The Longevity Biotech Fellowship is one of the most interesting longevity-related initiatives in the last couple of years. Co-founded by Mark Hamalainen and Nathan Cheng, both well-known figures in the longevity field, LBF has been everywhere: presenting at conferences, participating in co-living projects such as Zuzalu and Vitalia, and generally connecting longevity people.
The nonprofit’s main goal, however, is to recruit, educate, and orient a fresh cadre for the field, recruiting people who want to put their skills and talent into extending human lifespan but might lack things like sufficient knowledge of aging biology, connections, or a clear understanding of where to begin. Those people can apply to one of LBF’s boot camps, which take place all over the world, engaging in five days of intensive training in everything longevity. The group also offers a free online crash course and runs a podcast.
Importantly, LBF is quite outspoken ideologically. While many people in the field argue whether it’s more prudent to talk about healthspan or healthy aging (yuck!), LBF’s stated goal is to achieve a “post-aging society” by extending human lifespan indefinitely.
Nothing is impossible when you have a plan, right? LBF is working on one for the longevity community, integrating mainstream geroscience with such audacious (some would say outrageous or outlandish) ideas as whole-body replacement. With LBF, it’s either you’re all in, or you’re out.
We sat for this talk with Mark and Nathan in Vitalia, a longevity-oriented co-living project that took place earlier this year on the island of Roatan in Honduras. While the interview was in the making, the fourth LBF camp (“cohort”) took place in Valencia, Spain, and another one is coming up in California in August. Reach out if you’re eager to extend human lifespan but need a friendly push.
Guys, tell me how LBF started.
Mark: Prior to the LBF, we were both running programs to help people get involved in longevity biotech. I started a nonprofit called Less Death, and we ran a retreat called Longevity Summer Camp. Nathan had already started the ODLB (On-Deck Longevity Biotech Fellowship) at the time. I was introduced to him and got his advice for making my program a success, and he ended up coming to the camp.
Nathan: I started ODLB in 2021. We did two cohorts. It was an online program with about 200 alumni. It was a mix of different people who wanted to get involved in longevity.
We got through those two cohorts, and then, unfortunately, the program had to be shut down. At that time, we spun out the community as a nonprofit and teamed up with Mark to combine the best of both worlds under the name of Longevity Biotech Fellowship. Mark, when did we finally team up?
Mark: That would be the fall of 2022. After that, we merged the programs. We announced it in November 2022, and then we ran our first official LBF cohort in January. So, we didn’t waste time, got right into business.
The plan is to do four cohorts this year. We did two last year. By the law of geometric progression, we’ll do eight next year. In ten years, it will be a thousand.
You’ve obviously been busy, but how do you define your mission, what are you trying to achieve?
Mark: Longevity in a broader sense has been super growing and super trendy, but most of the activity is in lifestyle, healthspan, drugs: things that, as we already know, can only extend lifespan by five to ten years.
I wanted to focus on the technology development pathways that could cure aging entirely, because the number of people working on that is still very small. That niche hasn’t grown nearly as much as the sort of broader interest in longevity. It’s barely grown at all, it’s more linear than exponential. So, I wanted to get more people into it.
My interest was to focus on that specifically, and not necessarily from the entrepreneurial, startup angle because some of this stuff is still basic research. It’s still happening in academic labs, still government-funded. It’s too long-term for venture capitalists.
I wasn’t focused on entrepreneurship the way ODLB was, and that’s an advantage of combining our programs, of merging the entrepreneurial side and the more basic research side into one program.
Nathan: When I was running ODLB, it was more general – just anybody who’s interested in longevity, aging, and just getting them involved. It was a wide tent. But when I had the opportunity to spin out the ODLB community, I decided I wanted to be more explicit about our ultimate goal, that it’s not just to extend healthspan. Maybe that could be an interim goal, and that’s totally cool, but the fundamental goal of our community at LBF is to build a post-aging future, a better world for everyone, where people don’t have to get sick and old and die. We’re quite explicit about this in our admissions process.
It was considered heresy just a few years ago, but now it’s a legitimate opinion if not mainstream.
Mark: I’ve been in this field since the early 2000s, and back then, even saying that you worked on aging biology would make you ostracized. To say that you want to extend lifespan was even worse. That’s not something you do if you want to have a good career. Now you can openly say that you want to cure aging entirely.
It’s still pretty niche in terms of the amount of funding it gets though. The funding still goes to mostly conservative things.
LBF is talking about pathways to curing aging. What are they?
Nathan: From a high level, we’re trying to figure out what are the core, critical technologies that could plausibly get us to indefinite lifespan extension.
We’re working on this project called the Technical Roadmap to investigate and create a narrative of steps that one would take to develop these technologies. It’s a public document. It’s based on our current understanding, and it could change in 10-20 years as our knowledge of aging biology grows and new technologies are developed.
Caveats out of the way, we’ve identified three main strategies. I’m going to list them in order of importance, or maybe bang for your buck.
The first one is replacement. This includes whole body replacement and progressive brain replacement. Jean Hebert speaks a lot about the latter, but there’s another part where you could potentially replace the body.
Mark: It’s been shown that if you get an organ from someone younger than you, your outcomes are better. So, we do organs, sometimes people get multiple organs, and there’s no reason why you can’t imagine doing your whole body, right? Your identity is in your brain, the rest of the body is, in theory, replaceable.
Where do you get a young body?
People have been born without a functioning brain. So, if you replicate this, you can grow a body just like you grow an organ. It doesn’t have a functioning brain, so it’s not sentient. It’s no different than growing a kidney, an arm, or a leg.
This sounds like a public relations nightmare.
Mark: We’re fully aware of that.
Nathan: That’s one of the main risks of this strategy. Also, it sounds like sci-fi, I totally get it, but, as Mark said, this is a naturally occurring phenomenon, a congenital abnormality called hydranencephaly where the forebrain fails to develop, and there’s no consciousness, no neocortex, but there’s still the brain stem and so forth.
Those fetuses, when they’re born, are usually taken off life support, but sometimes they’re left on life support, maybe because parents can’t let go. They can then develop normally into fully grown adult bodies. There are documented cases of them growing for 20, 30 years on life support. And these are essentially non-sentient human bodies.
The second pathway is biostasis—either cryopreservation, chemical fixation, or hibernation. Finally, there’s this broader aspect of bioengineering, which Mark might want to explain.
Mark: All those are approaches that potentially can solve the problem completely. The idea is that with replacement, you just keep replacing parts indefinitely. Biostasis allows you to put subjective time for that person on pause until you solve their problem, whether through replacement or a different mechanism. The third method is bioengineering.
The advantage of replacement and cryopreservation is that you don’t have to understand aging to implement engineering solutions. However, with advanced bioengineering, as well as with traditional pharmaceuticals, you have to understand the biology of aging to some degree.
We didn’t include traditional pharmaceuticals in our Roadmap, because they fundamentally can’t completely solve aging. You don’t have some latent machinery in your body that can be activated by a drug and allow you to live indefinitely. Drugs can only modulate the activity of the machinery that we already have. You can get some life extension through that method, but it will be limited.
Advanced bioengineering is the idea that you can modify your biology, your existing genetic pathways, and build new ones. We can add new pathways, new enzymes, new biology. It doesn’t break any law of physics to create a non-aging organism. From the simplest perspective, as long as free energy is coming in, you can keep entropy at bay.
But that’s in theory. The problem with advanced bioengineering is that we still haven’t fully characterized aging. We don’t have complete models of biology. Aging itself is more complicated than our biology. Your genome can be compressed down to 20 megabytes of actual information. It’s a generative algorithm that produces a soma. Aging, on the other hand, is a byproduct. Every chemical reaction is not 100% efficient.
For instance, a lot of stochastic things are happening?
Yes, some of it is stochastic. People always debate between programmed and not programmed aging. Some parts might be programmed, arguably, but that doesn’t seem to be the case overall. It’s entropy, right? All these things are drifting away from homeostasis, and our homeostasis-maintaining mechanisms are only good enough within a certain time frame so that we can reproduce. But things eventually drift off.
And it’s not one thing. The problem with aging is that it’s thousands of things, all drifting away from homeostasis. Once certain things cross thresholds, it all goes exponential, because all those things affect each other. When one metabolic process stops functioning properly, all the other processes that depend on it stop functioning properly. That’s why mortality curves are exponential.
To try to fix that requires advanced understanding of biology and aging, and advanced tools too. Even if you understand, what do you do about it? Our current best genetic engineering tools are quite primitive compared to what would be required to do something significant about aging.
At the same time, we’ve been making good progress, and other industries are developing tools that can be relevant to our field. So, while the aging field as a whole suffers from chronic underinvestment, especially in harder problems, tools of synthetic biology and computational biology are being developed for purposes that have nothing to do with aging, but those tools can be applied to aging.
There are steps along the way. We can look at all the variants within humans that are associated with longevity and mix-and-match the best ones. We can look at the comparative biology of different species and see why they live longer versus shorter, and we can identify all the principles, tricks, and cool things that evolution has developed.
We can combine all that, apply to humans, and then start looking at the damage accumulation hypothesis – say, this or that thing accumulates with age, let’s see what it does. If you could get rid of all those things, you would effectively bring somebody back to a youthful state.
What is your contribution to these efforts?
Mark: We’re trying to build a coherent plan – like a white paper, so that we can go out there and say to people what they should work on. This roadmap will have a list of specific projects – what types of people are needed, how much funding is needed, what are the timelines involved? It’s going to be very specific and actionable.
People who go through our program, visit our website, or hear us talk can look at this roadmap and decide how they can get involved.
Nathan: Obviously, it’s a very valuable project for us, because, as we run these programs, invariably, the number one question that we get from newcomers is “What should I work on?” and this is supposed to help direct people to outstanding bottlenecks.
But the other sort of outcome we’re looking for is increasing funding. If you can articulate an actual sort of concrete narrative of how we might get to an indefinite lifespan, then you’re more likely to attract funding, because it’s no longer this endless black hole of research areas that you can throw tons of money on without knowing whether it will take decades or centuries or trillions of dollars to actually get a result.
One thing we can do with the roadmap is articulate timelines and budget estimates for some of these key objectives. For some of these strategies, like replacement, you can actually get a rough estimate; it’s easy to conceptualize. So, ideally, we want funders to fund these underinvested areas that potentially can have a high impact.
You’re building local chapters, too, correct?
Nathan: Yes, we have this model in mind of how we can scale these processes and ideas to get more people involved and working on the hard problems that could potentially get us to indefinite lifespan.
The model that we have in mind is that we’ve created this program, this machine that takes an unactivated talent. Then they go through the program, they get a sense of the community, and the context, and they connect with other people, who are talented and just as motivated with the same ultimate mission.
Then they go out and build companies, research and other organizations to tackle those problems, but some of these people will be inclined towards community building, and we’re already seeing this. They will go ahead and create a local chapter, a copy of what we’re trying to do. You can see how this self-replicates, like a von Neumann machine.
Mark: There’s another aspect of that, which we discovered initially. So, yes, it’s a bit like von Neumann’s machine, but there’s also a bit of a Borg analogy. For instance, one of our members runs the Swedish Longevity Cluster. He came to one of our cohorts and said, you guys need to run your next camp in Sweden. And we said, huh, Sweden in January? That sounds like a great idea.
It’s a good strategy for us, when we meet aligned people who are already running an organization, to jointly throw an event, and we’re happy to do the same thing with other organizations. Foresight Institute runs an annual Longevity Frontiers workshop, and we’re jointly running the event this year. Anyone who’s aligned with us on values, we’re super happy to not try to reinvent the wheel in a region or in an area and just work with people.
You conducted a large industry survey about bottlenecks in the longevity field and even published a paper about it. What were your findings?
Mark: Yes, we asked 400 people in the field what is specifically blocking them from making progress, and the answers were interesting. The number one thing people wanted was more large public datasets to do with aging or with biology that’s relevant to aging. There’s a lot of siloed data, a lot of piecemeal, small datasets that are produced, but if you look at something like AlphaFold, it only exists because of this giant protein databank that is publicly available for free and was funded by the government.
Funding was another big one. Specifically, people wanted larger, more ambitious grants for longer time periods, including for people from other fields. A lot of cool results are coming from people like Peter (Fedichev) from Gero, a physicist, from people with different perspectives. It’s very important, but it’s hard to get money to do something like that.
The lack of validated biomarkers was also in the top three. Importantly, people wanted a regulatory framework for aging, so that we could run aging trials, but that’s secondary to the question of how we measure aging. How can you run an aging trial if you don’t have validated biomarkers?
Nathan: It’s actually a very difficult problem to demonstrate lifespan extension, at least in humans. For the most part, all the longevity biotech startup playbooks involve some combination of a label expansion, or a multimorbidity trial like TAME, or a validated biomarker, a surrogate endpoint.
Those are the main approaches but none of them guarantees that you’ll have maximum lifespan extension. These are all proxies for lifespan extension. That’s something that must be addressed.
The first two obstacles seem solvable, but this one might prove much trickier, right?
Mark: Yes, it’s a science question. It’s indeterminable, and you can’t say ahead of time how long it will take to answer it. That’s just the nature of science. Science tends not to be a smooth curve but more of a step function, and the distance between the steps is often unknown.
We’re meeting in Vitalia, a first-of-a-kind longevity-related cohabitation project. What’s your impression of it?
Mark: I’ve been here since the beginning of February (and Nathan only for a couple of days). It’s nice to be in a community of people who are aligned along the same values.
Typically, as somebody who’s into solving aging entirely, you tend to be the odd one wherever you happen to be. If you plop yourself in on any random location on Earth and ask the 10 closest people to you, what they think about curing aging, eight of them will probably be like, what the hell are you talking about? One of them might be neutral or positive. But here, everyone’s on board, even if they have different ideas about what that means. Generally, people here seem to be open-minded, intelligent, and fun.
Do you think projects like Vitalia advance our goals?
Mark: I personally wouldn’t live here because it lacks the infrastructure to do the things that are important to me, but there’s a role for what Vitalia is trying to accomplish, such as medical tourism and running gene therapy trials with much lower costs and faster turnaround time. This is important because if we get some success that way, it will put pressure on those slower regulatory bodies in the developed world to change.
All such projects are trying to navigate this trade-off between stiffer regulation, but better infrastructure and other niceties in developed countries, and more lenient regulations, but numerous other problems in less developed ones. What’s the sweet spot? How do we solve this?
Nathan: The best thing to do is just to experiment, see what works, leverage each sort of jurisdiction’s strengths, deal with the weaknesses.
Vitalia is a really interesting experiment. Before coming here, I was more skeptical, because I don’t really know much about those attempts at deregulation. But when I think about it from a personal perspective, if I was 80 or 90 years old, and nothing had been approved yet, and there were some interesting therapies around that had some glimmers of efficacy, I would want at least an option to try something.
While I think this idea of informed consent is a tricky philosophical and ethical question, in my own personal situation or for my loved ones, if they got a terminal disease… I’ve had friends and past colleagues in this situation, and they dropped everything to try and find whatever experimental treatment, whatever clinical trial is out there.
Trying to make novel therapies more accessible is one aspect of Vitalia. Another one is just co-living. Do you find any value in that?
Mark and Nathan: Definitely! Yes! Absolutely!
Mark: I think it helps you be more productive, but also to hold each other accountable for taking care of yourselves. You can share resources, like the best food, and the best health practices. Those are not always the cheapest lifestyles, but when you do it together, you can share the cost of things, and I think it’s really valuable.
I want to add something about the regulatory side: the way regulations are set up in the developed world, is to protect against downsides, but they place zero weight on the cost of delaying therapies.
You mean, there’s more emphasis on the “do no harm” part?
Mark: Yes. Let’s say there’s a gene therapy that works really well in animal models, and it seems to be safe, and then it takes you years to get it to market, and many people die just because they didn’t receive your therapy in time. There are true stories like this. If those people were allowed to use it after Phase I, they wouldn’t have died. But the way current regulatory agencies are set up, this consideration has zero weight. I don’t think that makes sense.
I have been thinking for a while that, in a community of biology-savvy people, some of those defenses might not be required because people know what they’re doing.
Mark: It’s tricky. How do you know who’s ready and who’s not? It’s like the whole accredited investor thing, right? Or like people need a license to drive a car.
It’s basically a conditional right to try, which I think is a novel concept worth contemplating.
Mark: Yes, that may be a compromise that some developed nations might be willing to explore.
Any final words for our audience?
Mark: If you’re interested in working on these hard research and technology development problems, apply to the Longevity Biotech Fellowship. That’s our job to orient you, to help you with education, networking, investment, coworkers, cofounders – whatever. Our job is to fit all those pieces together and help you have an impactful career in longevity.
