Renowned Harvard University geneticist David Sinclair recently made a startling assertion: Scientific data shows he has knocked more than two decades off his biological age.
What's the 49-year-old's secret? He says his daily regimen includes ingesting a molecule his own research found improved the health and lengthened the life span of mice. Sinclair now boasts online that he has the lung capacity, cholesterol and blood pressure of a "young adult" and the "heart rate of an athlete."
Despite his enthusiasm, published scientific research has not yet demonstrated the molecule works in humans as it does in mice. Sinclair, however, has a considerable financial stake in his claims being proven correct, and has lent his scientific prowess to commercializing possible life extension products such as molecules known as "NAD boosters."
His financial interests include being listed as an inventor on a patent licensed to Elysium Health, a supplement company that sells a NAD booster in pills for $60 a bottle. He's also an investor in InsideTracker, the company that he says measured his age.
Discerning hype from reality in the longevity field has become tougher than ever as reputable scientists such as Sinclair and pre-eminent institutions like Harvard align themselves with promising but unproven interventions _ and at times promote and profit from them.
Fueling the excitement, investors pour billions of dollars into the field even as many of the products already on the market face fewer regulations and therefore a lower threshold of proof.
"If you say you're a terrific scientist and you have a treatment for aging, it gets a lot of attention," said Jeffrey Flier, a former Harvard Medical School dean who has been critical of the hype. "There is financial incentive and inducement to overpromise before all the research is in."
Elysium, co-founded in 2014 by a prominent MIT scientist to commercialize the molecule nicotinamide riboside, a type of NAD booster, highlights its "exclusive" licensing agreement with Harvard and the Mayo Clinic and Sinclair's role as an inventor. According to the company's press release, the agreement is aimed at supplements that slow "aging and age-related diseases."
Further adding scientific gravitas to its brand, the website lists eight Nobel laureates and 19 other prominent scientists who sit on its scientific advisory board. The company also advertises research partnerships with Harvard and U.K. universities Cambridge and Oxford.
Some scientists and institutions have grown uneasy with such ties. Cambridge's Milner Therapeutics Institute announced in 2017 it would receive funding from Elysium, cementing a research "partnership." But after hearing complaints from faculty that the institute was associating itself with an unproven supplement, it quietly decided not to renew the funding or the company's membership to its "innovation" board.
"The sale of nutritional supplements of unproven clinical benefit is commonplace," said Stephen O'Rahilly, the director of Cambridge's Metabolic Research Laboratories who applauded his university for reassessing the arrangement. "What is unusual in this case is the extent to which institutions and individuals from the highest levels of the academy have been co-opted to provide scientific credibility for a product whose benefits to human health are unproven."
