Andrew Brack

Scientist interested in preventing functional decline during aging. Program Manager at ARPA-H. Interests: Crypto, Everton FC and Boxing. Views are my own.

[Andrew Brack @BrackLab]

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.

[ARPA-H @ARPA_H]

What if we could predict age-induced health issues before they happen? Our new PROSPR program aims to identify biochemical and physiological markers, paving the way for faster, more targeted aging research. https://t.co/0euJylCcwa

[Andrew Brack @BrackLab]

@davidasinclair @TheLancet @NYT Well said @davidasinclair

[Andrew Brack @BrackLab]

This is the hyperbole that often comes with an emerging field.

The longevity industry exists to exploit humanity, not to save it." - Seamus O'Mahony writes @TheLancet

But the reality is that there are many great people with skin in the game trying to build the datasets that will bring medicines to prevent health declines during aging. It will take time, there will be failed hypotheses, and there is hype. And with the hype comes those that want to ride that wave in many guises.

For those who care about making progress-avoid the noise.

[João Pedro de Magalhães @jpsenescence]

"The longevity industry exists to exploit humanity, not to save it." - Seamus O'Mahony writes @TheLancet

Or, as he puts it, "the longevity industry is a goldrush without gold."

Talk about throwing out the baby with the bathwater!

Of course, the field is drowning in hype and commercial interests pushing unproven interventions. But that doesn't detract from the fact that slowing human aging - even if slightly - would have enormous health and medical benefits.

Manipulating human aging may prove harder than many in the field currently promise. But aging is no doubt malleable, so let's not lose sight of the field's long-term transformative potential.

The challenge is to tell hype from science, not to dismiss the science because of the hype.

[Nathan C. Frey @nc_frey]

Today, we’re announcing an open call for guest investigators in life sciences. Over 8–12 weeks, guest investigators will work directly with my team and other Anthropic researchers to produce analyses and tools for their work. We’ll run our models and harnesses, at no cost to them. We’ll work together to open-source the resulting data, artifacts, and code, and write preprints about what we find.

We want humans to remain at the center of scientific discovery, deciding what questions to pursue, and how to pursue them. Those decisions are not ours to make alone. This open call is part of our ongoing efforts at Anthropic to support researchers and accelerate scientific discovery.

I’m looking for principal investigators and their research groups at academic institutions, nonprofits, or government labs, working in causal human biology, structural and computational molecular biology, medicinal chemistry, drug discovery, and clinical science.

Applications are open for about 14 days: https://t.co/bCcrKjB3W7

[HHS @HHSGov]

Subscribe and learn more about how @ARPA_H and HHS are transforming patient care and public health one discovery at a time!

Learn more 👇

[Andrew Brack @BrackLab]

@Jack_O_Meara @incredutility @stripe Think we may have found the where?😉

[Andrew Brack @BrackLab]

@JamesPeyer 🚀

[Andrew Brack @BrackLab]

@ARPA_H Excited to be speaking and happy to meet folks to talk longevity

[Andrew Brack @BrackLab]

@biogerontology Thanks for the shout out Alex

[Andrew Brack @BrackLab]

@EricTopol It actually supports parabiosis work: the aged environment inhibits young cell function, a young environment enhances old cell function.

[Andrew Brack @BrackLab]

@MaxUnfried I can’t speak for your experience. I’d argue there was plenty of competition. But maybe the wrong games for stupid prizes!

[Andrew Brack @BrackLab]

@35gcs Looks awesome.

[Raghav "RV" Sehgal @rv_sehgal]

I’m excited (and definitely a little nervous!) to share that I have started as Principal Investigator and faculty member at the Marcus Institute for Aging Research, a @harvardmed affliate!

For the past few years, I’ve been obsessed with a pretty simple question: how do we understand and measure human aging well enough to actually do something about it?
That question will be at the heart of what we build next.

Our lab will focus on computational geroscience, bringing together AI/ML, multi-omics, and large-scale human data to understand the biology of aging and, ultimately, find ways to intervene on it.

A big part of that will be building better biomarkers that can reliably measure aging and tell us whether an intervention is actually working. But I’m equally excited about what comes next: using computational tools to identify causal drivers of aging, discover new therapeutic targets, and help find and prioritize new therapies that could extend healthy lifespan.

The bigger goal is to close the loop between measurement, discovery, and intervention, connecting computational work with experiments, human studies, and clinical trials.

There is a lot to build, and an even longer list of things I still need to learn about running a lab. But that is probably what I’m most excited about. Building a team, learning from people across geroscience, medicine, computation, and industry, and tackling some interesting questions together.

I’m incredibly grateful to everyone at Yale who helped me get to this point, and very excited for what comes next at Harvard !

PS I am definitely looking to hire some smart computational biologists and ML/AI folks so definitely reach out!

[Andrew Brack @BrackLab]

@MaxUnfried @EdwardAnderton7 @MaxUnfried understanding and reversing frailty is in my mind the closest and most practical (but not easy) approach to ‘reversing’ aging.

[Andrew Brack @BrackLab]

@johnhemming4mp @MaxUnfried You have data?

[Andrew Brack @BrackLab]

@JacobTref Exciting choices @JacobTref

[Andrew Brack @BrackLab]

@mu_anand @MelodyFRO Congrats @mu_anand. I'm so excited for your journey and what y'all develop.

[Andrew Brack @BrackLab]

@synopsi @MartinBJensen @GiantDouglasFir I was trying to narrow your focus to something thing that might be practical. I’m obsessed by getting shit done rather than waxing lyrical.

So, if an intervention given in mid to late life extended life by a few years pushed time to death, that cuts it? That’s a longevity drug?

[Andrew Brack @BrackLab]

Practically speaking this will be almost impossible to prove out in terms of drug development, and will likely lead to many false negatives of potential therapeutics. A practical example, the lifespan can differ by ten years different states within the US. Thought experiment, what if you shifted lifespan of a single state by a few years, say from 80-95. Is that a longevity drug?

[Charles Brenner, PhD @CharlesMBrenner]

IMO what matters more than the triage percentage is ppl fighting for a proposal that one person tanked for a crap reason

[Niklas Anzinger @NiklasAnzinger]

This is a first-time in history - review by a private board of a novel phase-1+ treatment for medical use

The ETRB aims to be highly transparent about its decisions