For more than two decades, Harvard geneticist David Sinclair has built a lucrative career on promises of miracle cures for aging. From resveratrol in 2013 to NMN supplements in 2019, and now a purported cure for blindness in 2026, Sinclair follows the same troubling pattern. He announces breakthroughs on podcasts before publishing peer-reviewed science, raise millions in venture capital, and move on when results fail to materialize.
According to sources, his latest claim involves ER-100. It is a gene therapy for glaucoma that he promoted on Joe Rogan’s podcast.
He stated on the podcast, “Nothing’s gone wrong so far. Everything’s proceeding according to plan. And we’re at a turning point potentially in human history if it works.”
The problems start immediately. Sinclair announced this breakthrough in August 2024, but the actual data didn’t appear until an October press release. No peer-reviewed paper exists. The entire scientific foundation rests on three patients tested over 56 days at the lowest possible dose, with no control group and no blinding.
The headline number driving media coverage claims two participants showed “28% of points in the visual fields showed a four decibel improvement” on the Humphrey visual field test. This test requires patients to press a button when they see flashing lights. It’s entirely subjective.
Glaucoma researchers have documented that patients improve on this test simply through practice. Single data points can vary by more than 10 decibels between tests. The press release doesn’t mention how many test points worsened, what happened to overall scores, or whether improvements held up on repeat testing.
More concerning is what the press release omits. The clinical trial registration lists objective measurements: OCT scans measuring nerve cell thickness and electroretinograms recording electrical signals from those cells. Neither measurement appears in the announcement. If these objective tests had shown positive results, they would have led the press release. Their absence suggests they revealed nothing worth reporting.
The funding timeline reveals the real strategy. Life Biosciences, where Sinclair serves as co-founder and chairman, raised $80 million in April 2024. This was months before any human data existed. The company has now collected $240 million total.
This mirrors Sinclair’s resveratrol playbook, which generated a $720 million sale to GlaxoSmithKline based on preliminary results. That research division was later shut down after failing to produce viable treatments.
Perhaps most troubling is the direct appeal to desperate patients. The Sinclair Lab website includes a donation button asking ordinary people to “help drive a glaucoma revolution.” This transforms the pattern from misleading investors to potentially exploiting people facing vision loss.
Sinclair’s colleagues have noticed. In 2024, he stepped down as president of the Academy for Health and Lifespan Research after claiming a supplement from a company he’d invested in had reversed aging in dogs. Fellow researcher Matt Kaeberlein publicly called him a snake oil salesman.
