Interview with Dr John Beard

I had the Pleasure of interviewing Dr John Beard at the Global Healthspan Summit. He is Irene Diamond Professor and Director of the International Longevity Center-USA at Columbia University, New York. ?He has previously worked as Director of Ageing and Life Course at the World Health Organization

Tell me a bit about your background and how you feel about this conference?

I am a director of the International Longevity Center, I have been a director for Aging and Life Course at WHO. I am a medical doctor by training so I don’t come from a biological background.

I just visited the World Economic forum in Davos and it's great to see the impact on Healthspan globally as well as this conference, this is really transformative and ensure legitimacy to the field.

What do you think about the large increase in the interest and perceived feasibility of healthspan extension? A decade ago aging research was to some degree snake oil but it’s now becoming mainstream that there are opportunities to intervene in agerelated diseases and reduce disease.

We are hampered by an outdated way of thinking about healthspan, we have to think about the span free from disease and the biological change, it isn’t much different to old fashioned medicine.

We frame the field as transformative, but a problem is the exact definition of healthspan as being in good health and moderate health so on. There is now the field of geroscience and various biomarkers that we can use, but we don’t link it.

We need to use scores earlier in lifespan and assess functionality not just when the person is sick like with ADL scores, we need to take into account many factors including psychological.

What are the major steps countries should adopt now to reduce the challenges of age-related disease and demographic challenges?

Here and now there are several things to be done that can help in the future. There are life course issues, we must provide good nutrition and education to start with, preventive intervention early on. Society can help by adapting to compensate for losses already occurred and create a supportive environment for elderly.

What do you think about the different stakeholders and organization in the field as for how they perceive aging, for example World Health Organization and other global policymakers if you compare it to Hevolution.

I think it’s a lack of integration to connect biology to policy. We need policymakers to see the value of connecting it, the investment from Saudi may overcome the psychology and that applies in general also to other things than aging. I think it is necessary to have 1-2 countries provide the leadership to shift that thinking.

What do you think about equality of access to medicines that improve healthspan/age-related pathology, people say only for the rich. There is a lot of debate in US now on health insurance and reimbursement etc.

People need to be made aware of it. It applies to for example GLP1 agonists. There is not a black and white answer to how to address these issues.

We need to tie molecular biomarkers to healthspan and find way of making treatments scalable.