Alex Plesa @amplesa

@GabrielFilsing1 @UriAlonWeizmann I think damage is an abstract concept for the sum of detrimental things that accumulate with aging (senescent cells, mutations, epigenetic drift, etc). I wasn’t saying mutations are causal, just that they’re more measurable and easier to use for validation nature.com/articles/s4158…

One of the best papers I’ve read recently. @UriAlonWeizmann’s lab model damage accumulation across species and show the best predictor of lifespan is the damage production rate, which varies across 7 orders of magnitude. nature.com/articles/s4358…

@ricomnl @UriAlonWeizmann Yeah, that was cool to see. That one fly strain in the quasi-steady-state regime could be a relevant aging model with faster turnaround than mice. Also, I wonder if any existing dataset could validate the model against a directly measured damage quantity, like somatic mutations

Just published on Substack: Why Epigenetic Rejuvenation Won’t Give Us Radical Life Extension — Lessons from 58 Generations of Cloned Mice. This is my take at the results of a landmark Nature Communications paper (20+ years, 1,200+ mice, 58 generations of serial cloning with full epigenetic reset) shows it still collapses. Mutations accumulated 3× faster. Epigenetic reprogramming works… until it doesn’t. There is an irreducible level of damage that cannot be undone. To my taste, this is a very important study. Popular literature claims cloning erases aging signatures. In short-lived species it may look that way — the entropic damage simply doesn’t have time to kill. In longer-lived animals we expect the picture be very different (and there is an anecdotal evidence for that with a lot fewer generation before the collapse). This is also why I dislike the language of “information theory of aging.” Flipping the sign on entropy and calling that "information" (changing from the Boltzmann to Shannon equation) doesn’t repeal thermodynamics. Of course, you can still hope for better Yamanaka factors or else. My interpretation of the experiment is not yet a proof of anything - certainly not. However, the experiment removes a lot of ground under proponents of epigenetic rejuvenation. If you want to keep your identity, better to stop aging than try to reverse it. Challenge me. Subscribe, Like & repost. Link: peterfedichev.substack.com/p/why-epigenet…

@Maya4Rights @Harlan_Stevens1 That’s what we’re working on next…figuring out how to intervene in cells and seeing if that translate to in vivo

It’s been great working with @Harlan_Stevens1 on this! He showed that blood stem cell aging hallmarks trace to the fragility of specific regulatory networks. This and the recent AP1 work make you wonder… How much of aging is set by the wiring of a cell’s identity programs?

Harlan Stevens @Harlan_Stevens1

3 weeks ago

Entropy is random. Its effects on aging are not. Aging destabilizes the regulatory networks in blood stem cells🩸 But not every part breaks equally. The hallmarks of blood stem cell aging trace to one thing: fragile TF programs collapse with age, while stable ones expand. 🧵1/8

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@Maya4Rights @Harlan_Stevens1 Detection matters, but we’re not there yet. How to track and fix this rewiring in vivo is still an open question.

long-lived species and humans living 100+ years are known to have increased DNA repair capacity but how DNA repair could be boosted to extend human lifespan is largely unknown our research in Nature Aging today proposes a target to enable such a boost: the DREAM complex

AI has transformed how we design therapeutics. But targeted delivery is still an expensive guessing game. Today @BobbyHollings and I are launching @deliverome with @beckypferdehirt and @radialscience at @AsteraInstitute, to fix that. 🧵

@innuendo_90 @HopeExistential I don’t think regulation is the major bottleneck yet. We don’t have therapies good or tested enough for approval, and more attention and capital would fix that. Current pipelines could plausibly add ~10 healthy years. Fully solving it needs breakthroughs we can’t yet predict.

Aging is starting to look like an engineering problem

Existential Hope @HopeExistential

a month ago

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Some thoughts on why it's so hard to find a cure for aging — tarkhov.ae/age-time-rever…

1/ How long do you want to live? For most of human history, aging was inevitable. It's now solvable. Apply for LBF8 cohort program: longbiofellowship dot org /THREAD🧵

I’m excited to launch the Longevity Biotech Atlas, a personal project mapping 700+ organizations across the aging and longevity ecosystem. Longevity biotech is moving fast. A lot of the public narrative has centered on GLP-1s, peptides, biohacking, and consumer health optimization. But beneath that, a much deeper ecosystem is forming: companies, labs, investors, and non-profits working on core technologies that will enable fundamentally new forms of measurement and rejuvenation. The field is growing quickly, but it is still hard to answer basic questions: Who is building what? Which areas are crowded? Which technologies are underexplored? Where should founders, scientists, investors, and operators be paying attention? To help make the space easier to navigate, I synthesized public information on 700+ organizations—ranging from therapeutics developers, diagnostics, investors, and more— into a single database. You can explore the atlas at the link in the comments. This is still an early version, and I’ll be adding more over time: new organizations, personal accounts, bookmarks, and better ways to track how the field is evolving. My hope is to build this out into a core tool for people trying to understand, build, fund, or work in longevity. If you’re interested in aging biology, biotech, investing, company formation, or the future of medicine, follow along. I’ll be sharing updates, maps of different subfields, and analyses of where the biggest opportunities and gaps may be. Let me know what you find useful!

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Let’s stay at peak health without limits! 🧬 Vitalist Bay 2026 is T-30 days away in Berkeley, CA from May 14-17. Thanks to our partners, join this week & get: 🩸 Free @rythmhealth blood panel 🩻 Free @BodySpec DEXA scan Full program @ vitalistbay.com (+ a unique benefit ↓)

for a while i've had a slight fear that the bluetooth from my airpods could be frying my brain this weekend i pulled the raw data from a $30m government study of 1,679 mice blasted with cell phone radiation and reanalyzed it what i found was...not what I expected? 🧵

A reminder that cellular rejuvenation ≠ organismal rejuvenation In mice, chemical reprogramming cocktails could be safely administered at lower dosages but with little benefits. At higher dosages, they became toxic and required euthanasia.

Aging Science News @AgingBiology

5 months ago

In Vivo Chemical Reprogramming Is Associated With a Toxic Accumulation of Lipid Droplets Hindering Rejuvenation onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.11…

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🧵 Elon: “Longevity is an extremely solvable problem” At Vitalist Bay (May 14 - May 17), we’re solving it! 1K+ pioneers, 100+ speakers, 50+ workshops, 40+ activities, 5 critical health tests Join us to spark dozens of SpaceXs for longevity!

How could tiny breakthroughs in aging science change U.S. GDP and population growth? What’s the economic value of making 41 the new 40, or 65 the new 60? How many lives could we create or save if we could slow reproductive or brain aging by just 1 year? What would billions of healthier hours be worth to the economy, if we assume no change in the age of retirement? I spent the last two years obsessing over the design, research, and execution of this project. The result is a book upcoming with Harvard University Press, a preprint, and—maybe your favorite part—an interactive simulation tool that lets you input your own timelines and assumptions for specific breakthroughs in aging bio, then see the ROI in terms of US population & GDP growth. From @RickEcon and Jason DeBacker—the economists who co-developed the open-source, macro model that made this project possible—to extensive comments by @tylercowen, @sapinker, Richard Freeman, @NDHendrix, @ebudish, @elidourado, @geochurch, @jasoncrawford as well as interviews with 102 scientists (!) and countless iterations with award-winning designer Giorgia Lupi and the @pentagram team, we built something we hope will be a benchmark for how scientists, economists, designers, philosophers, entrepreneurs and storytellers can come together to paint, fund, and build different flourishing futures for our species. I couldn’t be more excited to share this. It’s the start of an open and evolving project—the labor and product of love, obsession, and unrelenting care. I hope you have fun playing with our simulation tool — and if you do, please share!

Announcing our 2026 Fellows! One is a neuroscientist exploring how the brain computes at a molecular level, another is a bioengineer 3D-printing human tissue. There’s a PhD student working on computational protein design, and an engineer developing robots to build large structures in space – just to name a few of the badasses in our new Fellowship cohort! With this one-year program, we want to support early-career talents advancing important science and tech. We connect them with senior scientists, invite them to our technical workshops, seminars, and Vision Weekends alongside leaders in their fields, and offer platforms for sharing their work. We are incredibly excited to introduce our 2026 Fellows! Longevity Biotechnology • Alex Plesa, Scientist, Harvard University @amplesa • Donnacha Fitzgerald, Founder, Origenity @DN_Fitzgerald • Gianluca Cidonio, Assistant Professor, Sapienza University @gianlucacidonio • Jakub Lála, PhD Student, Imperial College London @jakublala • Léo Lopez, Staff Scientist, Tufts University • Nick Schaum, Postdoc & Co-Founder, University of Cambridge & Covalent.Bio Neurotechnology • Avery Krieger, Founder & CEO, Constellation Systems @Biofall • Constanze Albrecht, Graduate Student, MIT Media Lab • Elisa Kallioniemi, Assistant Professor, New Jersey Institute of Technology • Max Kanwal, PhD Student, Stanford University • Sven Truckenbrodt, Group Leader, MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology Secure AI • Huixin Zhan, Assistant Professor, New Mexico Tech • Keith Patarroyo, Research Fellow, University of Glasgow @KeithPatarroyo • Mateo Petel, Research Scientist, Stanford University • Tianyi Alex Qiu, Research Fellow, Oxford Human-Centered AI Lab @Tianyi_Alex_Qiu • Vivek Nair, CEO, Multifactor Nanotechnology • Alberto Privitera, Assistant Professor, University of Florence • Kathryn Shelley, Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Washington • Konlin Shen, Research and Development Engineer, University of California San Francisco • Qiancheng Xiong, Senior Scientist, A*STAR Bioprocessing Technology Institute Space • Philip Linden, Space Systems Engineer, Planet Labs PBC • Sidh Sikka, Co-Founder, Manifold Research @SikkaSidh Existential Hope • Abigail Olvera, Research Director, Golden Gate Institute for AI @Abi0lvera • Fin Moorhouse, Researcher, Forethought @finmoorhouse • Mahlaqua Mila Noor, Viral Immunologist, University of Cambridge • Ninon Lizé Masclef, Research Affiliate, MIT Media Lab @ninon_lize • Peggy Yin, PhD Student, Stanford University • Ruairidh Battleday, AI Researchers & Founder, Thinking About Thinking @RMBattleday Learn more about our Fellowship: foresight.org/engage/fellows…