[Dent]

TLDR : DH is probably going to buy some cancer pills

Do you work on bypassing the Hayflick limit, or extending telomeres?

We are actually interested in telomeres in a different way from that. So, it’s well understood that telomeres get shorter when cells divide, but not many of our cells actually do divide all that much.

A lot of our cells are simply incapable of division, because of the specialization they have adopted, like neurons, for example, and so a lot of our cells are capable of division, but they only actually divide very occasionally, when they’re called upon to do so, because of some kind of injury.

There are only a very small number of our cells which divide regularly throughout life, and frequently throughout life. So it’s actually not clear that the problem of shortening of telomeres really matters all that much in most aspects of human aging. However, what we can say is that the lengthening of telomeres is itself a problem, in one major effect of age-related disease, namely cancer.

So our approach is actually to do the opposite of what many people are trying. We want to suppress telomere elongation, we want to make it impossible for cells to extend out their telomeres and in doing so, to actually prevent cancers—not from starting, not from initiating, but from getting out of control.

We know that there are some cells in the body that will suffer if we completely eliminate the ability of the body to extend its telomeres. But we think that we can solve that problem using stem cell therapy.