METHUSELAH ARCHIVE PRACTITIONERS / DAVID A. SINCLAIR
Portrait of a smiling man in a white lab coat embroidered 'David Sinclair, Ph.D.' with a Harvard crest, arms crossed, standing in a laboratory.
Editor5627 (Wikimedia Commons) · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Resized for web display. source

David A. Sinclair

individual · Boston, Massachusetts, USA (Harvard Medical School)
lived:b. 1969
active:2003–present
type:individual
role:promoter
location:Boston, Massachusetts, USA (Harvard Medical School)
eventual status:still_active
"[Resveratrol is] as close to a miraculous molecule as you can find."
FINANCIAL CONFLICTS
Sinclair co-founded Sirtris Pharmaceuticals in 2004 around his own laboratory's resveratrol/SIRT1 findings; GlaxoSmithKline acquired Sirtris for $720 million in 2008; the archive did not find a source establishing Sinclair's specific personal proceeds from the sale. As of a February 2019 KFF Health News count, Sinclair was involved as a founder, investor, equity holder, consultant, or board member with 28 companies, at least 18 of them related to anti-aging, including being listed as an inventor on a NAD-booster patent licensed to Elysium Health (a supplement seller) and holding an investment in InsideTracker, a biomarker-testing company whose tests he has cited to support his own biological-age claims. He later co-founded Metro International Biotech (MetroBiotech), which develops a proprietary NMN formulation, MIB-626, as an investigational drug; MetroBiotech's active FDA Investigational New Drug filing was the basis on which, per trade-press reporting, the FDA excluded NMN generally from the legal definition of a dietary supplement in a November 2022 letter, a determination financially advantageous to a company in which Sinclair holds an interest, before the FDA reportedly reversed that determination in September 2025. A 2024 Wall Street Journal investigation reported that companies Sinclair founded had raised more than $1 billion in total, with four having gone bankrupt or largely halted operations and another four not yet completing human trials of their products (facts independently corroborated via a fetched syndication of the same reporting).
INTERVENTIONS PROMOTED
EXTERNAL REFERENCES
NOTES

David Sinclair earned his PhD in molecular genetics at the University of New South Wales in 1995 and is now a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and founding director of the Paul F. Glenn Laboratories for the Biological Mechanisms of Aging. His 2003 report, with colleagues, that resveratrol activates the sirtuin enzyme SIRT1 and extends yeast lifespan launched a wave of commercial and popular interest in longevity genes, culminating in Sirtris Pharmaceuticals’ $720 million sale to GlaxoSmithKline in 2008; a 2010 independent study later showed the reported SIRT1 activation was an artifact of the original screening assay, a company drug trial was halted for a serious adverse event, and GSK shut down the Sirtris research program in 2013. Sinclair’s public profile survived that reversal; his 2019 book Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don’t Have To (Atria Books) became a bestseller, and he shifted his public advocacy to NAD+-boosting compounds, principally NMN, which he has said he takes daily himself. He remains a co-founder, investor, or board member of a large number of companies commercializing longevity science, and in 2024 resigned as president of the Academy for Health and Lifespan Research — a body of longevity researchers he had co-founded and led — after a company he co-founded with his brother, Animal Bioscience, issued a press release quoting him claiming a dog supplement had been “proven to reverse aging in dogs,” a claim other longevity researchers, including University of Washington’s Matt Kaeberlein, publicly called unsupported by the underlying data; Kaeberlein resigned his own Academy membership over the episode, separately describing it as the textbook case of a scientist selling snake oil.