Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: biotech/medical

The CellAge project hosted last year with Lifespan.io has now joined up with Michael Greve and Kizoo to develop this technology. Community support for the project has helped move the project foward and will hopefully speed up progress as a result.

April 2017, Edinburgh. CellAge Limited (“CellAge”) has raised a seed round backed by Michael Greve´s Kizoo Technology Capital and a group of angel investors.

CellAge, a privately held synthetic biology start-up aiming to develop tools and therapies for age-related diseases, has successfully completed a seed fundraising round. In this round Kizoo Technology Capital and a number of angel investors have joined the effort to develop synthetic promoters which will make senescent cells identification and removal safer and more efficient. To achieve this, CellAge is planning to analyze transcriptional profiles of a wide range of senescent cell types using proprietary algorithm and construct novel promoters from candidate regulatory elements identified in this screen. The joint expertise in senescence, synthetic biology and bioinformatics gives CellAge a unique angle on improving ways how gene therapies could be targeted to senescent cells.

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Researchers have developed an artificial womb to sustain the life of premature babies. That womb just proved successful in animal testing for the first time. This advance could radically transform the lives of millions of premature infants around the world.

The wombs look like nothing too spectacular. They appear more like oversized plastic bags with tubes and fluids rather than the Huxleyan tube babies of science fiction. However, eight of these external womb Biobags held a fetal lamb. During the growth, the lambs developed as their brain, lungs, and other vital organs grew. They grew wool. They even moved about and twitched. A few of the lambs have now grown into adulthood.

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AI vs aging the ultimate showdown is in the making.

There are several scientists that are now convinced upon the idea that while aging is a natural occurrence that happens in all creatures, it is, in fact, a disease that can be treated or cured. In that regards, there are some scientists out there looking to slow down the process of aging, while others are looking to stop it all together.

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A nice new write-up on my governor run: https://humanityplus.wordpress.com/2017/04/24/this-transhumanist-politician-wants-to-be-governor-of-california/ #transhumanism

It’s a good time to be a transhumanist politician. As faith in the political establishment declines, new technologies, from gene editing to artificial intelligence, are transforming our lives faster than ever. The transhumanist author and politician Zoltan Istvan agrees. He thinks the time is ripe for pro-science and technology governance, and for leaders who will embrace the technologies that could fundamentally transform our conceptions of what it means to be human.

Istvan is a maverick who appears to thrive in an ‘outsider’ role. He self-published a sci-fi novel, The Transhumanist Wager, in 2013, which became a surprise bestseller on Amazon. In 2016, he made an unlikely run for US president as the leader of the Transhumanist Party. Now, he’s making a bid for Governor of California in the 2018 election under a Libertarian Party ticket.

As a libertarian, Istvan believes in promoting “maximum freedom and personal accountability,” a sentiment that gels well with his championing of human enhancement technologies and robot and cyborg rights.

Like all transhumanists, Istvan believes in using science and technology to enhance human capabilities and transcend current biological limits. He wants to be smarter, live longer, and eventually merge with advanced technologies to become a posthuman being—one that is impervious, or at least resilient, to aging, and most mortal risks.

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While China does this, the people in the USA who use cancer to pay for their third homes and quarterly trips to Tahiti write papers saying CRISPR is a WMD and needs to be made illegal LOL.

Here’s hoping China is able to pull it off.

On Friday, a team of Chinese scientists used the cutting-edge gene-editing technique CRISPR-Cas9 on humans for the second time in history, injecting a cancer patient with modified human genes in hopes of vanquishing the disease.

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UK artificial intelligence (AI) startup Babylon has raised $60 million (£47 million) for its smartphone app which aims to put a doctor in your pocket.

The latest funding round, which comes just over a year after the startup’s last fundraise, means that the three-year-old London startup now has a valuation in excess of $200 million (£156 million), according to The Financial Times.

Babylon’s app has been downloaded over a million times and it allows people in UK, Ireland, and Rwanda to ask a chatbot a series of questions about their condition without having to visit a GP.

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Fort Lauderdale, FL — Life Extension has partnered with Insilico Medicine to introduce Ageless Cell, the first supplement in its GEROPROTECT line to promote healthy aging by inhibiting cellular senescence.

Cellular senescence is a natural part of the aging process where cells no longer function optimally, affecting organ function, cellular metabolism, and inflammatory response. The accumulation of these senescent cells contributes to the process of aging. The Ageless Cell supplements inhibit the effects of cellular senescence by acting as geroprotectors, or interventions aimed to increase longevity and impede the onset of age-related diseases by targeting and inhibiting senescence-inducing pathways and inhibiting the development of senescent cells.

The partnership with Insilico Medicine allowed researchers to use deep learning algorithms to comb through hundreds of studies and thousands of data points — a process that could have taken decades — to identify four key anti-aging nutrients: N-Acetyl-L-Cysteine (NAC), myricetin, gamma-tocotrienol, and EGCG. These compounds target pathways that are known to contribute to or protect against the development of senescent cells.

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The most important set of genetic instructions we all get comes from our DNA, passed down through generations. But the environment we live in can make genetic changes, too.

Researchers have now discovered that these kinds of environmental genetic changes can be passed down for a whopping 14 generations in an animal – the largest span ever observed in a creature, in this case being a dynasty of C. elegans nematodes (roundworms).

To study how long the environment can leave a mark on genetic expression, a team led by scientists from the European Molecular Biology Organisation (EMBO) in Spain took genetically engineered nematode worms that carry a transgene for a fluorescent protein. When activated, this gene made the worms glow under ultraviolet light.

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