Lifeboat Foundation

A neurological “functional fingerprint” allows scientists to explore the influence of genetics, environment and aging on brain connectivity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWjI4Hekaxc

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“At SENS Research Foundation, we believe that a world free of age-related disease is possible. That’s why we’re funding work at universities across the world and at our own Research Center in Mountain View, CA.

Continue reading “Aubrey de Grey — We Will End Aging” »

Today, we would like to share the talk that Steven A. Garan gave at our recent conference in New York, Ending Age-Related Diseases: Investment Prospects & Advances in Research. The conference focused on bringing together the world of research and investment and bringing thought leaders, investors, the media, and the general public together.

Steven A. Garan is the Director of Bioinformatics at the Center for Research and Education on Aging (CREA) and a researcher at UC Berkeley National Laboratory. In his talk at Ending Age-Related Diseases, he discussed the impact of various present and future Silicon Valley technology breakthroughs on overcoming aging.

Continue reading “Steven A. Garan — Silicon Valley’s Role in Fighting Aging” »

To understand how cells in the body behave, bioengineers create miniature models of the cells’ environment in their lab. But recreating this niche environment is incredibly complex in a controlled setting, because researchers are still learning all the factors that influence cell behavior and growth. By observing and then modifying their engineered mini-models, scientists are better able to identify those factors.

This form of cellular research is essential to the study of regenerative medicine, which focuses on replacing or repairing damaged tissue, often through the use of stem cells, a special population of cells that can give rise to all tissues in the body. Bioengineers face the central question of regenerative medicine: what causes stem cells to grow, organize, and mature from a small population of cells to complex organs?

To find an answer, a research team from the Johns Hopkins Institute for NanoBioTechnology borrowed a process commonly used in the electronics industry called micropatterning, in which the miniaturization of shapes increases the number of transistors on a circuit. The team created micropatterned shapes, coupled with machine learning, to see how confinement influences stem cell maturation and organization.

Continue reading “Bioengineers borrow from electronics industry to get stem cells to shape up” »

This is the second part of a short fictional story about a man realizing for the first time that he has a deep desire to avoid aging and death. We published the first part of the story last Friday, and you can read it here.

I feel ashamed admitting to this, but I proceeded with wariness all the way to my door. That late at night, I didn’t meet anyone in the hallways or in the elevator. At first, I didn’t even want to take the elevator, as I was afraid that the girl might suddenly appear before me when the doors opened as I got in or out; however, for some reason, the idea of taking the stairs felt even worse, nearly terrifying. After hesitating some, I chose to take the elevator. Once I reached my door, I inserted the key in the lock, and after a moment of hesitation, I began turning it. At each turn, which echoed sinisterly in the hallway, I stopped as if to check that the sound didn’t attract the attention of God knows what supernatural creatures lurking in the dark. Absolutely nothing looked different than usual, yet I felt like a character in a horror movie.

I opened a crack between the door and the frame, stuck a hand in, and frantically searched for the light switch on the wall. “Finally home,” I said in an annoyed and embarrassingly loud and shaky voice to no one in particular, while still searching for the switch with no success. Once I found it, I flicked it, and as soon as the light went on, I pulled the door wide open, ran in, and finally slammed the door shut behind me.

Kelsey Moody, CEO of Ichor Therapeutics, discusses the creation of a gut-stable antibody mimetic for Parkinson’s disease and announces 10 million dollars in investment from Juvenescence into Ichor portfolio company Antoxerene Inc. at the Ending Age-Related Diseases conference in NYC.

More at: https://www.leafscience.org/ending-age-related-diseases-2018/

George Church, Age-X, HIV, Aubrey, a lil bit of everything here.

Within 5 years, the world could widely accept that we are within striking distance of a post-aging world. This could be with the achievement of mice that would normally die at the age of three getting life extension at the age of two and living beyond 5 years. It might be after that with the similar treatments to reverse aging in dogs. It could be with the first age reversal treatments in humans that make people look significantly younger but also restore muscle and other body functions.

Continue reading “Within 5 years, the world could widely accept that we are within striking distance of a post aging world” »

Now that we are starting to see the arrival of actual therapies aimed at targeting the processes of aging directly in order to prevent age-related diseases, it has become easier to separate two very distinct groups.

The first group consists of the snake oil salesmen peddling unproven supplements and therapies to whoever is foolish enough to buy and take things on faith without using the scientific method. The hucksters have long been a plague on our field, preying on the gullible and tainting legitimate science with their charlatanry and nonsense. One example is the “biotech company” that makes bold claims yet never delivers on those claims in practice, offering data based on poorly designed experiments and tiny cohorts that are statistically irrelevant; another example is the supplement peddler selling expensive supplement blends with flashy names, which, on inspection, turn out to be commonly available herbs and minerals mixed and sold at a high markup. These sorts of people have plagued our community and given the field a reputation of snake oil.

The second group are the credible scientists, researchers, and companies who have been working on therapies for years and sometimes more than a decade. Many of these therapies are following the damage repair approach advocated by Dr. Aubrey de Grey of the SENS Research Foundation over a decade ago. The basic idea is to take an engineering approach to the damage that aging does to the body and to periodically repair that damage in order to keep its level below that which causes pathology. These therapies are now starting to arrive, with some already in human trials right now, and this marks a milestone in our field: the credible science has finally outstripped the snake oil, and the focus can move from pseudoscience to real, evidence-based science.