Dublin Longevity Declaration

Dublin Longevity Declaration calls for a concerted effort to improve both healthspan and lifespan. It calls on governments, funding agencies and the public to intensify their support for the promising interventional ideas that exist to fight age. Dozens of world-leading experts add their signatures to declare that such an advance is now potentially within reach, by targeting the underlying processes of aging, and that efforts to achieve it should be immediately and greatly expanded. The Declaration expresses a consensus statement from longevity scientists that aging is not inevitable, and that there are early scientific results suggesting that the biological age of an individual is modifiable.

The interventions that are currently being tested to improve healthspan and lifespan include therapies to improve metabolism, restore youthful immune function, maintain youthful body composition, remove damaging cells from the body, and improve cellular stress responses. Some Emerging Strategies and Questions:

• Combinatorial approaches – Can multiple systems be targeted simultaneously and will that yield synergistic outcomes?
• Novel classes of small molecules – We have only explored a narrow subset of the small-molecule space for longevity outcomes. Will larger-scale screens or even novel screening approaches result in enhanced lifespan extension?
• Cellular reprogramming – Can we reprogram somatic cells in our tissues to a state to promote replacement of damaged cells and restoration of youthful tissue function?
• Approaches based on species longevity – Can we utilize adaptations of long-lived species to achieve human longevity comparable to nature’s greatest successes, exceeding the modest changes delivered by existing interventions?
• Gene and cell therapy – Long promised, both gene therapy and cell therapy have become feasible. Can they be employed to target aging or age-related conditions?
• Novel targets – for example, gene therapies derived from multi-omics studies. Can they delay or reverse aging processes?
• Emerging strategies to reverse age-related deterioration of the epigenomeItalic text – There is good evidence that this deterioration reduces our control of endogenous parasites such as retrotransposons and retroviruses and increases age-related inflammation. Can it be repaired?
• Personalizing aging interventions – While general events are likely to drive aging, their relative impacts in each individual are likely to vary, therefore understanding how to optimize interventions to the individual will likely have higher yields.
• Over the horizon – Often regarded as science fiction, strategies such as cryopreservation, brain mapping and ex vivo organ generation may ultimately be feasible. We should keep open the possibility that dramatic lifespan extension may involve technologies that we haven’t fully imagined yet.

The Declaration has already been signed by a global group of more than 50 leading longevity scientists. Signatories include George Church, Eric Verdin, David Sinclair, Aubrey de Grey, Brian Kennedy, María Blasco, Vadim Gladyshev, Andrea Maier, Nir Barzilai, Matt Kaeberlein, Andrew Steele, João Pedro de Magalhães, Joanna Bensz, Peter Fedichev, Morten Scheibye-Knudsen, Bill Andrews, Alex Zhavoronkov, Thomas Rando and Steven Austad.