Jacob Kimmel

If you want to just throw a new tool into biology, you somehow have to get around one side of that equation.

Yeah.

Just to give the delivery folks credit, they're currently ahead.

There are currently no reprogrammed medicines for aging, and there are medicines that deliver nucleic acids.

So they're still winning the race against us right now.

But to your point, I hope the lines cross.

I hope we out-compete them.

So I do think, actually, even if you were able to only target some subsets of cells, it's not that you would see this strange Frankensteinian benefit in health in some aspects and lack of benefit entirely in others.

I think what we found across the history of medicine is that actually the body is an incredibly interconnected complex system.

And if you're able to rescue a function, even in one cell type and one tissue, you often have knock-on benefits in many places that you didn't initially anticipate.

One way we can get examples of this is through transplant experiments.

So both in bone marrow and in liver, for example, we have fairly common transplant procedures that occur in humans.

And so we can compare old humans who get livers from young people or old people, and in a way ask a pretty controlled question.

What occurs as a function of just having a young liver?

Is it that, for example, you can eat a lot of fatty food and drink a lot and be fine, or is it that actually you see broader benefits?

And the latter seems to be true.

They have reduced risk of several other diseases and overall better survival as a function of having a younger liver than they do for an older one, suggesting that actually because these tissues are so interconnected,

Many of these organs like the liver, like your adipose tissue or endocrine organs, they're also sending out signals to many other places in your body, helping coordinate your health across multiple tissue systems.

Even just one tissue can benefit other tissue systems in your body at the same time.

HSCs are another example where there are many circumstances where one of the – and then I'll summarize.