Thanks for asking the questions I suggested. I thought found Aubrey’s response to this question the most informative:
Has any effort been made to see if the effects of multiple treatments are additive, in terms of improved lifespan, in a pre-clinical study?
No, and indeed we would not expect them to be additive, because we would not expect any one of them to make a significant difference to lifespan. That’s because until we are fixing them all, the ones we are not yet fixing would be predicted to kill the organism more-or-less on schedule. Only more-or-less, because there is definitely cross-talk between different damage types, but still we would not expect that lifespan would be a good assay of efficacy until we’re fixing pretty much everything.
I don’t have a background in anti-aging biology and my intuition was that the treatments would be have more of an additive effect. However, I agree with his view that there won’t be much effect on total life-span until everything is fixed.
My feeling is that this may make the expected value of life-extension research lower (by decreasing probability of success) given that all hallmarks need to be effectively treated in parallel to realize any benefit. If one proves much harder to treat in humans, or if all the treatments don’t work together, then that reduces the benefit gained from treating the other hallmarks, at least as far as LEV is concerned. This makes SRF’s approach of focusing on the most difficult problems seem quite reasonable and probably the most effective way to make a marginal contribution to life-extension research at the moment. Once all hallmarks are treatable pre-clinically in-vivo, then it seems like research into treatment interactions may become the most effective way to contribute (as noted, this will probably also be hard to get main-stream funding for).
Thanks for asking the questions I suggested. I thought found Aubrey’s response to this question the most informative:
I don’t have a background in anti-aging biology and my intuition was that the treatments would be have more of an additive effect. However, I agree with his view that there won’t be much effect on total life-span until everything is fixed.
My feeling is that this may make the expected value of life-extension research lower (by decreasing probability of success) given that all hallmarks need to be effectively treated in parallel to realize any benefit. If one proves much harder to treat in humans, or if all the treatments don’t work together, then that reduces the benefit gained from treating the other hallmarks, at least as far as LEV is concerned. This makes SRF’s approach of focusing on the most difficult problems seem quite reasonable and probably the most effective way to make a marginal contribution to life-extension research at the moment. Once all hallmarks are treatable pre-clinically in-vivo, then it seems like research into treatment interactions may become the most effective way to contribute (as noted, this will probably also be hard to get main-stream funding for).