The Need For Philanthropy

Why should there be a need to go to the public for funds on something so important as targeting age-related pathology? Why wouldn't the government or pharmaceutical companies take care of this?

In regard to the question of help from the government, there is only so much money to go around. To provide a framework for understanding where government money goes, you may have seen the following diagram elsewhere on this site or a similar one at www.SENS.org:

This diagram distinguishes different ways of impeding (flat-headed arrows mean "impede") the development of age-related pathology. But this diagram in a way is also a budget chart. The largest part of the budget of the National Institute of Aging (NIA) targets individual diseases post-symptomatically, one by one, at the end of the aging process (Treatment "B").

Much of the remainder of the NIA budget is palliative in nature. In short, the NIA budget emphasizes the right side of the diagram, at the end of the aging process, not intervention in aging or prevention of its effects.

This emphasis leaves about $6-10M per annum for the study of the biology of aging. And of this budget, the emphasis is on basic science, not medical intervention. In other words, the funding doesn't even tend to support Treatments "A", much less the middle strategy of repair and degredation. A more eloquent articulation of the problem (and solutions) can be found here.

One solution is for private individuals to provide funding to SENS research, either through LMRF or more directly. A second solution is to write the NIA and/or your representative, senators, and the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP), proposing a budget shift or increase. You can write HELP here. The Senate subcommittee overseeing the NIA is the Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies. The House Committee on Energy and Commerce can be reached here. Its Health Subcommittee can be reached there as well.

As for help from the pharmaceutical industry with preventative aging intervention, neither the regulatory environment nor the market strongly encourage innovation as much as lifestyle drugs and finding mimics of competitors' products. Treatments resulting from SENS would have additional issues. The FDA doesn't view aging medicines as approvable, partly since there are no drugs yet that can prove life extension. (Caloric restriction studies are the closest, but still in a multi-decade study proving life extension in lower primates.) To obtain FDA approval, pharmaceuticals working on aging-related medicine therefore tend to focus on diseases individually. Strategies that would affect age-related diseases en masse don't fit into this strategy.

Furthermore, clinical trials to demonstrate effective healthy life extension would take a tremendously long time. (One way around this though is to rejuvenate older test subjects.) Also, pharmaceutical companies may fear that enzymes patented for their ability to break crosslinks or degrade other aging by-products may be easily mimicked by competitors once a prototype is developed. An unlikely deterrant, but certainly not an inducement, is that medical treatments that are not only preventative but also are needed infrequently (likely on the scale of decades, since the relevant damage/aggregates build so slowly) won't be the most lucrative of a pharmaceutical company's products. Furthermore, such treatments may send the demand for a company's more lucrative, post-symptomatic treatments for age-related diseases plummeting.

Some relevant articles on pharmaceuticals and the FDA: 1, 2 (toward the middle), 3