lot longer probably for any approval.  

But I do think that if we are going to live significantly longer and healthier, we need to use multiple interventions in the same individual, like plugging many holes at once because the issue with when evolution has set up the human body, we accumulated the different types of aging damages at a very similar rate. So, when you're 90, you have misfolded proteins aggregate in your body, you have loss of stem cells, you have senescent cells and all of these things accumulate at a very similar rate. So, an old person has a lot of all these things that have been accumulating at very similar rates. And that's why we get all these diseases at roughly similar rates with a little bit of individual variation.  

But of course, there's nobody that naturally lives to 200 because of these issues. But that means that in order to achieve a significantly longer health span than we have today, we would need to combine, do some kind of combinatory treatments.  

And there's actually very few companies that are doing that kind of research. But in theory, you will need to design clinical trials also where you, for example, clean the senescent cells from individuals and use technologies to break down misfolded proteins to prevent Alzheimer's and stem cell injections for repairing an organ and so on. It's going to be very interesting to see how these synergistic therapies could potentially generate a longer health span.  

Lars Tvede  

I think we all understand that you're guessing in terms of the timeline. And also, one thing is to develop a medication. Another thing is to find out that there are side effect expenses. Maybe you get more cancer, you live longer, but unless you get more cancer and you're actually likely to get more cancer or something like that. But what do you see as the most promising in terms of how helpful it will be? 

Think about me. I would like to slow my health. Um, and I'm not that young anymore, so I'm slightly impatient, and also what seems to be most in reach to become a real approved product?  

Victor Björk 

Yes, there's definitely some spaces that are more, you could say, crowded right now than others within the field of anti-aging. For example, senolytics, drugs that kill off senescent cells. And there's a lot of companies in this field with various approaches, because there are different types, also, of senescent cells. And that's not one group. But it might be, for example, that you can use drugs that have been developed by multiple companies and apply them at once in the same person. So you would need to take multiple medications at once to eliminate the different types of senescent cells and reduce them to a more youthful level.  

But I do think over the next few decades, it's going to be extremely interesting because there's a lot of things that are going to be translated, and if it turns out to work, then people are going to really want to demand it. It's going to lead to a lot of media attention and public awareness for sure. But I do think definitely anti-protein misfolding drugs and-- 

Lars Tvede 

Can I just go back to these senescent cells? You say that there are many different kinds. I'm kind of interested in which different kinds, and also how do you kill them without killing the good cells? I mean, without getting incomprehensible, can you explain?  

Victor Björk 

Yeah, that's actually a very difficult question to answer because there's no universally agreed upon definition of what a senescent cell is, except the fact that they don't divide and they secrete a toxic combination of chemicals that leads to chronic inflammation in the body. So in order to kill off as many senescent cells as possible, you would need to have the properly identified targets, which we know would differ. It depends on the tissue also, but it's not going to be one single drug for all types of tissues. However, we already know by the mouse data that, for example, the leukemia drug Dasatinib combined with the supplement Quercetin, that is a very common supplement sold in healthcare, reduces the number of senescent cells sufficiently to generate a clinically measurable improvement like restoration of fewer in mice, improved cardiovascular function, and less osteoporosis, and so on.  

So we know that the drugs that currently do exist, at least in mice, can partially reverse this process. But of course, with more drugs, you can do it to a greater degree than currently in theory.  

Lars Tvede 

How do the drugs discriminate between healthy cells and dysfunctional cells?  

Victor Björk 

Different molecular markers--that's quite hard to go into, but different molecular markers that the senescent cells display but that are not present on the normal cells. 

Lars Tvede  

Some shape or specific protein structure on the cell that would signal it needs to be eliminated. And how does it eliminate the cell?  

Victor Björk  

Yes, exactly. It triggers the cell to commit suicide, preferably without harming normal cells. However, it should be noted that it's entirely possible that current synthetic drugs are also harming normal cells. The only thing we know is that the clinical improvement in mice is greater than if you don't treat the mice, so the net effect is good. 

Lars Tvede 

How long have we been working on this? I don’t think we’re helping mice when we experiment on them, necessarily, but how long has this worked on mice?  

Victor Björk 

It’s a very new discovery. The first study was done in 2011, which proved you could partially reverse aging by reducing the number of senescent cells and improving health span. That was a bit of a breakthrough, as it opened up a research area people didn’t believe in at the time. I believe we’ll see more areas like that opening up, where new spaces in biotech emerge, and then it rapidly gets crowded with companies and academic research. People will aim to maximize the potential and get therapies out. 

Lars Tvede 

Let’s assume, for a minute, that it works as well in humans as in mice, and you give it to me. Would I look better? Would I look young?  

Victor Björk 

Yes, if it worked that well, even a person with no scientific knowledge would notice a difference before and after, seeing you as looking fresher or better looking in that regard. It’s a fairly obvious clinical improvement, at least in mice, that you can also see. 

Lars Tvede 

Is there a place on the dark web where I can buy some injections?  

Victor Björk  

No comment on that. 

Lars Tvede  

So, the first hints of success in mice were in 2011. We’re now in 2024. What’s the typical timeline from an initial hint in animal experiments to a clinical product?  

Victor Björk  

It’s often 15 years and around a billion dollars. That’s a rough timeframe. 

Lars Tvede  

OK, if I add 15 years to 2011, we’re really close.  

Victor Björk  

Potentially, yes, but companies picked it up a few years after the first academic discoveries, so maybe 2030 is a reasonable estimate.  

Lars Tvede  

Then, perhaps someone will improve it, and the US or EU will approve it.  

Victor Björk  

Yes, I would hope for something like that. It might be for a very narrow condition initially, and then it could potentially be repurposed for more general aging. The hope is often that aging itself, although not considered a disease, can eventually become a target. 

Lars Tvede 

So, that’s one promising area. What would be another one?  

Victor Björk  

There are multiple targets. For example, improving mitochondrial function, as the energy production in cells decreases with age. 

Lars Tvede  

Could you focus on mitochondria? They used to be bacteria, right? Yes, millions of years ago, they were absorbed by other cells. Could you explain their role and why they’re a weak point in our genetic and biological makeup?  

Victor Björk  

Yes, definitely. Mitochondria’s function declines with age. They produce the ATP, the energy production in the whole body for our metabolism, and it declines with age, which means less energy and decreased muscle mass and organ function. And if you can potentially upregulate them to be more efficient, like in younger people, then you can potentially live a bit longer with that. So that's a big space. 

Lars Tvede 

Okay, so just to my knowledge, you can correct me here, but I know that genetically they are only inherited from the mother.  

Victor Björk  

Yes, correct.  

Lars Tvede 

And so they don't have the genetic kind of repair mechanism that you have from sexual combination. We have a similar problem with the Y chromosome that comes only from the father. So, as I understand, they are fairly vulnerable to genetic defects. Is that right? 

Victor Björk 

Yes, they acquire mutations as well, and the genome gets.  

Lars Tvede 

OK, so I have these small organelles inside every cell in my body, in the blood cells also? No, right?  

Victor Björk  

Most of the cells, definitely. 

Lars Tvede  

OK, most of the cells have these, and they are the ones who deliver energy, and then they start to malfunction. So, how can we help that? Can you explain that? Because it sounds really magic.  

Victor Björk  

Well, yeah, you can stimulate the mitochondrial biogenesis so that you create more mitochondria, and you can also improve the quality of their functioning with multiple targeted drugs. So that increases energy production as well. 

And one of them that is often sold as a supplement is NAD because NAD production goes down with age, and there's some mixed data there if you can potentially improve age rate at ill health by boosting NAD levels. 

Lars Tvede  

And that is something people do now, right?  

Victor Björk  

Yes, that is definitely something people do. I will say it's a very unclear area to what degree it actually matters when you do it in younger people, because a lot of people take these supplements; they're not very old. It might be more useful if you give it to centenarians than people who are only in their 40s and 50s. 

Lars Tvede  

So, if I take a blood test to find out if I need that, would I be able to see that from a blood test?  

Victor Björk  

Yes, yes, there are tests to measure that. But I would say that this is one of the more debated areas in aging research—to what degree this actually translates into a clinically measurable outcome.  

Lars Tvede  

OK, so it exists, but we're not sure it works.  

Victor Björk  

Yes, indeed. And of course, extremely old people are the ones who would benefit the most, potentially, in theory at least. 

Lars Tvede  

I'm hoping to become an extremely old person. Tell me about another one; this is interesting.  

Victor Björk  

Yes. So one thing that you can also do is you can potentially break down atherosclerotic plaques. There are multiple companies that try to work on this area, and it is now understood that lowering cholesterol is far from sufficient to avoid atherosclerosis. It happens throughout life to most people. 

Actually, it does not really happen to everybody because there are cases where people have been over 110 and not developed atherosclerosis. So they actually had perfectly clean arteries. But most people develop atherosclerosis regardless of lifestyle to some degree. And there are ways of intervening in that process. One of the things that you can do that is currently a bit actionable apart from lifestyle is trying to lower this age-related chronic inflammation. 

Because what happens with age is that the level of chronic inflammation goes up in response to the tissue damage that accumulates with age and also aging of the immune system and many other factors. But you can measure, even in healthy older people, that they have an increased amount of inflammation compared to younger people, which is often correlated with cardiovascular disease and the development of cancer and many other conditions. And we know that many drugs that improve the health somewhat of older people and are disease protective actually lower inflammation. 

Even statins, statins don't only reduce the cholesterol, but they decrease inflammation also. And some people have proposed that it's also an additive effect for why statins reduce cardiovascular incidence, that they also lower inflammation.  

Lars Tvede  

OK, so I have a question about inflammation, because let me explain to you. So I understand that chronic inflammation means that the body is so preoccupied with fighting something all the time that it doesn't have excess, maybe I was saying this wrong, but it doesn't have excess capacity to catch these, you know, potential cancerous cells for instance or other more serious things that are going wrong and for instance many people have a little bit chronic inflammation from the gums because they are not cleaning their teeth well enough for instance or you can have it from as you said these cells that are in your body that are malfunctioning or from drinking half a bottle of vodka a day or whatever. Smoking. So I understand that. But then here comes where the story gets more complicated because if I do hard sport then I'm ripping my muscles apart. I probably have some micro internal micro bleedings in lots of places. I'm poisoning myself with radicals, chemicals that are, you know, damaging my body and so on. But that's healthy.  

Victor Björk  

Yeah. I mean inflammation, short term inflammation is great because it's wound healing and it repairs muscles when it comes to exercise. But it's this low-level chronic inflammation that is persistent 24 hours a day and it increases with age. That is what this. The dangerous one, the sterile inflammation that they call it that is not in response to any pathogen and not in response to any controlled tissue in your ear like exercise and so on. I want to point out that the inflammation is very complex. There's a lot of different molecules involved and many of them increase with age. And some of them are believed to be more harmful than others. And they also increase in conditions like obesity. For example, obese teenagers, very obese teenagers, they have already elevated inflammatory markers in their body compared to other people.  

Lars Tvede  

So shouldn't it be more common than it is to get tested for chronic inflammation? You would say everybody, every person on the planet has some chronic inflammation, but you know the question is this is very low or is it elevated?  

Victor Björk  

Indeed, indeed. So in theory you could argue then that the optimal amount of inflammation is what you observe in a healthy 20-year-old and anything above that is suboptimal and that should be forked with biotechnology you could say in that regard.  

Lars Tvede  

Yeah, so you should first find out where does it come from. And then see what you can do about it.  

Victor Björk  

Yes. So, I mean, it's infections that the body fails to fight off, like cytomegalovirus, for example. Cytomegalovirus is a harmless infection, but the body uses a lot of immune resources to fight it off. And it depletes the capacity of immune cells to that should have been.  

Lars Tvede  

Let's say you take a 40-year-old. What might be a sign, if you haven't done the blood test, don't know the number, what might be a sign that you have too high chronic inflammation? You know, Is it that you get flu too often?  

Victor Björk  

No, it might be rather silent still, because 40 is also relatively young. But with an increased level of inflammation, you more easily develop plaques in your arteries at a relatively early age.  

Lars Tvede  

So that you would not necessarily know?  

Victor Björk  

No, you will not know that likely before you have a stroke or heart attack because most people don't check it. And it's not necessarily that you have a lot of plaques just because you get the heart attack. You can have a very moderate amount and then it breaks off and you get the heart attack. So it's not always that detectable early on. 

Lars Tvede  

But you know, yeah, there's these people who are never ill. And then there are these people who get the flu 5 times a year. Does that have anything to do with that, or is that something else? 

Victor Björk 

Not necessarily, because people are also based on their immune system and the receptors on their immune system. They can be more and less likely to catch a cold than others. But that doesn't necessarily determine the rate of aging. That you have not missed a day of work in 30 years, it's not necessarily an indication that you're super healthy from that angle. And it's also, of course, about exposure. I mean, if you work in a kindergarten, you're likely to get ill, for example.  

Lars Tvede  

Right, OK. Um, OK, so what… how does it… the things you could do against plaque, can you explain that? 

Victor Björk 

Yes. So what you can do currently definitely is to avoid excess blood glucose and excess lipids in your blood, but many other people don't think about this, that you need to lower your inflammation. You can, for example, check CRP, C-reactive protein. That is a very general marker for inflammation. And if that is too high, that's a sign that you're more likely to develop cardiovascular disease, even if you are of normal weight and so on. So you should definitely track that. And if you go into an advanced level, you can look at things like interleukins, which are inflammatory compounds. There are many other more advanced tests like that you can take and get some kind of insight into your cardiovascular risk from that regard. And people who have less inflammation age slower in that regard. For example, in Okinawa in Japan, where there are many more people who live to 100 than elsewhere, they have much less chronic inflammation than the people in the Western world with a Western diet.  

Lars Tvede  

Is there medication that you would call anti-aging medications for this in the pipeline, stuff that we don't have now?  

Victor Björk  

Yes, definitely. There are companies who work on addressing and dampening down inflammation in that regard. So I want to point out there because this is of course a bit of a chicken and egg problem because inflammation increases with age and inflammation also causes aging. So it both causes aging and it drives aging. So it's really a problem. But if you artificially dampen it with a molecule, the net outcome is generally good.  

Lars Tvede  

Right. Then we have the telomere, like can you explain what that is at the end of the DNA?  

Victor Björk  

Yes, definitely. That's also one quite unclear area in aging research, I will say, because telomeres are also a bit of a chicken and egg problem because telomeres—short telomeres, that's the end of the chromosomes and they shorten with age. So in really old people, there's almost nothing left. 

Lars Tvede 

Almost nothing left, or nothing left? 

Victor Björk 

Almost nothing, very, very little left at least. It's something that varies a lot between individual cells. So if you were going to a tissue of a 90-year-old, you will see some cells that have virtually no telomere left, but some with more. So it's not necessarily that it's the same in every cell. It's not like a ticking clock.  

Lars Tvede  

And then when the cell divides, then you actually use coding genetic material because you don't have this protection left.  

Victor Björk  

Yes, if you would go to that degree, yes.  

Lars Tvede  

Okay, so there's something called telomerase.  

Victor Björk  

Yes, it’s the enzyme that increases that, but of course it fails to do it at a pace that is enough to offset.  

Lars Tvede  

Is there anything we can do about that in the future to extend our lifetime? Because I understand that people who are naturally, genetically, for genetic reasons, born with longer telomeres age slower and live longer. Isn't that right?  

Victor Björk  

Yes, it's associated with better health, yes. And there are some studies using gene therapy in mice that show a smaller life extension of about 10% by creating mice and artificially creating very long telomeres by telomerase gene therapy. Iit's definitely a component of aging, but it's also secondary to other damage in the cell, because telomere shortening responds to other damage. There's also studies showing that people who exercise and live healthy have longer telomeres than others. 

Lars Tvede  

So let me just get that. If you live healthy, the body has a repair mechanism to build them back out when you lose some of them, is that right?  

Victor Björk  

Yeah.  

Lars Tvede  

And then if you live more healthily, it does that better. And then you don't get a problem from them being too short as quickly. Also, in a pharmaceutical way, on mice, and perhaps in the future on people, give that process an artificial boost.  

Victor Björk  

Yes, I would expect that giving an artificial boost to people in that regard would give some level of health benefit, but I expect it to be quite moderate because it's only one component of these different markers. 

Lars Tvede  

So, can you list what other things you think are very promising, and what are you working on yourself?  

Victor Björk  

There are many things that are potentially promising, but it's very hard to speculate on when they'll reach the market. I have to be a bit agnostic, saying that I favor certain treatments, but there are more mature technologies than others. 

What I do myself is help people who invest in this area evaluate the companies in the field to see if they have good technologies or not. I also help people interested in their own lifestyle who want to understand the space better. For example, there are many longevity clinics opening now around the world offering treatments, and some of them might have some truth, while others are just hype. It's important to be aware of where the latest science actually is and whether you're making a reasonable bet or not. That’s one of the things I do as a  a geroconsultant, as I call it. 

Lars Tvede  

So what kind of clients need that? 

Victor Björk 

People who visit longevity clinics, people who invest, people very passionate about their lifestyle and they also want to understand the things beyond diet and exercise and sleep and so on. I work as a concierge to help people and I also evaluate other people like physicians and other scientists.  

Lars Tvede  

So, you have both individual consumers who are really into this and investors who need your help.  

Victor Björk  

Yes, indeed. 

Lars Tvede  

So you have a broad overview of everything, from both corporate and private sectors.  

Yes. I also work as a concierge, helping people and evaluating physicians and other scientists involved in the field. So, I have a comprehensive understanding of the various technologies and developments in aging science. 

Lars Tvede 

I have a last question, unless you want to list some other things that are in the pipeline that we haven’t mentioned. 

Victor Björk  

If you're interested, I can briefly mention some things in the pipeline, such as cellular reprogramming. This technique has become hugely popular in the aging field. It partially reprograms a cell to reset its instructions so that it resembles a more youthful version of itself. This technique could potentially reverse aspects of aging by inserting more youthful cells into tissue. 

And there's some companies that are working on this, like Altos Labs, which received an initial funding of $3 billion, the biggest funding in the biotech industry, a single one.  

Lars Tvede  

So where would you inject that? 

Victor Björk  

You can potentially inject that in any type of tissue that you have adapted it to that has suffered from a loss of stem cells and their function. With that versus cartilage, most people get problems. You can use it in cartilage and other cells, you can use it in bones, in muscle, and you could repair an aged heart with it. But it's not enough to reset aging itself, because it doesn't remove the junk that you accumulate, for example, in tissues. So you need to clean out the junk and restore the cells. Right. Yeah, we all end as the pile of junk. 

Lars Tvede  

OK, so my last question is just that Aubrey De Grey coined this term, longevity escape velocity, quite a few years ago. And this is about, well, maybe you can explain it and you could tell me if you believe that we will ever get there.  

Victor Björk  

Yeah, so longevity escape velocity would mean that you were able to successfully implement enough rejuvenation technologies into people to make them live longer to a degree that they essentially never have to experience aging, but that they can dramatically extend their life. As for knowing when that will happen, that is, first of all, it's completely impossible to know it in advance. So we can only know it after that has happened and a long period also after it has happened. So I cannot say it's going to be in March 2043, because it might be decades later we can see, "Oh, this actually happened at this inflection point."  

Lars Tvede  

Yeah, people start walking around saying, "Why is she still around? She was also around when I was small," or something like that. Do you think it's possible to get to that point? 

Victor Björk  

Oh yeah, definitely. Definitely. And it doesn't violate any law of physics. We actually do not know to what degree that you would get if you would combine all the technologies that we have a hint of that might work into one individual because it has not been properly done. So at some point, I think people are going to aim for that, and no one knows what will happen.  

Emil Waehrens 

Very, very interesting, guys. It's tough to cut you off now at this topic, but I need to do so, because we need to open the floor for some questions. So again, the audience out there, if you have questions, please post them. But we already have quite a few, so let's see how many we can cover. The first question being, any thoughts on the new AI supercomputer that has been launched in Copenhagen and its ability to aid in this topic of slowing aging? Maybe you can start, Lars, and then, Victor, you can chip in also. 

Lars Tvede  

I start. OK, that's the game here. I was actually supposed to be at the opening ceremony, but couldn't make it. But I just want-- I don't think I should be the one to answer that other than saying that the discovery process for protein folding and protein chemistry has increased more than a million X because of AI combined with supercomputers. So that's all I want to say about that.  

Victor Björk  

Yes. So I cannot either comment on how quickly it is going to solve any problems in that regard, just that it's very impressive what is going on. And there's so many things opening up now, so we don't know where it's going to lead us in a few years only.  

Lars Tvede  

No, only that these kinds of technologies speed up the scientific development massively.  

Victor Björk  

Yes, especially if it does it by the boring work that people have to do manually gets wiped out and that's why things move so quickly.  

Lars Tvede  

And you are less likely to pursue a dead-end avenue because you can do in silico testing, as you say, computers can find out that this won't work because it will cause this problem. And then you don't have to go through clinical trials and all the rest of it.  

Emil Waehrens  

Thanks for your thoughts on it. I guess the future will show the impact it will have.  

Jumping straight to a new question because there are quite a few questions from the audience here. How can someone balance the immediate health goals with long-term anti-aging benefits? Maybe you can take that one Victor.  

Victor Björk  

Yeah, I mean nobody has any answers because we don’t have any detailed map of the molecular composition of a human body in that regard. We don't have a road map of everything that goes wrong with age. So it's very hard. There is no answer that everybody has to make their own risk-benefit calculation based on the currently available scientific evidence. That's all I can say from that.  

Lars Tvede  

But there's no contradiction at all between short-term health and long-term health, right?  

Victor Björk  

Not really, not really. I mean, of course, you can argue that some people who are Olympic athletes might prioritize performance over longevity in some regards. But for the general population, there's not really. 

Emil Waehrens 

Thank you. A question on how long are people born today likely to live? I guess there's also a question of how much longevity can impact the age we can get to.  

Victor Björk  

Yeah, that's a very speculative question because we have already implemented many medical advances that we couldn't do before, and things are going to improve incrementally. So when is enough, when are we going to do enough to really modulate lifespan to a greater, more significant degree? What if somebody who would have lived to 88 can be treated with an immune booster and LIN-203, when do we draw the line between what is action and aiding treatment and just preventing a particular condition? It's a very speculative area.  

Lars Tvede  

What you just said, somebody who was born today, when that person begins to become kind of old, let's say 60, 70, 80, an absolutely massive amount of progress must have been done. 

Victor Björk  

Oh yes, definitely. But in the lab, it's also the issue of implementing things because there's so many interesting findings in the lab and cool data that is also not really picked up upon and there's something just left and you would be surprised to discover that this condition could be improved,5-7 years ago. New research is picking that up. So you would need to really, it's almost like going into a gold mine and looking, why is nobody doing that? Why do you have this web of--  

Lars Tvede  

Yeah, which AI can do, by the way.  

Victor Björk  

Yes, definitely.  

Emil Waehrens  

Thanks for your take on that. I think that brings us over to another question that has popped out in different versions, but overall, what do you see as the biggest challenge in bringing anti-aging treatments to mainstream markets?  

Victor Björk  

Well, it's very expensive. And aging itself, we need better markers to conduct a clinical trial, saying that we are getting to the point where we reverse aging and not treating a particular condition only to that degree. Also, things like compliance are very difficult once you get something out. That's surprisingly difficult. Is somebody going to take hundreds of pills every day and never forget anything in order to live longer, for example? That's also a thing. But costs go down fairly quickly after something has been approved in most cases because there's going to be such a big demand, that's for sure.  

Emil Waehrens  

Do you think we will get to that stage where it is a mainstream market for all these medications?  

Victor Björk  

Yeah, there's going to be a push for that, definitely, because the diseases are so extremely expensive. So the push is going to be that it's not going to be just for a few people. And that is irrespective of any discussion about moral ethics, it's pure economics that it's very expensive to be ill and that's why people are going to try to get to the point.  

Lars Tvede  

I would like to say that if you look at big investment banks and research companies' predictions for real GDP per capita in the future, they think that trend growth will kind of tilt up because of AI and robotics and as we get more wealthy, we will allocate more money, on average, to these kinds of things that really can increase life quality, but there's also a cultural element. So if you see your friends do it and have some success with it, then you're more likely to start pursuing it yourself.  

Victor Björk  

Yeah. And not to discount the general state of the economy in the world, because, of course, the economy has to be great in order first to pursue these expensive things that are high in the Maslow's pyramid, so to speak.  

Emil Waehrens  

Thanks a lot for your thoughts on that. A question on how you conduct clinical research on aging, since it's not an official disease. What is the process of that?  

Victor Björk 

Yeah. If I just have to give my personal opinion on that, there might be some confusion about it, but I think there are some fairly good diseases to go after. For example, sarcopenia, so muscle loss that happens with age, is recognized as a condition to treat, and that's a very universal feature of aging because all 90-year-olds are frail, they would struggle to walk. So it's more relatable than, say, cancer, for example, in that regard. Diseases like immune response to a vaccine that goes down with age, sarcopenia, ability to walk, because every biomarker that has to do with age in my opinion has to be tied to physiology. I think measuring age reversal is a very simple thing because you're going to use very crude, simple things like how is your vision, how is your ability to walk, how do you feel? I mean, that's going to be the ultimate endpoint. The molecular markers for aging are not going to be the ultimate endpoint. It's going to be the simple, already measurable physiological endpoints that we can already do today. 

Emil Waehrens  

Very interesting. Thank you. A question here on what emerging treatments or lifestyle changes in general are you currently most excited about in the field of anti-aging? 

Victor Björk  

Well, as for what is currently available, I cannot really comment because I cannot give medical advice in that regard. But certainly, we know that a lot more people would reach 85 if everybody ate well and exercised than currently—that's for sure. We would wipe out a lot of premature mortality. Actually, on a healthy lifestyle, it's aging on a molecular level. So it's not very distinct in that regard.  

Emil Waehrens  

Thanks for giving it a shot. I think there are many asking for tips and tricks in the audience. So, but thank you both. It's been really, really interesting. We've covered a lot of ground, but before we wrap up, we'd really like to show a small video of what we do here at SuperStrength. So, stay along, it's short, and we'll play it now. 

Supertrends video transcript 

Hi. Our smart scans are tailored to each customer and their specific strategic objectives. Here's an example of a Smart Scan for offshore wind power. This example includes a summary of key market developments, the latest innovations and technologies, and other information of relevance to the specific use case.  

We can structure and deliver the information in many ways so that it fits your way of working, and once configured, the Smart Scan is automatically updated with the latest information. Our platform can also use the monitored information to generate a range of new content, such as podcasts or a summary report on a topic. 

Imagine you ask for a report on energy technologies. Our AI assistant will then guide you to ensure the report meets your requirements, and within seconds, a report is generated for you, covering the latest information we have collected on the topic. This way, you can interact with and extract highly relevant insights tailored to your business.  

Get in touch with us to know more about our different solutions. Thanks for watching. 

Emil Waehrens  

We hope you all enjoyed a small sneak peek into what we do here at Supertrends, besides speaking about longevity. Again, we have to wrap up, thank you very much Lars, thank you Victor, thanks to everyone joining in on this really interesting discussion. And of course, if you have any further questions, reach out to us and stay tuned for further upcoming events. Thank you all and have a great evening. Goodbye. 

Disclaimer: This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity, grammar, and brevity while maintaining the original intent of the conversation.