The Longevity Revolution Is Here | Lifespan with Dr. David Sinclair - Season 2, Episode 1

Dr. David Sinclair (0:00)

We are living through the most revolutionary period in the history of humanity. You could be one of the last people to live a normal lifespan, or one of the first to break the maximum limit of 122 The technology is coming. OSK alone could reset the epigenetic clock of human cells. One of the most exciting milestones happened recently, ER100, became the world's first epigenetic reprogramming therapy to be cleared for human clinical trials. It's the same tech that cures blindness in mice. People that have been treated, if all goes well, will be able to see again. So cross your fingers that that works.

Welcome to Lifespan, a show where we discuss the cutting-edge science of aging and how to live healthier at any stage of life.

I'm David Sinclair, a scientist and professor working on understanding why we age and discovering new ways to slow and even reverse the aging process.

On this show, I share an insider's look at the latest from my lab, the field and what's just around the corner.

Hey everyone, it's great to be back after the pilot episodes, which I'm so grateful went to number one. This new Lifespan show is bigger and better now. Matt will be coming back for some shows, and I'm also going to be interviewing scientists from the longevity field and from my lab. We'll hear what it's like to make these discoveries and where humanity is heading. These folks have more than a five-year view on the future because they're actually inventing it. Normally, this would be hidden behind closed lab doors, but we're going to gain special access to join our community. Visit lifespan.com. My life's mission is to extend healthy Lifespan for all. That's why I founded Lifespan, which exists to help you and your loved ones live your longest, healthiest lives. We're building the world's largest longevity community and supporting medical research through the nonprofit Lifespan Foundation. Of the 150,000 people around the world that die every day, approximately two-thirds of those are due to age-related diseases and conditions with aging at the root cause of those. Hence, we can dramatically improve human health by targeting aging itself. We are in a new era, and Lifespan covers what you need to know about the exciting world of aging and longevity science. In making this episode, I used everything from tennis balls to DNA models to show you how cellular software might be rebooted. I recorded this over many weeks because it was really hard to make. We looked at thousands of papers and double and triple-checked every fact and even re-recorded parts for accuracy. With that, let's go. To my left here, I'm excited to introduce the Lifespan Smart Board. This board here, I can go up, I can touch it. We can zoom in on figures from papers, and every show will be examining the science on that white board and also bringing up video chats and other things. To my right here, we have a glass cabinet as part of this beautiful old library that I've filled with objects of interest that I'm going to bring out throughout the shows going forward. They'll illustrate what I'm talking about, from DNA molecules to the Wright Brothers plane even. Arthur C. Clarke, the science fiction writer who features in my book Lifespan, famously said, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. If you've not yet heard the news, I'm excited to inform you, the technology is coming. One of the most exciting milestones happened recently, in January 2026, when Life Biosciences drug candidate called ER100 became the world's first epigenetic reprogramming therapy to be cleared for human clinical trials by the FDA. The tech is essentially a gene therapy that came straight out of my lab from my student, Wan Cheng Lu. It's the same tech that we published on the cover of Nature in 2020, that we showed reverses aging and cures blindness in mice.

Professor Bruce Kassander, Sharon Rosenweig-Glipson, and her team at LifeBio have since shown that this tech also works in monkeys to restore visual function. And we're about to learn if it works in humans to reverse vision loss. And from there, just pick your organ of interest. Ear, kidney, heart, liver, skin. The possibilities are just too numerous to list. I'll talk much more about all of that later and give updates on how the trial goes in later episodes. What used to be science fiction just 10 years ago is now coming to reality. And the science that used to live on the pages of journals and in academic conferences like the ones I typically attend, it's now coming to the market. No science show would be complete these days without mentioning AI. Artificial intelligence isn't here just to solve problems faster. It's here to rethink them. AI systems today are helping uncover previously invisible aging biomarkers, revealing drug targets tied to biological aging, and even suggesting repurposed compounds that could rewind the age of cells and address multiple hallmarks of aging at once. I know this because my lab is doing this, and I'm excited to bring you the latest findings of my lab and the field, insights you can find nowhere else.