A new era of longevity science: models of aging, human trials of rapamycin, biological clocks, promising compounds, and lifestyle interventions | Brian Kennedy, Ph.D.

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
Hey everyone, welcome to the Drive podcast. I'm your host, Peter Attia. This podcast, my website and my weekly newsletter all focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity into something accessible for everyone. Our goal is to provide the best content in health and wellness, and we've established a great team of analysts to make this happen. It is extremely important to me to provide all of this content without relying on paid ads. To do this, our work is made entirely possible by our members, and in return, we offer exclusive member-only content and benefits above and beyond what is available for free. If you want to take your knowledge of this space to the next level, it's our goal to ensure members get back much more than the price of the subscription. If you want to learn more about the benefits of our premium membership, head over to peterattiamd.com/subscribe. My guest this week is Brian Kennedy. Brian is a renowned biologist and leader in the field of aging research. He is the former CEO of the Buck Institute for Research on Aging. He is now the director of the Center for Healthy Longevity at the National University of Singapore. In this episode, we discuss why Brian moved his research from the US to Singapore and how that shift opened the door to running larger scale clinical aging studies. How the field of longevity research changed around 2017 when serious funding started pouring in and reshaping priorities and the pace of discovery. We explore two different concepts of aging, one being the linear accumulation of wear and tear with age, but the other being the exponential or non-linear increase in all-cause mortality with age. Again, I think Brian's explanation here is one of the more interesting ones I've heard. Talk about how rapamycin is being tested in humans today, what we know so far and why dose timing, especially around exercise, could be critical. Why current aging biomarkers often miss the mark and what Brian's team is doing to build a clock that clinicians might actually find useful. Compounds that show early promise such as alpha-ketoglutarate, urolithin A, and sublingual NAD boosters, molecule we've long discussed and questioned and that Brian himself has been skeptical of. But nevertheless, we found an interesting place to discuss it here. How to combine lifestyle factors and pharmacology with a focus on VO2 max, strength training and the use of GLP-1, agonists and SGLT-2 inhibitors. Lots more as well. So without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Brian Kennedy.
Brian, thank you so much for being here. You might actually hold the record for longest journey taken to come to this podcast. In fact, I don't know if anybody could travel a greater distance than from Singapore to come out here. So thank you very much.

**Brian Kennedy** (3:03)
Oh, it's my pleasure to be here. And I don't think you can get further from here to Singapore.

**Peter Attia** (3:08)
Let's tell folks a little bit about how you wound up in Singapore. I'll speed things through a bit by way of background. Obviously, you used to run an institute called the Buck Institute. Tell folks a little bit about what the Buck is and what you did there.

**Brian Kennedy** (3:19)
It was really the first institute solely devoted to understanding aging and longevity.
It started around 2000 with some money that was donated by a woman who died in Marin County, north of San Francisco. I was the second CEO there in 2010 There were about 20 faculty at the time all devoted to either aging or aspects of aging, very basic science. As you can imagine, in the 2000s and around 2010, that was a significant component of the aging research field. It was still a very small field. And so the goal was really to help that institute grow. And it was tough times in the 2018s because the funding levels were low. And it was right before the real interest in aging and longevity happened around 2017, 2018 So we were really struggling to keep the doors open. And I think the buck's doing a lot better now, as well as the rest of the aging field.

**Peter Attia** (4:13)
At the time that you were there, how much of the funding came from NIH and how much came from either donations or industry?

**Brian Kennedy** (4:22)
Yeah, it was very heavily oriented to NIH, and our goal was to get more industry funding. We started seven companies when I was there, some of which are still hanging around, and also really tried to ramp up the philanthropy. But philanthropy for aging wasn't really happening until around 2017, 2018, when people started really getting the idea that you could slow aging and prevent all these diseases and stay healthy and functional. And so that revolution happened around that time.