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Category: life extension

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Inspired by British billionaire Jim Mellon, chairman of anti-aging upstart biotech venture Juvenescence, Sergey Young unveiled a $100 million fund on Monday to catalyze the development of a comprehensive solution to counteract the damaging consequences of aging.

“I’ve never looked like my age…and with my name, I think it was predetermined that I was going to work in the space (of aging),” Young told Endpoints News. The 47-year-old considers himself a product of Peter Diamandis — the man behind the non-profit XPRIZE and venture capital fund BOLD Capital Partners — and is in charge of all things longevity at both organizations.

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Longevity Investor Network member Sebastian Aguiar discusses the rejuvenation biotechnology industry and bridging the gap between research and development.

Sebastian Aguiar is a Venture Fellow at Apollo Ventures, an aging-focused venture capital fund and company builder that invests across Europe and the United States. He can be found at https://www.linkedin.com/in/sebastianaguiar/ and https://twitter.com/sebastian_gero.

What initially attracted you to aging as a general discipline?

Aging is already a solved problem… for cells. The germ line is immortal. Cancer cells are immortal as well. In fact, cellular immortality has been a solved problem for 3.5 billion years, since the dawn of life on Earth. It’s just that the soma – all the cells other than the reproductive cells – are disposable.

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Human health depends on age and evolutionary history. Firstly, adaptation is age-specific, with Hamilton’s forces of natural selection leading to much greater adaptation at earlier ages than later ages. This of course is how evolutionary biologists explain the existence of aging in the first place. Secondly, when environmental conditions change, it takes surprisingly few generations for populations to adapt to such new conditions, at least at early ages when natural selection is intense. Thirdly, at later ages, when the forces of natural selection are weak, natural selection will often fail to produce adaptation to a selective environment that is not evolutionarily ancient. All three of these themes will be illustrated using both explicit mathematical theory and findings from experimental evolution. At the end of the presentation, we will apply these general scientific insights to the case of human evolutionary history, human aging, and optimal human diets.

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Brought to you by Nicola Bagalà, the Rejuvenation Roundup is our monthly digest, which takes a look at the big news stories involving the industry and helps keep you informed of current developments in the aging research field.

Welcome to the first Rejuvenation Roundup of the new year! There is quite a bit of news to go through and upcoming events to look forward to, so get comfortable and let’s get started.

LEAF News

Team and Activities .

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Click on photo to start video.

Hosted by John Lewis of Oisin. Panel title: “A Therapeutic Revolution Against Aging”.

Aubrey de Grey, Judy Campisi, Nir Barzilai in a panel titled “A Therapeutic Revolution Against Aging”. Hosted by John Lewis of Oisin.

This was an excellent panel! Topics included Yamanaka factors, epigenetic rollback, partial reprogramming and many more. Judy disagreed with Aubrey on the nature of aging, Nir brought up a great point about the secret to rejuvenation lying in uncovering just how a 50-year old egg cell becomes a new rejuvenated baby, and even a paper on Jeanne Calment was mentioned!

Михаил Батин, I even filmed the audience several times — just for you! 😁.

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As your body ages, increasing amounts of your cells enter into a state of senescence. Senescent cells do not divide or support the tissues of which they are part; instead, they emit a range of potentially harmful chemical signals that encourage nearby cells to enter the same senescent state.

Their presence causes many problems: they degrade tissue function, increase levels of chronic inflammation, and can even eventually raise the risk of cancer. Today, we will talk about what senescent cells are, how they contribute to age-related diseases, and, perhaps most importantly, what science is hoping to do about the problem.

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Ending Age-Related Diseases — October 3, 2018.

This is a video from the Ending Age-Related Diseases 2018 conference, which was held earlier this year at the Cooper Union in New York City. The conference was designed to bring the worlds of research and investment together in one place and explore the progress and challenges that the industry faces in developing and funding therapies to end age-related disease.

This was the second panel during the conference and featured Dr. Aubrey de Grey of the SENS Research Foundation, Keith Comito of Lifespan.io, Dr. James Peyer of Apollo Ventures, Dr. Mark Hammond of Deep Science Ventures, Joe Betts Lacroix of Y Combinator and Vium, Dr. Oliver Medvedik of Lifespan.io and The Cooper Union, and Ramphis Castro of ScienceVest.

Life Extension Advocacy Foundation Website — https://www.leafscience.org/

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A new aging clock developed by Professor Steve Horvath and his research team takes measuring your biological age a step further and can accurately predict your future lifespan.

The epigenetic clock

As we age, our DNA experiences chemical changes called DNA methylation (DNAm); these changes are used as a way to measure age and are the basis of the epigenetic clock. As we age, the methylation patterns present on our DNA change, and researchers can measure these changes to work out how old an animal or person is.

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(Advances in science and public health are increasing longevity and enhancing the quality of life for people around the world. In this series of interviews with the Milken Institute Center for the Future of Aging, 14 visionaries are revealing exciting trends and insights regarding healthy longevity, sharing their vision for a better future. The Longevity Innovators interviews highlight new discoveries in biomedical and psychosocial science, as well as strategies to promote prevention and wellness for older adults. This is the last story in the series.)

Director of the Longevity Genes Project at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Dr. Nir Barzilai has discovered several longevity genes in humans that appear to protect centenarians against major age-related diseases. Barzilai is also co-founder of CohBar, a biotech company developing mitochondria-based therapeutics to treat diseases associated with aging. In an interview with the Milken Institute Center for the Future of Aging, Barzilai explains why some people have longevity genes and the challenges in drug design for age-related diseases:

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