Prestigious aging research world, meet C15:0

Healthy Aging

Dr. Nik Schork Presents a Preponderance of Evidence Supporting C15:0 as a Leading Geroprotector

Once a year, a group of prestigious scientists from around the world gather at the Aging Research & Drug Discovery (ARDD) symposium in Copenhagen, Denmark to share the latest research on interventions that could help us live longer, healthier lives.

With 700+ in-person, and 6,000 virtual attendees, this is the largest meeting of its kind. We’re talking about leading scientists from the National Institute on Aging, Altos, Eli Lilly, Stanford University, L’OREAL, Harvard University, Mayo Clinic, MIT, AbbVie, Pfizer, and more.

Dr. Nicholas Schork, Principal Investigator of the National Institutes of Health-funded Longevity Consortium, is such a respected scientist in the field of healthy aging that he had multiple ARDD presentations, where he covered the latest evidence behind leading longevity compounds…and how to go about proving that they actually work.

In this Science Says! takeover by Dr. Nicholas Schork, he shares his main takeaways from the recent ARDD meeting, his tips for living longer and healthier, and key points from his ARDD talk entitled:

Hi, Dr. Schork! Thanks for joining us on Science Says this week. Before we get into your talk on C15:0 at ARDD, can you tell us what a geroprotector is?

Dr. Schork:

Well, it’s great to be here. A geroprotector is an intervention that is designed to slow the aging process in some way, thereby reducing our susceptibility to age-related diseases and ultimately extending our healthspan and lifespan.

Got it. Geroprotectors slow aging to help us live healthier and longer. What are the three most important takeaways from your talk on C15:0, as they relate to C15:0’s role as a geroprotector?

Dr. Schork:

1. C15:0 has extensive science supporting its health benefits. Well, the first takeaway from my talk is the large amount of scientific evidence in favor of C15:0’s health benefits. This includes numerous prospective cohort studies in humans, robust laboratory studies demonstrating C15:0’s longevity-enhancing activities, a clear evolutionary role of C15:0 in supporting mammalian longevity, and human clinical trials. Together, these studies consistently support C15:0 as a beneficial nutrient that effectively slows aging and supports longevity.
2. C15:0 is natural and accessible. The second takeaway is that C15:0 is a natural ingredient, which makes it easy to access and test. While this may seem simple, many candidate geroprotectors are not easy to access or test.
3. C15:0 is an essential nutrient. The third takeaway is that importantly, C15:0’s health benefits have been shaped by evolution to help humans live longer, which make its effects broader and more ubiquitous. Studies increasingly support that every living human depends to some degree on C15:0, which makes it compelling as a geroprotector.

In contrast, these advantages of C15:0 are not present for most drugs. For example, we don’t know what many candidate geroprotector compounds will do long-term in humans, especially among healthy people who do not have the diseases that many of these drugs were intended to treat.

What are two additional discussions/topics that were covered at the ARDD meeting that you found most interesting?

Dr. Schork:

How to prove that a geroprotector actually works. First, there was a lot of discussion around how you go about proving that an intervention is a true geroprotector.  We typically don’t have time to conduct lifelong trials that evaluate whether a person lives longer or not due to slower aging. Thus, many discussions were around nearer-term measurements, such as epigenetic clocks and what types of shorter clinical trials could be used.

Understanding that a geroprotector, by definition, must have broad effects. Because of this, there was extensive discussion around using more than a single intervention. This topic focused on the concepts of longevity and N-of-1 medicine, which use multi-prong approaches, including changes to lifestyle, diet, exercise – along with taking a geroprotector pill in a way that is tailored to each individual.

A successful longevity and N-of-1 medicine program will help people avoid the onset of multiple conditions, and it will be important to personalize approaches that consider specific conditions to which an individual is most susceptible.

In this context, C15:0 has many advantages. C15:0’s health benefits can be easily assessed by physicians using routine health panels, safely administered as a promising candidate geroprotector, and is known to have broad effects across multiple phenotypes and against multiple aging-associated conditions. Because of this, C15:0 is likely to be a core component of longevity medicine programs.

In your opinion, what would it take for humans to live 150 years?

Dr. Schork:

Ultimately, to overcome all the problems for humans as we age beyond 120, you’re probably going to have to resort to more radical interventions, such as organ replacement. This is less about influencing, e.g., a ticking epigenetic clock and more about overcoming all of the genetic perturbations each of us has that affect how we age. The high number of these perturbations provides a real constraint on how long humans can live.

We are increasingly understanding that we can optimize higher C15:0 levels to live healthier and longer as individuals. If we wanted to live beyond 120 years, however, perhaps we could explore new ways to leverage C15:0’s longevity pathways to an even greater degree.