Andrew Brack

What if we had therapies to extend healthspan and prevent the onset of age related diseases? I’m excited to announce my first @ARPA_H program, PROSPR. The goal is to develop validated surrogate biomarkers, new clinical endpoints and therapies to collectively extend healthspan by 20 years for all Americans.

@ConorNeu Just to add perspective. Life insurance companies would go out of business with that level of prediction.

I'm personally invested in a company that can tell you whether you will have a heart attack in the next 12 months. With 86% certainty. From a blood test. Unreal value. They are weak at scaling. Someone please buy this and take it to the masses.

We should fund and build more organizations that are meant to solve problems - instead of working on them. New essay.

Fantastic piece from Anastasia explaining the nuts and bolts of what a good "General Manager" needs to do to achieve an ambitious social impact goal. Here's what it would look like for far-UVC deployment:

Experts agree: real-time clinical trials could have a major impact on accelerating cures. Thank you to Dr. Meagher and Dr. Litton for joining us!

I’m building a program to catalyze on this today…

LBF is only getting stronger. They are catalysts for those that want to build in the longevity community. Congrats @realNathanCheng on launching LBF8

@michellebkwok This rings true: most VCs say they want to be early while still acting like risk managers. The two things are not compatible. The discomfort is the signal.

VC is one of the weirdest jobs on the planet. You genuinely don't know if you're good at it for 5 to 10 years. Which is exactly what makes it interesting to watch someone who’s been doing this for 40+ years operate differently from most others in the room. I’ve learned a lot since working for Tim Draper. In his portfolio: Coinbase, Twitch, DocuSign, SpaceX, Tesla, Robinhood, Baidu, Polymarket, Ledger, Carta, Colossal, AngelList. The list keeps going. 60+ unicorns, rhinos, and hecticorns. The biggest thing I've absorbed working closely with him is that he plays a time horizon most investors would find genuinely uncomfortable. A lot of VCs are always calculating when they’ll return capital. Tim calculates what would happen if the thesis were right. Even if looking right takes a decade. He bought 30,000 Bitcoin at the Mt. Gox auction when everyone was making fun of him. Spent around $19M. Got viral for all the wrong reasons. That stack is now worth north of $2B last time I checked. Being early IS the job. But most VCs say they want to be early while still acting like risk managers. The two things are not compatible. What I've internalized from watching him is that if a position already feels totally comfortable and the IC is nodding without friction, you're probably late. The discomfort is the signal. #VentureCapital #Investing #DraperAssociates #VC #FrontierTech

What a lovely endorsement

@mkaeberlein Does this impact the clinic or just the podcast?

Dear Friends, I want to share that I am no longer at Optispan, the company I co-founded in 2023 and have led since. I’m proud of what we built together and grateful to the team for their work and commitment. I wish them continued success. While I’m still considering what comes next, I remain 100% committed to the vision of helping as many people (and companion animals!) as possible achieve longer, healthier lives.

Welcome to the scientific revolution. 100s of robots. Zero coffee breaks. America’s largest autonomous lab, open today.

We funded the FIRST SBIR effort @ARPA_H, and they are poised to transform disease agnostic Dx. Great topics in this solicitation! @SBAgov

Would you draw the same conclusions for fasting and exercise? Are the benefits of fasting or CR clinically observed in people with optimal diets? And remember most model organisms in labs are on diets not selected for health/longevity. Maybe GLP1 agonism = intermittent fasting/CR. If that’s even close to true, we should maybe couch these drugs under the same umbrella. I’d like to see CR in people with optimal diet were lean and exercised regularly. Maybe compare that with a spike of glp1 agonism. I hope you see where I’m going with this. I would also ask if aged fat tissue is equivalent to fat in young humans. If aged fat secretes more Inflammatory cytokines, harbors more senescent cells, doesn’t undergo normal autophagy/mitophagy, etc then its removal is consistent with many other interventions of geroscience. My model is inconsistent if young and aged fat is identical. Just some food for thought

4. This distinction matters because it shapes therapeutic strategy. If GLP-1s work primarily by correcting metabolic dysfunction, their benefit may be limited to people with glucose dysregulation, insulin resistance, or obesity. If they have direct geroprotective effects—acting on mitochondrial quality control, inflammatory signaling, or autophagy independent of glucose—they may benefit metabolically healthy individuals as well.

1. GLP-1s reduce inflammation, improve mitochondrial function, and lower cardiovascular risk. But here's the unresolved question: are these effects happening because GLP-1s fix broken glucose and insulin signaling—or because they have direct anti-aging properties independent of metabolic disease? Most studies can't separate the two. And that ambiguity changes how we should think about their role in longevity. 🧵

@davidasinclair Good for diabetics, but many already use CGMs. Sensitivity is going to be a limiting problem with this tech for broader utilization. And with near IR having large spatial overlap with other molecules, this does translate to other molecules in the ISF.

Can't wait 👏

🧵 Over 24 hours, our scientific team and AI scientist infrastructure developed a novel peptide agonist to potentially treat ADHD. Below is our paper for a pre-IND computational feasibility assessment for OX2R-004: an 18-residue peptide agonist designed as a selective OX2R agonist for ADHD. Why this matters? No approved orexin agonists exist anywhere. All marketed orexin drugs are dual OX1R/OX2R antagonists for insomnia. Clinical-stage ones are small molecules for narcolepsy only. We did this with @peptai_ a novel full 8-gate computational pipeline in one shot developed by @BioProtocol community 👇

More on the amazing story of CETP inhibition with obicetrapib - was associated with attenuated decline in kidney function in patients at high CV risk: Post hoc pooled results from the BROADWAY and BROOKLYN trials doi.org/10.1016/j.ajpc… @nationallipid @society_eas @atherosociety @ASPCardio @escardio @NewAmsPharma

Large rapamycin clinical trial launches news.uthscsa.edu/large-rapamyci…

@davidasinclair @Serenapoon Congrats David and team

Shout out to Jerry McLaughlin, our incredible team at Life Biosciences, @Serenapoon, and my cofounder Tristan Edwards, who started Life Bio with me in 2018 🚀 Nothing better than making the impossible possible, with people you love working with ✌️

Speed and accountability are moral imperatives. ARPA-H operates differently than traditional arms of government research.

Alzheimer’s is one of medicine's hardest unsolved problems, and one of the most devastating. At the OpenAI Foundation, we believe AI is well suited to its complexity. We're directing over $100M to scientists mapping the disease, designing drugs, & more. I wrote about it here: openaifoundation.org/news/ai-for-al…

We actually don’t know how far down the body fat / BMI axis we can traverse before seeing no positive effects of these compounds. I’ll predict there will be benefits even in those folks with approx 25% body fat. If so, that’s approx 70% of population over the age of 50. The same logic can be applied to caloric restriction, at what percentage body fat is CR or fasting no longer beneficial?

Weight loss drugs may increase human longevity but that's because they reduce the mortality of folks at the lower end of the lifespan distribution (i.e., unhealthy individuals), not because they delay the aging process. That's still valuable, but if this is the best intervention we have, it reflects poorly on current aging science. At best, weight loss drugs are targeting aging accelerants, not aging per se. To truly increase longevity, we need interventions that reduce mortality for everyone by targeting aging.