Avi Roy

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@agingroy

Science Lead @temple. Biomed Scientist in #longevity. Mentor & Investor in Health startups. Past CTO @BioVivaScience, Researcher @CASMIORG, Founders Health.

Oxford, England temple.com Joined May 2008

2.8K Following 14K Followers 11K Posts

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Avi Roy @agingroy Apr 24

A weekly jab in the belly is generating more revenue than the entire AI industry.

Ozempic + Mounjaro: $71B in 2025.
OpenAI + Anthropic: $29B.

And they've barely started. ~2% of the 800 million eligible patients can currently access them.

h/t @DrSamuelBHume

Avi Roy @agingroy 4h

Ovarian cancer is often found too late.

By the time it’s diagnosed, more than half of cases have already spread. At that stage, about 3 in 10 women live five more years. When it’s found early, that number is over 9 in 10.

The tests we use today aren’t good enough.

In a trial of 200,000 women, screening did not clearly reduce deaths.

Now researchers have tested a new blood test that looks for a scrap of tumor RNA.

They used blood samples from 506 women, including 43 with the earliest stage: a tiny precancer in the fallopian tube, where the most common type often begins.

In one test, the new method told apart a woman with that precancer from one with a harmless lump 99 times out of 100.

CA-125, the blood test doctors use today, did it 31 times out of 100, worse than a coin toss.

Important caveat: it has not yet been tried in women before diagnosis.

Bottom line: if it holds up in women who feel fine, ovarian cancer could finally be caught while it is still curable.

Avi Roy @agingroy 7h

A toothbrush that helps kill bacteria while you brush? That is the claim behind a new design that uses the electricity its own bristles make as they bend. No battery needed.

In a trial at Peking University, adults with plaque and bleeding gums used either the new brush or a standard one, chosen at random, for three months. With the new brush, plaque, swollen gums and bleeding improved by about 35% to 40%. The ordinary brush improved by about 15%.

The electricity comes from the plastic bristles themselves. Each bend builds a small charge, the same effect behind the spark when you click a lighter. In saliva, that charge makes a chemical that white blood cells also use to kill germs.

The study involved about 110 people at one hospital and did not track cavities or lost teeth.

Bottom line: it is still just brushing twice a day, but with bristles that may leave fewer bacteria behind. A bigger trial will show whether that protects teeth.

Avi Roy @agingroy 11h

Stopping an Ozempic-type diabetes drug was linked to about double the risk of heart attack, stroke, or death in a new study.

But before you panic, look at *who stops*.

People often stop a medicine because they get sick with something else. If that sickness is what drives the higher risk, the drug gets blamed for part of the story it did not cause.

Gym quitters work the same way: some of the risk is losing the exercise, and some is the illness/injury that forced them to stop.

That matters here.

Records from 57,000 Italians with diabetes fit that pattern. Most of the extra events in people who stopped were deaths: about 22 per 1,000 a year, versus 5 per 1,000 in those who stayed on the drug.

If the drug alone explained that gap, taking it would need to prevent about 4 out of 5 deaths.

The big trials found closer to 1 in 7.

The records did not say why people stopped. The authors point to frailty and cancer as possible reasons.

Bottom line: these drugs do protect people, and stopping gives up some of that protection.

But the doubled risk in this study far outweighs the known benefit, suggesting the main question is not just what happens when people stop, but *who* stops.

The Lancet Verified account @TheLancet 2d

Stopping GLP-1 treatment linked to twice the risk of heart attack, stroke or death compared with continuing, in people with type 2 diabetes and no cardiovascular disease, according to a new study.

Find out more in @LancetRH_Europe: spkl.io/60137wUtS

$Research in context panel for a paper published in The Lancet Regional Health - Europe entitled \"GLP-1 receptor agonist discontinuation and cardiovascular events and all-cause mortality in people with type 2 diabetes: a retrospective cohort study\". Copyright: 2026 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. CC BY 4.0.$
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Avi Roy @agingroy 1d

Most of us will watch someone we love face cancer, Alzheimer's, or heart disease. In this clip, Anthropic's CEO says AI will make them "relics of the past" in under 10 years.

I hope he's right.

AI is already speeding up the first half of drug development: finding the drug. It can predict the shape of most proteins, work that once took a lab months or years.

The hard part is proving a drug works in people. That depends on the disease itself.

The trials behind the two Alzheimer's drugs that slow the disease ran about 18 months, because the decline takes that long to show. A Novartis heart drug was followed in 8,322 people for almost 5 years, and when the full results came out on Saturday, it had not prevented heart attacks or strokes.

No computer can make a disease move faster.

Today, a drug takes about 10 years from its first human dose to approval. About 9 in 10 fail along the way. That is where AI can help most. If better targets turn 1 success in 10 into 2, twice as many medicines reach patients from the same number of tries.

So my bet for 2036 is more medicines for these diseases, each one proven in people. Making them relics will take longer.

Fireside Alpha Verified account @firesidealpha 1d

Dario Amodei says cancer, Alzheimer’s, heart disease, and mental illness will be relics of the past in less than a decade, and that "we can create an age of miracles"

“You know, if today we look at things like cancer, Alzheimer’s, heart disease, mental illness, these will be relics of the past in, I think, less than a decade."

"And I believe that the company which gets the risks right will also be the company that has the license to operate that society trusts and society believes can build the benefits in the right way."

"I think if we do this right, we can create an age of miracles where humanity is able to solve problems that have eluded us for millennia."

"We have to make sure that all the risks, all the ways that things can go wrong with this technology, we very carefully address those risks as we bring the benefits, and as we have a viable business at the same time.”

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