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With the Renaissance man personality and the driving ambition,
Westphal seems ready-made for the limelight. But he largely avoided the press until the recent news about resveratrol made that untenable. Recently he granted a few interviews, but his press persona has been low-key, guarded, almost professorial. It's not that he's shy. When a TV news team showed up one day, he put on a white lab coat and safety glasses before going on camera - a nerdy affectation that caused much mirth at Sirtris. Self-satire, he later commented, is part of his campaign "to keep us grounded. We're in trouble if we lose the ability to laugh at ourselves."
Rather, he's determined to avoid any whiff of "fountain of youth" hype - specifically, of giving the impression that Sirtris is a bunch of flakes chasing miraculous elixirs, which is the kiss of death for a startup trying to raise millions of dollars from hard-nosed money managers. He spends a lot of time explaining that his company is working to cure diseases of aging, not to cure aging itself. There's a difference, especially in the minds of regulators, who view aging as part of the human condition, not an illness warranting treatment.
Further, proving that a drug extends life span would require an impossibly long clinical trial. And then there's what Westphal calls the "vortex of inflated expectations," which invariably spins up around scientifically credible anti-aging research. "I don't want to get sucked in," he says.
But Westphal can't afford to steer Sirtris too far from the vortex. After all, it does have to impress those hard-nosed money managers in order to realize its drug-development dreams. And the possibility that its drugs actually will slow aging provides him with a very compelling case to put to potential investors and pharma partners - to wit, aging, when stripped to its dire essence, is simply a process that inexorably increases the risk of killer diseases. So a drug that retards that process should have across-the-board power to postpone such diseases' toll, making it an FDA-approvable blockbuster of unprecedented scope.
So Sirtris's star is hitched to perilously glitzy anti-aging science despite the fact that it isn't pursuing life-extension drugs per se. As a result, Westphal's media stance, like the man himself, is a study in high-speed motion as he alternately approaches and flees the vortex. In an interview last fall he enthused that "studies on long lived humans indicate there are four key predictors of longevity: low levels of blood glucose and insulin, little weight gain during middle age, and low body temperature. Our drugs positively affect these predictors in mice. That's very promising." Then he took pains to caution that "whenever Sirtris is mentioned" in the news, "it should be emphasized that it's going for FDA-approved drugs to treat diseases like diabetes, not anti-aging. No matter how often I say that, folks don't seem to listen."
Like most entrepreneurs, Westphal is fixated on the new. Ironically, however, the line of research that led to Sirtris dates from the 1930s, which is when scientists at Cornell University discovered the life-extending effects of calorie restriction, or CR. The researchers found that reducing normal calorie intake by about a third extends animals' life spans by 30 percent or more, keeping them sleek and vibrant when their normally fed peers look wasted, or are dead. In fact, CR is the only established way to slow aging in everything from guppies to dogs to, many scientists believe, humans. The big drawback, of course, is the not-eating part. CR's stomach-growling regimen requires the self-control of a Mahatma Gandhi. (It also tends to produce the great ascetic's half-starved look.)
And thus the appeal of a substance like resveratrol: Sinclair's research suggests it does many of the wonderful things CR does, including extending healthy life. Sirtris's goal is to develop medicines that function like resveratrol but are far more potent: in principle, people on the medicines could eat heartily while getting the pluses of CR. Further, they wouldn't have to gulp fistfuls of pills. (Heroic doses of resveratrol, comparable to a person's drinking hundreds of glasses of wine a day, were needed to elicit the remarkable effects seen in the high-profile mouse studies.)
Article Produced By
David Stipp, Fortune
https://money.cnn.com/2007/01/18/magazines/fortune/Live_forever.fortune/index2.htm
Post by
Chuck Reynolds
