 Hello and welcome everybody at this press conference today at the World Economic Forum in Davos. It's Thursday and today we will be talking with some distinguished speakers that have joined me here today about the topic of healthy aging. All the speakers are, as a matter of fact, from the European Union, so we'll talk also in a little bit more granularity about where we are in Europe, and we'll be hearing from each of the speakers. We have three speakers who are researchers at the European Research Council. Next to me is Dr. Konstantinos Demetriades. Welcome. Then next to him is named Linda Partridge. Welcome to you too. And then at the far end is Professor Virpi Luma. Welcome to you too. And in the middle we have their, I suppose their boss in a way, Professor Jean-Pierre Bourguignon, the President of the European Research Council. Welcome to you too. And then last but not least, there is Carlos Moedas, the European Commissioner for Research, Science and Innovation. Welcome. And why don't I start immediately with you, Commissioner Moedas? We're talking here about healthy aging in the context of Europe, and of course you are responsible for the domain of science and research into that topic. Could you tell us a little bit more about why this is important for the European Commission and perhaps also why it's important for the citizens of Europe? So thank you very much, and welcome to all of you. It's really a pleasure to be here. I mean, and I wanted to start by a couple of words to thank the scientists. I think the reason of the value of the European Union is about having this power of the network of scientists all over Europe. And the main institution that we have that is able to leverage this power to a point that I've never seen in my life is the European Research Council. And the European Research Council has become really the brand of fundamental science of Europe. In the last 10 years, we were able to have grantees that became Nobel Prizes, six of them. We had four Fields Medal. We had five Wolf Prizes. And so it was a project that became 10 years ago something that a lot of people in Europe didn't believe. They didn't believe and it was difficult to get off the ground and we were able to do it. So first of all, thank you to the scientists. Thank you for their word and I have all the time about Europe and for their great work. But let me tell you why I think it's important to be here today as a politician. If I look ahead and I think what are the big challenges? What are the big challenges that we have ahead of us? And I'll say three. One, as a politician, I would look at climate change. The second will be about the whole digital world that we're living. But the third one is about aging. And it's about aging because this will be the big challenge for politicians. You know, once Chancellor Merkel said that in Europe we are 7% of the world. We are 25% of the GDP of the world. But our social welfare state is 50% of the whole cost of what people expense in terms of welfare. And so we have to think for the future how can we, without reducing the services, without reducing the welfare, because that's on the DNA of Europe, what can we do to have better health? And how can we have a better output? And I think the better output that we can have is exactly about aging. How can we have a better life? How can we prevent disease? And that's what these scientists do. So their work, even if it's in very fundamental ways and about curiosity-driven research, is at the end of the day about politics. And you see that in different countries in Europe, you see that people today, they are upset. They are upset because they say, look, we pay taxes, but then we don't get the services we deserve. But if we had a system that was more focused on the outputs than the inputs, then with the same amount of money we could have better health. And so I think that for me this is extremely important. And I always start when I talk to young people, I always say to young people, you know what's the life expectancy, what was the life expectancy 100 years ago? And people are always puzzled because they normally get, oh, no, it was probably 60 or 50, no, no, no, it was 30 years old. And then we did these amazing work of today looking at the young generation, my children, and I say, look, you're the probability that you go over 100 is amazing. But I want you to have a good life. And that's what these research is about. So as a politician, I just wanted to have these two words, one about the link of the work of these scientists from the very fundamental research to the day-to-day of people. I wanted to thank the president of the ERC, which has been the engine of these institutions. And I wanted to give you the incentive and to tell you that in our proposal for the next program of Science of Europe, we're talking about increasing the budget of the ERC. That today was around 13 billion for seven years to almost 18 billion euros. So that's the importance we really give to fundamental science. So thank you for inviting me. I feel very humble around these tables. So now I will just listen. And if there's any political question, please ask me. Yes, absolutely. And I've no doubt that we have some questions at the end. So in about 10 minutes, we'll come back to you and the other speakers. But first, you mentioned what can we do to have a better health, because that's a challenge for people now that we are getting older. But I want to take a step back and ask, perhaps, Dame Partridge or Dame Linda, what is actually the situation in Europe right now? How old are people getting? And how healthy are people? Could you tell us a little bit about that before we turn to your research? Indeed. And I also am delighted to be here. Very glad to be able to talk about aging in this wonderful context. So we are indeed all living longer. It's actually been going on for about 200 years in developed countries. And the problem is that healthy lifespan is not keeping up with the overall increase. So by the age of 80, most Europeans have at least eight different medical conditions. So a big burden of multi-morbidity. And the indications are from the current demographics that the increase in lifespan will continue at least until 2030. So we're going to see a growing population of elderly in many countries against a background of falling birth rates. So the ratio of older young is also changing. So the real challenge for the kind of research that we're doing that is funded by the ERC is to try to tackle this period of ill health at the end of life, to try to keep people healthier for longer before the end of life. And happily, aging is proving to be a very malleable process. So work with animals has shown that a lot of different interventions, genetic, environmental, particularly diet, but also drugs can increase lifespan as it happens. But what we're really interested in is health. And it can keep them healthier for longer. So a quite simple intervention, eating less, dietary restriction, can protect laboratory animals, including resus monkeys, against multiple different aging-related diseases. So dementia, cardiovascular disease, cancer, and others. So the thought in the field is perhaps instead of waiting for these aging-related diseases to happen and then treating them, we could instead develop a preventative medicine based on what we now know about the biology of aging and the interventions that can affect it. And my own work here is primarily based on the use of drugs because we've discovered so much about the fundamental mechanisms of aging now that we know how to target some of them, sometimes with already approved drugs actually for aging-related diseases. So there's quite a prospect rather than for new drug development for drug repurposing in this area. So I'm particularly working with three different drugs in a variety of different animal models. And what we're finding is we can keep the animals healthy for longer. They don't get the age-related conditions that their particular species gets. And I think the prospect for the future is definitely prevention, probably based on the use of a cocktail of different drugs that target these different features of the aging process. I think that's the really exciting prospect that we're potentially looking forward to. And I think it could do a lot to tackle this growing burden of multi-morbidity at the end of life. Excellent. We look forward to that. Of course, just one question. I know that there's now increasingly talk in popular press about people living a hundred years and a hundred year life. Are we actually close to that for babies that are born today or how old do they get in Europe? Well, as you know, protection is very difficult, especially of the future. But if current demographic trends hold up, then yes, we're looking at a very significant proportion, perhaps even 20% of the babies born today living to a hundred. But of course, there are unhappily contrary trends. The obesity, the diabetes in the young could send that one back. But potentially, yes. So we have to be careful what we wish for. Thank you, Dame Linda. And then I want to turn to your colleague, Dr. Konstantinas Demetriades. If you do similar research into what is possible actually with medicine, with biology, could you tell us a little bit more from your perspective? Is it indeed a good idea to use the medicine that we have right now, or should we rather take a step back and do some more basic research? Thank you very much. I will try to explain our research in a way that is as simple as possible. This is usually tricky because we're working on very fundamental processes, and sometimes we fall into the technicalities. So you just heard about different dietary regimes that we have already and different drugs that can mimic these processes. However, unfortunately, it's not as simple as that. So although we know a lot, we're not there yet, and we cannot simply get a sip of this drug every morning and stay healthy and live forever. And the reason behind that is that we don't quite understand the very fundamental processes that are affected when we touch upon these cellular mechanisms. So our ERC-funded work aims to understand how precisely these molecular mechanisms work in healthy cells, and what goes wrong in aging and age-related diseases. And I believe that this way we will be able to identify more precise and more targeted ways in order to modulate these processes in the right organs and at the right time and to the right extent. So in particular, we're looking at nutrient sensing. So this aims to understand how ourselves sense the availability of nutrients in their environment in order to modulate or adapt their processes accordingly. And we know that this is very, very important because these exact mechanisms are the ones that are very commonly dysregulated in many different diseases. And we know that these very same mechanisms go bad as we age. I understand. And so you're hoping to find out in the coming years more about those mechanisms, I suppose, and to find more effective ways of, let's say, preventing or treating aging diseases that go with aging. Yeah, that's correct. But our purpose is to understand better what we do before we actually give it a try because this way we might be able to improve the efficiency of the overall process of clinical trials and the application of these findings all the way to patients or to the senior people. And as, sorry, not professor, but at least Commissioner Moeda said with a welfare state that's costing us 50 percent of our budget, it would be a good idea to look into the effectiveness of how to achieve it, especially with so many people aging right now. I want to turn now to the last speaker of the researchers at least, Professor Wispy Luma. Could you tell us a little bit more about your research into this matter? Yes, thank you. So studying human aging is a little bit difficult in the sense that the study subject lives as long as the researcher. So we are facing a little bit of difficulties there. But nevertheless, in addition to this fantastic lab research on model organisms, we also need to study longitudinally the aging processes in humans as they grow older. So I've taken a little bit different approach in my research and I've looked back into the history to try to understand how we age today. So ERC re-transformed my research when they gave me a grant to computerise thousands and thousands of family records from my country in Finland so that I can build 15 generations of pedigree following people from birth to death. And using these records, we can look at many factors that influence differences in lifespan between people like genetic factors, environmental factors, socioeconomic differences and so on. One particular question that I've become very interested is why do we actually live as long as we do? So what sort of lifespan did we evolve to have? And we are a little bit strange species in that we live decades after we can't even have babies anymore. No other species practically has this. So it's been a dilemma. And one idea I had was that perhaps because our babies are so much effort and need a lot of care from the mothers, we basically evolved to become grandmothers who can't have their own babies anymore but still are really much needed for the success of their families to raise these grandchildren. So that's what I've been studying. And we've found, my team has found really big benefits of the grandmothers for the success of the families, for the survival of the grandchildren and so on. So that was a really key finding but of course everything is changing in the modern world and people live now further and further away from their grandparents which we can also study with these fantastic data we've collected. So there's a problem that the elderly today actually spend most of their time with other elderly rather than with their families like used to be the case. And I think we should pay more attention to this because birth rates are declining, people are citing problems with childcare and social networks as one of the key reasons for this. And if we could improve the healthy lifespan and the healthy years at the end of the life, perhaps then actually if these elderly were more involved in their families like always being the case or something else which stimulates them, there might be actually multiple benefits for not just one generation but several generations in terms of their health, in terms of actually economic factors and social factors. It's absolutely fascinating and I want to ask you on behalf of the fellow men in the room though, if grandmothers have that social function of growing so old, what about the grandfathers? Oh I hate that question. So I studied mainly historical families and I hate to say but in the historical families grandfathers didn't really have much of a benefit for the grandchildren in the same way as the grandmothers did. But that's not to say that the grandfathers today would be useless because of course our society has completely changed so both grandparents today are much more involved, hands on in these issues. Let's see what happens. And I didn't do this on purpose but of course we have a last speaker, President Jean-Pierre Bourguignon of the European Research Council. You have heard Commissioner Moueda speak about his ambitions to raise the budget of the European Research Council. I heard I noted down from 13 to 18 billion, quite a big increase. Could you tell us a little bit for what benefit this money is used and what you have in mind for the European Research Council going forward? Thank you very much for that. First of all, I'm a grandfather so I'm very pleased to acknowledge this at this moment. Of course it's very important what we heard from Commissioner Moueda but I think it's very directly connected to what we heard from the scientists themselves, namely that while developing the European Research Council I think the European Union and European Commission had the duty to do that, developed a program which really has been stimulating and making Europe more, stimulating the researchers and making Europe more attractive. So you heard that this huge variety of research which has been developed at our level were covering all fields of science and you heard some samples here focused on one topic. Of course this topic is extremely relevant as a fantastic societal impact and also shows that the concerns of people is really addressed and maybe one element I would like to make here is the fact that very often the scientists are more or less accused which is maybe too much but people think they are living in their ivory tower and I think it's something we see at the ERC level completely differently because actually the researchers are submitting their most ambitious ideas to us and we select, of course we are selective but we select some of the very best and definitely what we see is a fantastic impact on the level of research at the European level and this is of course something which is very important at this stage where other continents are investing massively into research. I'm thinking about Asia in particular but I think Europe it's not as, for the reasons that Commissioner Moritz has put forward namely has a very special situation of, I mean small number of people already quite still very advanced countries but also in terms of social benefits so we need to rebalance this. Maybe my key point I would like to make also concerning the European Research Council is its breadth so at the moment we are over, typically at 9,000 grants we have been given which have been employing more than 60,000 people in of course many different institutions we are now at 800 institutions which benefited and of course for us the future is we want it's critical that we can keep the quality and that quality, scientific quality should be the only criteria on which the projects are selected because we know that as soon as we get away from this then the whole thing is going to fall apart and this really made a difference for the success of the European Research Council and we are very pleased to see when we look at really the studies we have been doing or even some other people have been doing really now is ranked as one of the most successful funding mechanism in the whole world and this is not our figures it's the figures of really independent evaluators and just to give a close on this note in our case with our exposit evaluation of the projects we see that typically about between 70 and 80 percent of the project every year because we do that on a yearly basis we have either a breakthrough or a major scientific event which for us is very comforting shows that our choices have been definitely very reasonable and really we know we have provided resources that researchers have used remarkably well. Thank you so much Mr. Bourguignon and I want to turn to the floor for questions from the audience. Stephen Fittler from the Wall Street Journal if you can stand up with the microphone and ask the question. A couple of different questions I wonder if the researchers could if you have extended healthy life do you kind of necessarily thereafter have a period of unhealthy life so are you just pushing back these say eight years of unhealthy life to the future so you'd start to what do you conk out much more quickly after your healthy life and the prospect there after the healthy life and the second one is the question about Brexit I'm afraid and what would be the relation of the European Research Council what can you say about the relation of the European Research Council to the UK after Brexit. So I think I can tackle your first question I think there are two quite encouraging lines of evidence that if you try to compress the unhealthy period you actually compress it so you don't just draw everything out so the first is that people who die at really advanced ages so well into their 90s or over 100 or even over 110 often have relatively little ill health at the end of their lives so it's possible to combine a long life with a short period of ill health at the end of it they're there we can see that happen and some of these interventions that I mentioned particularly dietary restriction extends lifespan and often makes it rather difficult to say what the animal died of so with your control animals it's usually pretty obvious it was a tumor or something else that you can see pathologically with the animals that are dietary restricted in a sense they just died it's really hard to say what problem was so again there really seems to be a compression of that morbid period at the end of life so I think it is achievable and of course that's what we should aim for rather than simply stretching everything out Thank you and then now for the elephant in the room we actually prepared this press conference and we thought that we were going to have a different elephant in the room because actually one of the researchers has done research on elephants but we can talk about that later so the elephant in the room breaks it I'm very happy to answer that question but I was thinking about the dietary restrictions that I have to have so I'll ask that question to Lida afterwards you know I'm it is such a sad situation for research and science and I say these from the bottom of my heart because in these five years I saw and I visited all these researchers in the UK, in other parts of Europe and my conclusion is that we really need each others so the UK needs Europe and the European Union and the European Union needs the UK and so as a commissioner for research and science what I could do and I did was to try to open my arms for the future in terms of our proposal for the next programme and so if there is an agreement between the European Union and the UK then it will be very easy for the UK to look into the framework programme the next programme of science and it is there in my proposal it's just very easy the UK can join can join and we have a very simple system where nobody in terms of amount of money the UK will pay their part we will pay our part so imagine that you have ten scientists five are from the UK and five are from other countries then the UK will pay their part and we will pay our part and so it's a very fair system and so I think that we have proposed a really very very good deal that makes possible that the point will not be about the money I think that the researchers in the UK really want to participate and we can ask that question to Linda not because of the money it's because of the network because of the ability that you have to do but everything I did and I've put these really with very careful in my proposal it does not depend on me it doesn't depend on us it depends on an umbrella deal on the deal above and so if that deal exists and the same doors are open to countries like Canada and countries like New Zealand that we've been talking in Australia so we want this program to be really open to the world the really amazing thing that I've seen in this program is to see scientists that come from the United States and work with us or other parts of the world from China, from Japan and the president of the ERC basically I mean I think that nobody has travelled has he has travelled to the expense of his health I imagine of doing these just telling really you are part of it that Europe is an open system and the European system of science has to be open to the world so Stephen I'm sorry that I cannot answer the first part of the question which is the political question between the UK and the EU and I think that we have proved that we really want the UK as part of the game so we've done everything in our proposal for Horizon Europe for the UK to be Thank you Commissioner and then I think we have time for one more question before we close the press conference and if there's none I will ask Yeah go ahead When Virpi was describing her work I was thinking about the relationship of her work with policy making and one of the interesting experiences that came to me was this experience in Japan where they have put a senior living facility next to a kindergarten and so you can see that the work of a scientist can then be at the end you can think about solutions so if the grandparents are not anymore with the families probably we can find other solutions and the results of that work are very interesting for the people that know it will be interesting to see and to link so I'm always trying to do these links because I think there's a lot of link even with a very fundamental I mean what you're doing is fundamental research but we can find that for the future of Europe is important Very well and with that I think we've indeed come to the end of our press conference I want to thank all the speakers and I want to thank people both here and soon with another update Thank you so much