The LBF community is dedicated to accelerating progress towards solving aging. While the field has made substantial advances in the past decade, there remain many large systemic bottlenecks to progress - and little has been done to address them.
As a first step to addressing these bottlenecks we attempted to map them and bring them into limelight. We aimed to establish an empirical, systematic, rigorous, and minimally biased methodology. To do so, we surveyed 400 participants across various sectors of longevity, asking them for their personal bottlenecks and desired solutions in a combination of structured and free-form questions. From the 1000s of answers, we built a classification system of Bottlenecks and Solutions and tabulated the frequency of each. The result is a first-of-a-kind taxonomy of the bottlenecks to progress and desired solutions for the longevity space.
On this page you’ll find the main takeaways of this work. For more detail, see our preprint paper, explore the answers in our interactive site, or access the full dataset for your own analysis.
Most importantly, if you want to make an impact and work on or fund solutions to any of these bottlenecks, consider joining the LBF or contact us below!
A lack of validated aging biomarkers; a lack of funding; a lack of good aging models; and a lack of a defined regulatory path for aging interventions.
In your work in aging, what are the biggest bottlenecks you currently face?
Figure 1. Top 15 bottlenecks, and a summary of all bottlenecks across all participants. The area of the bubble is proportional to the number of answers.
In your work in aging, what are the biggest bottlenecks you currently face?
Figure 2. Profession-specific bottlenecks.
More and better access to data
If it was available, which one tool, resource, or regulatory/social/other type of change would have the biggest positive impact on your work?
Figure 3. Summary and top 15 most needed solutions across all participants.
Reprogramming, genetic medicine, and organ replacement
For each intervention, how many years of life do you think they will add to the average lifespan of generally healthy people in 5, 10, and 25 years of research?
Figure 4. Perceived efficacy of interventions in the short-term, mid-term and long-term across all participants. Each dot represents one individual answer.
100 years or indefinitely
Assuming continuous good health, how long would you want to live?
Figure 5. Personal longevity goals of participants.
Visit our interactive site or access the full data and see how different members of the longevity community responded
Check out the preprint of our paper for our detailed analysis of the data.
Now the real work begins. We are organizing working groups around these bottlenecks to build towards solutions. If you want to work with like-minded people and champion, fund, or contribute to a solution, sign up below.
We will send out invites to initial round-table discussions, organize bottleneck-specific meetups and keep you updated on overall progress.
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