IMPACT COMMUNICATION
AND INNOVATION
AND INNOVATION
In July of last year, McKenzie Funk of Outside Online described the journey of Liz Parrish, creator of the longevity company BioViva, in search of medical treatments capable of helping her achieve her ultimate goal: to live forever or, at the very least, to extend human life indefinitely. To do this, Parrish, 44 at the time, flew to Bogotá, Colombia, to undergo an experimental gene therapy without even telling her family. The contents of the injections, as Funk describes, included substances like dry ice—information enough to keep the entrepreneur up at night.
“In the studies she had read and the videos she had watched, mice that received the treatment she was about to undergo were born again, their fur shone, and their muscles gained new vigor. The change was almost immediate—a matter of days, weeks.”
But as Funk also points out, mice are different from humans, and drugs that work on them may have no effect on us at all. Even so, with a courage worthy of a biohacker, Parrish was willing to take the risk. To that end, the entrepreneur spent the night in a clinic room where she received more than 100 injections in her triceps, thighs, buttocks, and face, just below her cheeks.
Two days of fever and vomiting later, Parrish's doctor decided she was well enough to return home to the United States. If she had previously lived a quiet life running her small biotech startup, now, as Patient Zero of a completely experimental gene therapy, discretion was the last thing Parrish had. Not wanting to miss the timing, BioViva also published a press release indicating that a first patient had received a gene therapy to reverse aging, though it did not reveal that the founder was that person.
In any case, Parrish's life continued as normal: she kept reading and answering her emails, taking the dog for walks in the woods, and taking the kids to school. She also didn't have much of a habit of exercising, perhaps less than doctors might recommend, but Parrish also kept a diary in which she would describe any changes she noticed in the mirror or in the photographs she took every day for months. Nothing visible. But why would a healthy, married woman with children subject herself to such a risk?
Parrish says that in 2013, her family was blindsided by the sudden diagnosis that her son had type 1 diabetes, a chronic disease in which the pancreas stops producing insulin. The boy then began treatment at Seattle Children's Hospital, one of the best institutes in the United States, which has more than 400 beds occupied by children suffering from cancer, heart disease, neurological disorders, and brain damage.
But despite all the support offered to the child, Parrish, as an enthusiast and avid reader of scientific and medical content, thought that a possible approach to her son's problem would be, for example, to freeze a biological sample of his pancreas so that, in the future, when there was enough technology, his condition could be reversed—more or less in the style of how the premise of cryogenics works. However, when a nurse was approached, she did not have enough instruments to, at that moment, discuss, for example, the possibilities of stem cell treatment—after all, while Parrish's son would survive, many other children in the hospital would not have that same possibility. And that made the entrepreneur even more restless.
That was the moment when Parrish realized that her son could die, and what his funeral would be like. She then thought about her own death and how she would find the boy's body, imagining that image over and over again. This anxiety from the awareness of death, however, led Parrish to go after a cure, a solution she sought at medical conferences where she would approach researchers to see if, perhaps, certain treatments could be applied to children.
At one of these events, specifically the sixth biennial SENS Foundation conference in England, Parrish had the opportunity to meet Aubrey de Grey, a gerontologist known for his approach to longevity and the end of death—fighting death as if it were a disease. It was in 2014 that he began to gain media attention by participating in the documentary The Immortalists, revealing himself to be a researcher with a background in computer science and biology who used his inherited money to support initiatives and research on aging.
“She watched presentations on caloric restriction, gene editing, and tissue regeneration, and she heard speaker after speaker mention something called telomeres—small pieces of genetic material described as a biological clock. The people there were openly dreaming of an immortal future, cures for all diseases, and when Parrish asked the anti-aging researchers her usual question, some said, Yes, this technique could help children. Of course it could. Curing death would help everyone. ‘What do you need?’, she asked. They needed money.”
Parrish thought that raising money would be easy compared to the challenge of “curing death,” so since she was already helping her husband with his software company, she had some contacts with other tech companies. And in that sense, funding research seemed much more important to her than creating an app.
Even without an academic background or experience founding startups, Parrish accepted the challenge that launched her as one of the youngest middle-aged billionaires in Silicon Valley, alongside names like Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the founders of Google. They, too, after the same SENS conference that Parrish had attended, opened a new Google initiative focused on longevity: Calico, which received $1.5 billion in investment. The immortality industry then gained momentum in the American market, especially since, a year after Calico's launch, a $1 million prize was also created for companies working in the field. Later, we also had the case of the startup Ambrosia, which suggested transfusing blood from younger people into the bodies of older adults, and then, in 2017, the Silicon Valley Longevity Fund, directed by Laura Deming, raised $22 million and created Unity Biotechnology, a company focused on removing dying cells from a person's body before they accumulate. The idea seemed so good that even Jeff Bezos contributed a total of $151 million in funding.
But despite all this explosion in the longevity market having occurred recently, people like 66-year-old Bill Andrews have been in this fight for much longer. Andrews' meeting with Parrish also took place in 2013, when both participated in a podcast where they discussed basic questions regarding telomerase, hTERT, and a concept called the Hayflick Limit, which is a scientific principle established by microbiology professor Leonard Hayflick and his colleague Paul Moorhead in 1961.
Until that moment, scientists understood that human cells functioned like bacteria, that is, that they could divide forever. But Hayflick proved that this was not true by observing that human cells could only divide about 50 times before stopping and entering an almost “zombie” mode called senescence. “Somehow, cells know how old they are,” Andrews said on the podcast. “The number of divisions levels off. That is the Hayflick Limit. What we now know is that this is caused by a limitation of telomeres.”
“Andrews went on to say that gene therapy is the easiest way to reach the limit, but that it is unlikely the FDA will approve such a treatment because aging is not classified as a disease. He warns that the consequences of activating telomerase in all of an individual's cells are unknown, and that gene therapy is a serious commitment—you cannot simply reverse it. ‘It might be okay,’ he said, ‘we just don't know yet.’”
The result of this conversation was a partnership between Parrish and Andrews, who began working on a gene therapy for Parrish’s new company, BioViva. Six months before leaving for Bogotá in 2015, the entrepreneur made a public statement at an event called People Unlimited in Scottsdale, Arizona, where dozens of people gather to discuss educational issues, lifestyles, and social organizations aimed at helping people achieve an indefinite lifespan. In her speech, Parrish stated that she became interested and involved in the issue of longevity primarily because she wanted to work on curing pediatric diseases. “I never thought I would be talking about longevity. But when I started looking more into the science, I began to understand that it was time to fight a new war—the first and oldest human war. By curing aging, we can help with many diseases that children have.”
“With striking fluency, she recounted the history of mortality. Humans used to die primarily from infectious diseases. Then we developed antibiotics. Now we die primarily from problems of aging—cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer’s. We need to develop a new kind of revolutionary technology, she said. We need gene therapy.”
But for the U.S. government to allow such treatments, it would be necessary to raise nearly a billion dollars and conduct fifteen years of testing, and obviously, no one was willing to pay that price, especially in terms of time. As a result of her presentation, Parrish made contact with various investors and finally managed to raise the $250,000 needed to conduct her experiment in Bogotá.
Beyond the BioViva press release, Parrish also took the initiative to post an article herself on Reddit titled A Tale of Do-It-Yourself Gene Therapy. Among the questions asked, one of the main ones concerned the price of this type of treatment, which could be a divisive issue between those who will be able to live indefinitely and those who will continue to die from infectious diseases despite the existence of treatments. Parrish’s response was standard: just as a supercomputer cost $8 million in the 1960s, today we have much more processing power in our cell phones than in the rocket that took man to the moon.
Despite this, the results of the therapy Parrish underwent were not truly conclusive regarding the treatment's effectiveness. She did not develop cancer, but she also did not return to being 25 or show impressive results in terms of her triglycerides or muscle mass. However, in 2016, BioViva published a new press release stating that the treatment had been successful, as, comparatively, her leukocyte telomeres had grown by 9%, which, according to the report, would mean a 20-year reversal of aging. However, no truly scientific study was published alongside the release.
Now, however, BioViva is following a new path: bioinformatics. The idea is to start using artificial intelligence and machine learning to develop new gene therapies, a trend that has been growing among researchers and even in the medical field regarding disease diagnosis. In any case, the belief remains that telomerase and the possibility of increasing the length of blood cell telomeres is a potential approach to life extension. At least, that is what Andrews has still been focusing on in his new partnership with Libella Gene Therapeutics.
