Medical Technology on the cusp

Investment Analysis Clubs Macro Economic Trends and Risks
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10 years ago or so I pointed out that battery technology had turned the corner. There have been a lot of failures since then, and people you think would be running the space (Tesla and its 4680 battery) are barely competitive, others are gone, dead and buried.

But some, CATL, BYD and others are now producing new batteries at a rate that are making YouTube influencers rich. The thinking I had then was that before Tesla hit main stream, battery technology was driven by wild eyed individuals.

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We have arrived at the same point with medical advancements.

For the last 100 years we have been trying to fix things as they break. We have gotten so good at it that we are wearing out the human body. So for the last 25 years there has been this wild eyed bunch of people exploring longevity in their garages.

That had changed. There are three prongs to the change, but like all biology it is messy and it overlaps, it is even messier because we have multiple cultures, not just counties making advances on multiple overlapping fronts with different incentives driving each.

I will try to make it simple.

1 Longevity via anti aging. This is the prong driven mostly by David Sinclair and Life Bio Sciences. They are doing the first human trail using epigenetic cell reprogramming. They are still at the very earliest stages of Phase 1 trails. (First person to receive treatment was June 9)

The second is peptides. The advent of GLP-1s and the normalization of injecting stuff into your body at home has changed the world. First, the GLP-1s are amazing medicines and are changing things in so many ways that we cannot even sort them all out. Second the advancement of GLP-1s has dramatically accelerated.

Semiglutide came out. It was awsome.
Trizipatide came out it is super awesome. (Cured my wife’s migraines)
Retatrutide is coming out (Warning may cause heart problems) it not only stops food noise, it keeps metabolism from crashing.

There are more in the pipeline, the game is just getting started.

What is more, the compounding and gray market the the GLP-1s created had created a broader peptide market. Think billions of dollars in peptides. These are slowly being tested with Randomized Control Trails, but there arr so much “Bro” antidotes that there is a push create big antidotal data trials.

Finally, there is new phase one trail that edits in a way beyond CRISPER, that can lower LDL permanently. So, yes, Gene editing may have turned to corner.

What is more, the the latest AI from Anthropic we may have seen all of this just pushed into turbo charged mode.

Money matters. Money makes things happen. We saw it with the internet, we saw it with smart phones, we saw it with batteries, we are seeing it with AI (By the way my 64 year old wife is using AI to track diet for weight loss and migrianes as well as control scheduling, so yes it is very useful) We are seeing money start to roll into bio science particularly into lifespan and more importantly health-span. Some if us here might live long enough to see the normalization of these new frontiers. If so, making your money last to 100 might not be long enough.

Cheers
Qazulught (Taking Grey Market Retatrutide, need new belt, old one too big.)

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I think you have a bit of a disordered perspective here. Not so much the exciting times we’re living in (becausethat much is true) but rather the developments that’ve taken place over the last century…and longer…which can’t really be characterized as responding to things that are broken after the fact. Regardless of what the longevity gurus would have us believe.

Insulin, for instance…for Type 1 diabetes (not the self inflicted iteration…that’s an example of something broken I agree there) That was introduced in the 1920s with refinements ever since.

Vaccines/vaccinology even earlier with Jenner’s cow pox experiment. Developments here have effectively produced a preventative intervention for a few cancers. HBV and hepatocellular carcinoma, HPV for cervical cancer for but two.

Even the breakthroughs that appear to be of recent origin tend to have been developed from the hard work of researchers decades ago…GLP-1 receptor agonists spring to mind (thinking of dh’s lab partner here)

Biohackers and self experimenters have their place, I suppose, but to imagine that big leaps are likely to come from “out there” would be citizen scientists working out of their garage is a bit of an illusion, I fancy.

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All well and good, but the ultimate front on anti-aging (from what we know today) will be in the form of telemere repair.

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Maybe…maybe not. In the context of the bit of @qazulight 's post excerpted, the gene editing excitement concerns preventing premature death (premature, as in 20s) from a FH variant as opposed to an iteration of overall anti aging. My skepticism is from what I suspect might be a whole slew of genes controlling telemere length and the various enzymes involved rather than one defective gene controlling expression of a single protein…PCSK9, in this instance.

FWIW, don’t know enough about the topic to be wandering barefoot and blindfold through AI overview’s field of cowpats, so opinions, typos, pore speling, and dodgy inference drawing are all my own

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Yes, in fact that is the point of the post. I was thinking of Roy Walford and his books The 120-Year Diet (1986/earlier editions) and Beyond the 120-Year Diet (2000).

Aubrey De Gray has built on what was at the time very fringe stuff. Although the fundamentals of autophagy and senolytics has flowed from that.

What we are starting to see now is real research funded with some cash. However, until we start seeing billion plus dollar investments the real money has not arrived.

As for a “gym bros” and peptides, those guys have been shooting BPC-157 for decades, but the normalization of injecting oneself that the GLP-1s have caused is causing the whole “gym bro” subculture to break into main stream and billions of dollars are already flowing into a mostly not legal market. I expect this wild west of grey market suppliers to be pushed completely underground one day, or be made irrelevant like copying CDs was by Spotify. In the mean time that market is growing at double and triple digit rates.

There are some moves to try and get Randomized Control Trails of some of the peptides. I think SS-31 is one of them and there are rumblings about the grandfather BPC-157 that has its roots all the way back in Pavlov’s dog.

Cheers
Qazulight

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