What Silicon Valley is doing to make humans live longer
Your browser doesn't support HTML5 video.
Peter Diamandis, co-founder of Celularity and Human Longevity, Inc., explains how Silicon Valley can make 100 the new 60. Following is a transcript of the video.
How Silicon Valley can make 100 the new 60. Peter Diamandis is an engineer, physician and entrepreneur. He is best known as founder of the XPRIZE Foundation. He is also co-founder of Celularity and Human Longevity, Inc. These companies work to extend the human life span.
Peter Diamandis: So, what do we do right now? So, it's still the basics, eat right, exercise, and get enough sleep. But what else can you do? There's a couple different things.
It's a company called Human Longevity Inc, H-L-I. We have a service at HLI called the Health Nucleus. When you come to the Health Nucleus, we spend three hours with you, we sequence your genome, all 3.2 billion letters of your life. We do a full-body MRI that's able to detect cancer. We basically collect 150 gigabits of data about you, we feed it into machine learning and our goal is to find out, is there anything going on inside your body that you should know about. We all eventually have some problem, but we find it at stage zero or stage one, when it's curable or treatable immediately.
Treatments coming in the near future are gonna be the stem cell treatments. The ability to use stem cells to solve autoimmune disease and degenerative disease. The human placenta for 99.999% of the time is thrown away. The placenta is the richest source, the most abundant source of stem cells, and that because these stem cells are immunologically privileged, meaning you can give these stem cells from a single placenta to hundreds, thousands, potentially tens of thousands of individuals, the price of these stem cells will drop down significantly.
Then, there are other treatments that are ongoing right now. You've heard about young blood experiments going on in Silicon Valley, where you transfuse the blood of a young person to an old person. What Elevian has done is recognize not just the whole blood that is important, there is a particular molecule called GDF11 that seems to be the molecule that's most responsible for this rejuvenate effect. And so Elevian is actually commercializing that particular molecule.
Other companies like Unity Biosciences is working on finding those senescent cells in your body and destroying them. So cells will grow and they'll stop growing so they don't become cancerous and it's called senescence. But when those cells start becoming inflammatory, they can damage your body. And so Unity Biosciences is working on how do we find the senescent cells and kill them, making more room for stem cells to grow younger, healthier tissues. So there's a number of these technologies coming on right now.
In 10 to 12 years from now, for every year that you live, science is extending your life for more than a year. These treatments are going to be coming online to help you extend your life, but bottom line, eat right, sleep right, get exercise, that's not going away.