
Researchers are puzzled by Calico’s stealthiness - perakojotgenije
https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/4/27/15409672/google-calico-secretive-aging-mortality-research
======
joe_the_user
There are lots of good reasons for secrecy in these circumstances.

All the more extreme, imaginable interventions aging are going to be quite
controversial - scientifically, socially and institutionally. The effects of
anti-aging interventions would also be controversial.

Just as much, this is going to be chasing a lot of things that will turn out
to be wrong. Being wrong and investing money "uselessly" isn't something that
is presented very positively in the public eye these days.

~~~
sjg007
Nah.. secrecy in a bioscience company is a bad idea. You have to have peer
reviewed primary literature to support the engineering required.

~~~
mdekkers
_...you have to have peer reviewed primary literature..._

Maybe they are just not ready for that. This whole piece comes across as a
situation where Calico wants to work in peace and quiet, and the rest of the
world is literally dying (sorry) to know what they are working on. I can
understand their idea of wanting to be left alone: Science is a field that by
its' very nature is full of naysayers and sceptics. This isn't a bad thing:
this is how new science is validated. However, release your ideas too early,
and you have a good chance that a whole circus develops around the
_impossibilities_ of their ideas or direction, and possibly, Government
oversight and regulations before anything is actually ready for any kind of
scrutiny.

The overall tone of the article strikes me as "We are curious about what
Calico is doing, and we are really annoyed they won't tell us". Remember, this
is being done with private money, not Government grants, and Calico doesn't
owe anything to anybody.

~~~
sjg007
Still a bad idea.

------
pmoriarty
Maybe I've read too many science fiction dystopias, but I think it will be
interesting to see if any breakthroughs that this company makes are kept back
to benefit the Google elite or shared with the rest of society.

~~~
DamnYuppie
I am sure they will be shared with as many people as can a) afford it and b)
are of a similar mindset to the gate keepers.

~~~
joe_the_user
Will it be: "Can afford it AND are of similar mindset" or would it be "OR".

Just much, the ultimate cost is big question. The only way to make a
breakthrough imo is some combination of procedures that cut the Gordian knot
of current health care processes and ways to automate these processes.
Together, this may be cheaper than artisanal Cancer care and research - well
especially if it could be done without royalty payments in Costa Rica.

So whether the knowledge gets out is a big question - cue the secrecy question
again.

~~~
pmoriarty
_" Just much, the ultimate cost is big question."_

There's a really interesting Radiolab episode that deals with this
question.[1]

To quote from the episode:

 _" What do you do if you have a really expensive drug that's really, really
good? ... Everyone that I know pointed me to this new drug, it's called
Sovaldi... it is a drug that treats Hepatitis C, which is caused by a virus,
and the disease itself goes to work on your liver, it inflames it, it scars
it, it can cause liver cancer, cirrhosis, it can be fatal, and for the longest
time the treatments that they had weren't that great or they just had wretched
side effects, and along comes Sovaldi. It's one pill, twelve weeks, you take
it with some other antiviral meds, it's a super simple treatment option, and
the side effects are very minimal. It was kind of like the wonder drug. So a
lot of doctors start to prescribe it. In the first half of 2013 70,000 people
in the United States were treated, and it had a 95% rate of cure, in other
words the virus was erradicated... but this drug costs $1000 dollars a pill,
for one pill that I take one a day..."_

Now imagine how much a cure for aging would cost.

[1] - [http://www.radiolab.org/story/what-year-life-
worth/](http://www.radiolab.org/story/what-year-life-worth/)

~~~
joe_the_user
Sure, priced like a contemporary drug, the price of a life extender would
infinite.

But then again, priced like a contemporary drug, the price of air or water
would be infinite too. Fortunately, we have much of this around, so far, for
nearly nothing (air more than water, _so far_ again).

What about the Hep C drug makes it expensive? The research? The production
process? The patents racket? If you knew the recipe could you make it in your
basement with some ingredient of modest cost? Of expensive cost?

------
frankydp
There is an update at the bottom of the article which is relevant:

"Thanks to reader tips and additional searches in PubMed, _we’ve located and
linked to several Calico papers we weren’t aware of when we first published
this story on Thursday_. I flagged the papers with the researchers quoted in
this story who said they did not change their assessment of Calico."

------
Gatsky
Stealth is a sign of weakness in a life sciences company.

------
dbcooper
How would you design a clinical trial for a life-extension drug? How long
would it take, and how much investment would be required, to compile a
compelling case to the FDA to approve your drug?

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osazuwa
I want to know what Daphne Koller and her machine learning (probabilistic
modeling?) team are doing. I want to know this badly.

~~~
sjg007
In jest, you should just build a graphical model of likely states and then
feed in some evidence to get a conclusion.

Couple ideas: mapping regulatory networks behind some phenotype or biological
pathways. Building sensor networks based on some biological inputs. Encoding
biological data into some kind of probabilistic database. Simulations. Applied
neural networks of some kind.

In anti-aging research you would breed worms, mice, and fruit flies and look
for anti-aging biomarkers in some set of conditions thought to promote life
extension. You would also try to map known pathways between organisms to each
other. You would sequence a ton of RNA... Also you would sequence genomes and
RNA of people who are old and have lived a long time etc...

As a control sequence everyone else. Feed all of that into a NN and see what
pops out.

------
reasonattlm
It isn't news to the audience I usually talk to that the California Life
Company, or Calico for short, Google's venture into aging research, is
secretive. Outside of the staff, few people can do more than read the tea
leaves regarding what exactly they are up to. The high level summary is that
Google is channeling a large amount of funding into some sort of long-term
development plan for therapeutics to treat aging as a medical condition. Over
the past few years Calico has made sizable development deals with
pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, and hired some of the most
noteworthy names in the aging research community. It is usual for
biotechnology and drug development companies to be fairly secretive in their
early stages, for reasons that largely relate to investment regulations. At
some point they have to talk about what they are doing, however, given that
the goal is clinical trials, customers, and revenue.

It may be the case that Calico is simply following the standard biotechnology
startup game plan over a longer time frame and with more funding than is
usually the case, including the secrecy portion of that plan, but by now most
of those interested in faster progress and beneficial upheaval in the research
community have written off Calico as a venture unlikely to make any meaningful
difference [1] [2]. Given who has been hired to lead it, and given the deals
made, the most likely scenario is that Calico is the second coming of the
Ellison Medical Foundation. By that I mean an organization that is essentially
running more of the same research funded at the National Institute on Aging,
with a poor or absent focus on clinical translation, and constrained in goals
to the paradigm of drug development to slightly slow the progression of aging.
In this area you will find things like calorie restriction mimetics,
pharmaceutical enhancement of autophagy, and so forth. The past twenty years
of research have made it clear that it is very hard and very expensive to
produce even marginally effective and reliable drugs capable of slowing aging
through the adjustment of metabolic processes. Yet this is exactly what most
research groups continue to try.

There is an alternative approach. Instead of altering the poorly understood
intersection between metabolism and aging in an attempt to slow the damage of
aging, instead periodically repair the quite well cataloged list of
fundamental cell and tissue damage that causes aging. This approach is
exemplified by senescent cell clearance - a way to extend healthy life and
turn back symptoms of aging and age-related disease that is already showing
itself more robust and useful than any of the present drug candidates aimed at
altering the operation of metabolism to slow aging. Senescent cell clearance
as a way to reverse aging has been pushed by the SENS rejuvenation research
advocates for more than 15 years [3], with good evidence as support. Yet over
that span of time the majority of the research community rejected damage
repair in favor of focusing on efforts to slow aging, efforts that have not
succeeded in producing useful therapeutics with sizable results on human
health.

That rejection was clearly not sound. Once efforts started in earnest on
development of methods of senescent cell clearance, it required only the past
few years to robustly demonstrate its effectiveness as a rejuvenation therapy
[4]. It is gathering ever more attention now - but not from Calico, so far as
we know, and not from the majority of the research community that continues to
work on slowing aging through adjustment of metabolism, an approach to aging
as a medical condition that is demonstrably marginal and expensive. The
funding used to bring senescent cell clearance up to its present point of
proven success is a tiny fraction of what has been spent on so far futile
efforts to produce calorie restriction mimetic drugs [5] that would, even if
realized, be far less effective and far less useful to patients.

On the whole I think Calico is most likely a larger than usual example of the
primary problem in aging research: the dominance of initiatives that put their
funds towards complex, lengthy, and uncertain projects that even in the best
of circumstances are only capable of producing poor outcomes for patients. In
short, the problem is an unwillingness to pursue the repair and rejuvenation
approach that is demonstrably more effective than the adjusting metabolism to
slow aging approach. Excessive secrecy is a minor quibble in comparison.

[1]: [https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603087/googles-long-
stran...](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603087/googles-long-strange-life-
span-trip/)

[2]: [http://mendelspod.com/podcasts/brian-kennedy-and-aubrey-
de-g...](http://mendelspod.com/podcasts/brian-kennedy-and-aubrey-de-grey-
their-converging-approaches-aging-research)

[3]: [http://www.sens.org/research/introduction-to-sens-
research](http://www.sens.org/research/introduction-to-sens-research)

[4]:
[http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature16932](http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature16932)

[5]:
[http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2008/04/24/720...](http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2008/04/24/720_million_worth_of_sirtuin_research)

~~~
RichardHeart
my summary of reasonattlm's post: Calico is going to fail like the Ellison
Medical Foundation did. Everyone bet against SENS, and was wrong, as proven by
senolytics. SENS is likely to be right about the other stuff as well, and
people should put money into engineering instead of understanding.

