Summary
Reason works as CEO at Repair Biotechnologies, which is focused on reversing atherosclerosis. He’s also an active self-experimenter regarding aging interventions. Reason also spearheads some aging advocacy efforts – such as the blog fightaging.org.
Presenters
Reason, Fight Aging
Reason is the founder and writer of Fight Aging!, a leading voice in the rejuvenation biotechnology and patient advocacy communities for more than fifteen years. He is also co-founder and CEO of Repair Biotechnologies, a biotech startup working towards the reversal of atherosclerosis, and has presented at numerous industry conferences, including Undoing Aging and…
Q&A Takeaways:
- Gene therapy is underdeveloped, and we need a good, reliable gene therapy with effective targeting.
- Lipid nanoparticles and plasmids are a potential future option for gene therapy
- The only way to target specific organs with gene therapy is direct injection, which has a high mortality rate
- There’s no way to solve atherosclerosis using small molecules, you need gene therapy
- It’s difficult to do remote work for biology because it requires hands-on labwork
- Entos pharmaceuticals are developing a lipid gene delivery system
- There are tooling groups developing technology for gene therapy in the for-profit world, but we could use more
- End-run risk, the risk of someone taking your proprietary knowledge and running away with it after you’ve done all the work, does seem to exist in this field but it appears to be domain specific
- AAV is still going to be in use for a while, and if it has a big breakthrough use case it may get further developed to lower the cost associated with its use
- We need to have a conference where we get many experts together in a room and figure out where the best paths for progress are
- One big question is how to fund trials, because the FDA makes it very hard
- Restoration of hematopoiesis and regeneration of the thymus are promising therapies in the near future
- The thymus and bone marrow talk to each other
- There isn’t enough investment in the biotech space, and if you like what they are doing then invest in their companies
- One list of companies is available at agingbiotech.info
- Medical tourism is the only way to reform the FDA, because government only responds to competition outside its dominion
- Investment would help Reason’s company the most right now – Repair Biotechnologies needs to get into clinical trials by the end of 2023
Seminar summary by Aaron King.