David Andrew Sinclair
| David Andrew Sinclair | |
|---|---|
| Born | ca 1969 Sydney |
| Nationality | Australian |
| Fields | biology, aging |
| Institutions | Paul F. Glenn Laboratories for the Biological Mechanisms of Aging at Harvard Medical School |
| Influenced | Rozalyn Anderson |
David Andrew Sinclair (born ca 1969) is an Australian biologist and Professor of Genetics best known for his advocacy for resveratrol as an anti-aging dietary supplement and potential drug.
David Andrew Sinclair was born in Australia around 1969, and he grew up in St Ives, New South Wales; his paternal grandmother had immigrated to Australia following the failure of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and his father changed the family name from Szigeti to Sinclair.
Sinclair obtained a Bachelor of Science at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, and received the Australian Commonwealth Prize. In 1995, he received a Ph.D. in Molecular Genetics from the same school, focusing on gene regulation in yeast. In 1993 he met Leonard P. Guarente, an Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who studied genes involved in the regulation of aging, when Guarente was on a lecture tour in Australia, and the meeting spurred Sinclair to apply for a post-doc position in Guarente's lab. Earlier that year Cynthia Kenyon's lab at UCSF had discovered that a single-gene mutation in (Daf-2) could double the lifespan of C. elegans.
In 1999 Sinclair was hired at Harvard Medical School. In 2003 his lab was small and struggling for funding. In 2004 Sinclair met with the philanthropist Paul F. Glenn who ended up donating $5 million to Harvard to establish the Paul F. Glenn Laboratories for the Biological Mechanisms of Aging at Harvard, of which Sinclair became a director.
In 2004 Sinclair, along with serial entrepreneur Andrew Perlman, Christoph Westphal, Richard Aldrich, Richard Pops, and Paul Schimmel, founded Sirtris Pharmaceuticals. Sirtris was focused on developing Sinclair's research into activators of sirtuins, work that began in the Guarente lab. The company was specifically focused on resveratrol formulations and derivatives as activators of the SIRT1 enzyme; Sinclair became known for making statements about resveratrol like: “(It's) as close to a miraculous molecule as you can find.... One hundred years from now, people will maybe be taking these molecules on a daily basis to prevent heart disease, stroke, and cancer.” Most of the anti-aging field was more cautious, especially with regard to what else resveratrol might do in the body and its lack of bioavailability. The company's initial product was called SRT501, and was a formulation of reservatrol.; Sirtris went public in 2007 and was subsequently purchased and made a subsidiary of GlaxoSmithKline in 2008 for $720 million.
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