Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?

Solar powered (or wind etc) little machines that communities can buy (e.g. the local surfing club) and we can let lose into the problem area.

Creating working, cheap, mass-produced rejuvenation therapies is the best way to save the most lives and eliminate the greatest amount of human suffering.

The most exciting areas right now are senescent cell clearance (and oh look there's a startup called Oisin Biotechnology seed funded by the Methuselah Foundation and SENS Research Foundation), and glucosepane cross-link clearance, which I recently wrote a long blurb on the current state of at Fight Aging! That is at a point at which research is highly parallelizable and even small investments above the current funding will greatly speed the process of finding either a small molecule drug candidate or bacterial enzymes at the Spiegel lab at Yale.

Other areas making real progress and which could be further diversified and sped up are transthyretin amyloid clearance, where the current best approach there is locked up in the glacial GSK development process, and mitochondrial DNA repair, which is another one subject to great gains in speed due to parallelization of research.

Any of these are only a couple of years away from low-cost seed funded startups, and all are and have been dependent on philanthropy to move ahead in the lab. None of these incredibly promising lines of research are in any meaningful way supported by the existing funding establishment, which is crazy when you look at the data in mice and the supporting evidence. E.g. senescent cell clearance even in its first few animal studies has already produced better and more compelling benefits than any of the alleged calorie restriction mimetic or other age-slowing drug development efforts that have consumed billions over the past decade or so.