If “Science has a really serious marketing problem” as Larry Page observed, then life extension technologies face even bigger marketing problems. I am definitely not a marketing expert but realized the problem early on when thinking about the lag-phase period of a robust life extension technology. So I made a short email interview with Dave Gobel, the marketing and business mind/strategist behind the Methuselah Foundation (official title: Chief Executive Officer) following our meeting and chat at the SENS3 conference in Cambridge, UK, 2007.
1. What is the biggest marketing problem of any future (or present) healthy life extension technology?
The biggest marketing problem today is the time it takes for a beneficial effect to present itself. For instance, a product such as resveratrol may take months to present beneficial results, or it may never show up clinically. People who are scientifically sophisticated can appreciate the value of reduced circulating fats or glucose, but to the typical individual, there are much sexier things to spend money on that give immediate gratification and clear utility. The proof of this is illustrated by a counter example – how ridiculously easy it would be to sell a product that biologically reversed grey hair. The effect might be seen gradually but incontrovertably by all and in the mirror directly.
It seems to me that the best way to proceed from a business standpoint therefore is from the outside in. Create legitimate products that improve a person’s visual image and therefore social standing and they will flock for the result. Try to engineer those products to have globally beneficial effects, and marketing becomes easy.
So, for the present, the problem is delayed, and difficult to pinpoint results in exchange for expensive pills/treatments and never ending taking of pills. What about the future? The problem of marketing will evaporate as tissue engineering provides an immediate benefit by eliminating hip, knee and similar pains while restoring or even improving base functionality. When biologically matched teeth can be implanted and grown anew in gums, marketing will be easy.
2. How to market life extension for different generations (teenagers, college students, young adults, mature adults, grandpas and grandmas) and what are the main differences here?Read the rest of this entry »
“I’m basically trying to solve the problem that startups have in hiring the right people. A lot of it has to do with marketing (it’s hard for startups to get prominence over big named companies particularly in university settings), but also fit.“
And that is a very nice endeavour indeed!
I found 1 job description by typing “biologist‘ into the search field although manually I found a bit more mostly in the protein scene. Bioinformatician? Guess what. Hopefully the numbers will grow.
BioBarCamp is due in circa 3 weeks and we have now 45 BioBarCampers signed up on the list of attendees and our host the Institute For The Future has the capacity for around 55 more campers, roughly for 100 people in general. We already have a very valuable mix: researchers, biologists (grad, postdoc, PI), coders-engineers-bioinformaticians, biotech entrepreneurs, doctors, science journalists.
Here is the list so far and that’s also a chance for you to decide whether you want to join and meet us there in Palo Alto on the 6th and 7th, August and share, ask and answer, be the donor and receptor of ideas from all around biogeekdom. I am continuously trying to collect some links on the campers on the BioBarCamp FriendFeed Room to make future Campers preconnected.
Last year I was probably the only SciFoo Camper with an explicit life extension commitment. I suggested & held a session which was related a bit to partial immortalization but was rather about the systems biology perspective in general, illustrated with some examples. So throughout the terrific SciFoo Camp 2007 life extension as a conversation topic remained rather implicit (ok, close to zero) and there was not much room to discuss it in the lack of other fellow life extensionists.
In my opinion the whole point of unconferences is to form the good aggregate of people with a common interest & similar/complementer message to join forces in order to draw enough (intellectual) attention for their topic. In this context, an unconference is about topics at the first place, not just about people. Idea networking is as important as social networking.
And if something fits 100% with the idea of SciFoo it is life extension/aging just as handling terrantic scientific datasets, open science or climate change as all these topics are utterly complicated and quite urgent screaming for the attention of the smartest people.
So I emailed Timo Hannay, SciFoo organizer:
“One thing I’ve noticed is that it would be very good to organize a session on scientific life extension technologies and consequences, because the SciFoo people are ideal to see and discuss all angles of this really important topic.”
Finally Chris over at Ouroboros came up with the idea and the quick implementation of Hourglass, a blog carnival devoted to the biology of aging/biogerontology. For some reason I am not an explicit supporter of blog carnivals – many of my posts were chosen by carnival editors but I never hosted one -, but Hourglass will be the big exception in which I participate, submit posts and host it later. The reason: first it presents aging/biogerontology related posts, which fits my profile and second it was instigated by Chris Patil, whose work is a guarantee for keeping all this in the good direction. So if you want to read on the evolution of longevity and aging, calorie restricition, stem cells/tissue engineering/regenerative medicine, or on the association of long life and intelligence at once, Hourglass is for you.
The concept of decellularizing complex organs in cadavers and reseeding the remaining matrix structure with differentiated, stem or progenitor cells, growing in a bioreactor and transplanting back to the organism could turn out to be a real technological shortcut in the field of tissue engineering. It is not a brand new story on the web, but it is quite new in science and when I heard Doris Taylor at the Understanding Aging Conference talking on that….well I was really amazed.
Dr. Taylor not only showed the pictures of a complete decellularized rat heart matrix, but in fact they did it on a whole rat framework. So the obvious question is whether the technique could be extended to complete human cadavers (imagine the bone and the bone marrow situation) and if yes, when and how? I am sure if there were a useful clinical near term application of this type of tissue engineering, people would include that option too into their testaments.
And now a pop video on the topic and the abstract:
I try to cover some interesting, sciencey points on the conference in later posts, right now just a brief, subjective human- and strategy focused summary:
Congrats to Aubrey de Grey and the team, everything went well and if finally a worldwide consensus is around the corner claiming that robust healthy lifespan extension is technologically possible and worth achieving it is largely due to Aubrey’s relentless networking, organizing activity and American like pushy marketing strategy! Well done!
Had a nice chat with a diverse bunch of interesting people amongst others: Barbara Logan, Nason Schooler, Todd Huffman, Betty Liu, the startupperAndregg brothers, Mark Hamalainen, Keith Causey, Ben Zealley, Brian Martin and sure I forget to mention many more here.
In the photo (thanks Barbara Logan): Neal Van De Ree, Florida auctioneer and activist, John Furber, Legendary Pharmaceuticals, Florida, Aubrey, Paul Logan, Alex Zhavoronkov, GTCBio, BioGerontology Research Foundation Damian Crowe, Genescient, BioGerontology Research Foundation and yours truly.
My tweet was based on my recent Understanding Aging Conference experience where I was part of the audience and not a presenter. So the context is scientific presentations. Of course the chat continued on FriendFeed.
