Ian Sample

speaker

2,123 appearances 29 recordings 3 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 4d ago

Ian Sample’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 29 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 8.

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Science Weekly · Can a world-first gene therapy reverse ageing? · 16 Jul 2026 podcast

And one of the ways you can do that is you can, instead of putting all four Yamanaka factors into cells, you can put, say, three in. matched

Or you can do something where... matched

you can pulse them, if you like. matched

You can kind of pulse the dose of the aminoc factor so you can rewind, rewind, rewind a little bit, but stop short of completely destroying that cell's identity because it's when you get rid of the identity altogether that you're at risk of these cells going on to becoming tumours. matched

So this is a phase one trial of a gene therapy that they're calling ER100. matched

It's done by a company called Life Biosciences. matched

And they are doing this trial for people who have age-related eye disease. matched

So these are diseases which will very likely make these people go blind. matched

They're using a harmless virus that carries Yamanaka genes, and they will be injected into the retina with the hope that those factors rewind the clock on those cells in the eye. matched

Now, Paul isn't involved in the trial, but he took me through how the researchers hope it's going to work. matched

This is the first inhuman trial of this therapy and of any therapy that's tried to do this kind of thing. matched

So as a phase one, it's really just looking at safety, but clearly they'll hope to get some sort of information on whether it has any effect, any meaningful effect. matched

And it's worth saying that Life Biosciences, the company behind this, is co-founded by David Sinclair, who is a professor of genetics at Harvard, and he's matched

He's a controversial scientist. matched

He's a controversial scientist in the whole sort of longevity research field. matched

And, you know, to some people, I think he is, you know, this absolute pioneer who is charging ahead. matched

I would say for others, he is... matched

sometimes gets ahead of the evidence, shall we say, and pushes too far. matched

But there's no doubt David Sinclair is a big figure. matched

And I think what's interesting is that this trial, obviously looking at eye disease, but I think it's really just the starting point of where he's interested in using these kinds of therapies to treat patients. matched

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