Friedberg: New study shows enzyme reverses skin age from 70+ years to 31 Chamath: That’s a $2T market. Did Scientists Just Discover How to Reverse Skin Aging!? “CML is kind of the predominant molecule that gets formed in this extracellular matrix that's driving aging, and nothing breaks it down. So these scientists set out to try and create an enzyme, an enzyme is a protein that breaks something down, that can break down CML. And so these guys kind of went out and they took the target, which is CML, and tried to figure out, ‘Okay, how do we actually degrade CML, clear that extracellular matrix, and reverse aging?’ They started to test it on the proteins that we would find in our body, casein, collagen, retinal proteins, which are in your eye, hemoglobin, and they were able to get rid of 52 to 97% of the CML, just degrade it away. And then they found several sites where they were able to degrade over 90%. And then they took actual human skin from elderly patients that had donated their skin, and they put this enzyme onto that skin, and they were able to eliminate 55% of the CML on the skin, basically reverse the skin's age down to the age of a 31-year-old, this is from greater than 70-year-old patients, just by putting this enzyme on the skin. And so it's kind of a groundbreaking demonstration of combination of AlphaFold, what's called directed evolution, where you change the order of the DNA that changes the structure of the protein to test different proteins, do high throughput screening, and ultimately make a novel protein that doesn't exist in nature today that can do something pretty profound for human health.” Chamath: “It will be a trillion-dollar market. If you can create a cream…” Friedberg: “I mean, dude, if you could put this enzyme literally on your skin and have it absorb in…” Chamath: “Game over. That alone is $2 trillion.”
