Ending aging and death is humanity's greatest challenge. Yet we lack a coherent technical plan to solve it. This is the biggest obstacle to effectively attracting and allocating talent and resources in longevity.
Critical path technology paths to extend lifespan indefinitely, in order of greatest potential impact relative to current funding of pathway.
Replace old parts with young. Full body transplants + gradual brain replacement.
Pausing biological activity and deterioation indefinitely with reversible cryopreservation and/or chemical fixation.
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Vastly more advanced computational models of biology plus genetic and cellular engineering tools.
An overview of the roadmap we are building including: our rationale for building it, inclusion criteria, technical objectives, key recent science, existing and proposed projects, and our process for updating and filling in details through expert interviews and community engagement. The full roadmap will include actionable information on how to start, join, or support key projects.
Presented at VitaDAO Life Extension Conference, Vitalia (Feb 24th, 2024)
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We're doing deep dive interviews with experts to understand their mental models and pathways to solve aging -- and updating the roadmap.
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Please read before throwing stones.
Yes. Solving aging is one of the most challenging and meaningful technological achievements humanity will ever undertake.
Could you imagine trying to map the human genome, land on the moon, or build a fusion reactor for the first time without some overarching plan?
Despite most funding in longevity biotech going towards traditional pharma approaches, this strategy will likely have modest lifespan effect sizes and are not a scalable solution to address all potential mechanisms and processes of aging.
This doesn't mean that aging pharma isn't a worthwhile endeavour. We certainly support these efforts, but they should not be the dominant focus.
It is often argued that initial aging pharma dugs may help drive funding and interest in longevity, but the key technologies that could actually solve aging will take longer to develop, are severely underfunded, and need to be worked on today.
The Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) approach proposed by Aubrey de Grey in 2002 is a categorization of different possible forms of cellular or molecular damage associated with aging, with some proposed repair strategies. However, it leaves out many promising alternative approaches.
The Hallmarks of Aging is a similar (arguably derivative) categorization system of possible aging mechanisms with no specific proposals for how to address them.
1. Support our work at LBF by donating here.
2. Get to work on aging by working on the key technology paths and joining the LBF Community.
3. Invest in our fund Longevity Acceleration Fund, which funds ambitious founders working on key areas of the technical roadmap.
4. Are you an expert? Give us feedback or come on our podcast to discuss the roadmap.
The LBF roadmap is a living document covering the most plausible strategies to solve aging based on the technologies and scientific knowledge that we possess today. This will change in the future as new unanticipated discoveries and breakthroughs are made, and we will update the plan accordingly.
Yes, solving the problem of biological aging is plausible within the lifetimes of people alive today.
However, we are not on track to solve aging given the extremely low resource allocation.
And while the LBF roadmap describes how to attempt the development of certain life extending technologies, there are still significant scientific and technology risks to these approaches.
