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This article is part of LEVITY’s editorial collaboration with pump.science. It is written by the pump.science team and the views expressed are those of the authors.

Everyone speaks about longevity escape velocity (LEV) as if it’s an inevitability in our lifetimes. The longevity community goes crazy over posts that claim “if you can just survive 10 more years, you’ll live forever”. Yet, nobody wants to look at the unfortunate facts. Optimism trumps realism in the longevity space, and this is slowing us down. If we want to survive long enough to reach LEV, we must take off our rose-colored glasses.

Here is the reality: life expectancy is decreasing and we have no interventions with any human evidence for life extension, with no signs of either changing. This is not meant to be a pessimistic take, but rather a realistic take on the speed of progress. If we want to live to eternity, we have to make moves immediately. We must change the scientific and financing systems that are holding us back. We posit that it is the systems, not the science itself, that are rate limiting LEV. We believe the greatest accelerator to LEV will be a project like pump.science, because it enables anyone to test and fund hypotheses and generate open data for training AI. 

For-profit biotech is not aligned with improvement in health; it is aligned with making more profit. Let this sink in. It is important to understand why lifespans are not increasing. The objective function of capitalist biotechnology is to maximally extract profit from its customers, which involves charging exorbitant prices from health insurance companies while the patients suffer. The healthcare system makes more money when patients are sick, not when they are healthy.

To realign biotech with health, we must put the power back into the hands of individuals to incentivize and reward products that keep them healthy, not products that keep them sick for as long as possible, insidiously referred to as ‘treatment’. The fact that the healthcare system is not engineered to care for your health, but rather to make you sick and keep you sick, should scare you. It scares us enough to develop a product that rips the power out from under the healthcare system and puts the hands back into individuals. It sounds crazy. Crypto-enabled biotech that requires financing from individuals, instead of professional investors, but it seems to be the only way out of this broken system.

Luckily, the tides are turning. People are waking up and realizing nobody is going to save them and they have to save themselves. We built pump.science for those of you who feel this way.

For many of us, our passion is for longevity, but keeping up is extremely hard. We want to know the secrets of living a longer healthier life: what we should be doing; what we should be consuming. We don’t want to have to be questioning who and what to trust, but find ourselves constantly doing just that: Trying to figure out what is real and what is hype, who is truth-seeking and who is a paid shill, what has a high return on investment, and what is a waste of time.

What longevity desperately needs is a neutral and open system for comparing longevity interventions in animals and humans. This exists somewhat for C. elegans and mice, (CITP and ITP, respectively), but not enough interventions are being tested, and there are batch effects* between labs, hurting the comparability. 

* Batch effects means that results differ between labs or experiment runs for technical reasons (like different conditions, equipment, or handling).

What we need is something far larger in scale and real-time, so we can monitor results and make decisions when we personally are convinced that taking a particular intervention is “worth it”. We need an open system where anyone can submit an idea for a new intervention. Credentials should not stop anyone from having their ideas tested. We need a system where anyone can financially support compounds they think are worth testing. Rather than complain about the low budgets, we should be putting our money where our mouths, heads, and hearts are.

In an ideal world, the results are so clear and easy to interpret, that we can easily audit and discuss the results for ourselves, without requiring anyone else to analyze it for us. In a very ideal world, if a discovery is made and productized into a longevity therapy, anyone who funded the discovery can share in the proceeds from commercialization. 

I have some good news for you, although it is early and still small, all of this is already happening on pump.science.

Pump.science is the game where the objective is to find interventions that extend lifespan.

So, who’s winning? There have been 80+ C. elegans, 43 Drosophila, and 19 mice experiments, and one human experiment initiated. The leaderboard can be seen at pump.science/leaderboard. Anyone can submit a compound by launching a token or support the research by purchasing the tokens in an intervention already been launched that they want to see further research on in the different animal models: worms, flies, and mice. Lifespan studies with C. elegans are run at Ora Biomedical, while Drosophila flies are tested at Juvion Health Sciences in Switzerland, and mouse experiments are tested at VivoArchitect.

The most lifespan-extending compound originally tested on the C. elegans was Rifampcin (32% lifespan extension), but was later replaced by Rapamycin (34%), Omipalisib (37%), and finally Doxycycline (80%). The objective is to continuously dethrone the top compound that extends lifespan the most in each animal, the “King of the Pill”.

Although not every compound can be King of the Pill, there have been some very interesting results, including methylene blue, a hotly contested potential longevity compound, which impressively increased worm lifespan by 37% and is, at the time of writing, currently being tested on flies.

Many compounds tested have shown interesting results. Pump.science was the first to discover that Urolithin A increases lifespan in Drosophila. Other molecules like ginsenosides, sulforaphane, glycine, and even psilocybin have shown promise as gerotherapies and are being tested on multiple animal models thanks to the traders on pump.science. The value of this data being generated is immense, given it can be used to inform longevity product development and train AI models. Though humans are not the model organisms we’re testing on, we believe the data will be indispensable to discovering the fundamental causes of aging and develop the products that halt and reverse them.

Pump.science’s research infrastructure is being utilized by some of the most respected longevity scientists. The Rapamycin Longevity Lab (RLL) is led by Krister Kauppi and Girish Harinath with Dr. Brian Kennedy as a scientific advisor, and Kamil Pabis as scientific lead.

Krister’s story shows the magnitude of the shift created by pump.science. Previously, he spent a year raising $56.7k through traditional routes for mTOR inhibitor screening. On pump.science, he raised more than $30k for research in one month. That speed convinced RLL to leverage pump.science as a core fundraising and experimental engine for their next wave of research. In addition, well-known longevity researcher Dr. Ali Ghanem and pharmaceutical medicinal chemist Dr. Christian Kutruff have launched compounds on pump.science, further increasing the caliber of researchers testing out this experimental research model. 

We see this as the future of all scientific research, where scientists are limited only by the quality of their ideas and their ability to build a community as excited about those ideas as they are. 

Longevity escape velocity will require scientific breakthroughs, but these breakthroughs themselves are not limited by the number and quality of ideas to test, but rather the funding and commercial structure to make them. We believe that experimentation on how science is done is just as important as the science itself, and will be key to achieving LEV faster. Though pump.science may sound crazy, given the low friction funding it provides to qualified scientific teams, and discoveries already made in such a short period of time, we think it’ll be obvious in hindsight.