Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: life extension

It’s an unfortunate fact of life that as we get older, our cells gradually lose the ability to heal themselves. Thankfully, at least one aspect of that might be treatable in the near future, if new work from Georgia Tech pans out. Researchers have developed a hydrogel that holds muscle stem cells, and by injecting this near the site of a muscle injury they can get to work repairing it. The team says the technique could be effective at treating injuries in the elderly and people with muscular dystrophy.

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Today, we would like to share with you the talk given by Kelsey Moody, CEO of Biotech Company Ichor, at the recent Ending Age-Related Diseases: Investment Prospects & Advances in Research conference in New York City. In this talk, Kelsey discusses Ichor’s protein engineering platform, how Ichor has used it, and Ichor’s plans for using it to discover new classes of drugs for age-related diseases.

Kelsey is a process-oriented biotechnology executive who has specialized in the study of aging and aging mechanisms for over a decade. Since 2013, he has successfully built Ichor Therapeutics from a living room start-up into a premier, vertically integrated contract research organization that focuses on preclinical research services for aging pathways. Proceeds from this work are used to self-fund R&D initiatives that constitute Ichor’s portfolio companies in enzyme therapy (Lysoclear, Inc.), small molecule drug discovery (Antoxerene, Inc.), and protein engineering (RecombiPure, Inc.) Kelsey has received graduate-level training in medicine, business, and laboratory research.

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Lincoln Cannon asked me to do a talk a few months ago for the MTA. It was a good time. I learned a lot from the other speakers. Bryan Johnson opened the event and it was interesting to learn about his path and vision for the future. I would like to see many more people in his position. My goal is to make many millionaires out of biotech visionaries through the BioViva platform so that they can reinvest into great tech. Thanks, Lincoln and Bryan!

At the 2018 Conference of the Mormon Transhumanist Association, held 7 Apr 2018 at the Marriott Hotel and Conference Center in Provo, UT, speakers addressed the themes of Mormonism, Transhumanism and Transfigurism, with particular attention to topics at the intersection of technology, spirituality, science and religion. Members, friends and critics of the association have many views. This is one of them. It is not necessarily shared by others.

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The effects of donor age on organ transplants: A review and implications for aging research.

Despite the considerable amount of data available on the effect of donor age upon the outcomes of organ transplantation, these still represent an underutilized resource in aging research. In this review, we have compiled relevant studies that analyze the effect of donor age in graft and patient survival following liver, kidney, pancreas, heart, lung and cornea transplantation, with the aim of deriving insights into possible differential aging rates between the different organs. Overall, older donor age is associated with worse outcomes for all the organs studied. Nonetheless, the donor age from which the negative effects upon graft or patient survival starts to be significant varies between organs. In kidney transplantation, this age is within the third decade of life while the data for heart transplantation suggest a significant effect starting from donors over age 40. This threshold was less defined in liver transplantation where it ranges between 30 and 50 years. The results for the pancreas are also suggestive of a detrimental effect starting at a donor age of around 40, although these are mainly derived from simultaneous pancreas-kidney transplantation data. In lung transplantation, a clear effect was only seen for donors over 65, with negative effects of donor age upon transplantation outcomes likely beginning after age 50. Corneal transplants appear to be less affected by donor age as the majority of studies were unable to find any effect of donor age during the first few years posttransplantation. Overall, patterns of the effect of donor age in patient and graft survival were observed for several organ types and placed in the context of knowledge on aging.

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Together, Forever Healthy Foundation and SENS Research Foundation are now accepting research proposals that promise progress in regenerative medicine for the prevention and reversal of age-related disease. This Fellowship will take place at SRF’s research center in Mountain View, California.

For more information, please visit: http://sens.org/research/research-blog/forever-healthy-foundation-fellowship-rejuvenation-biotechnology

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Website ► http://sens.org
YouTube ► https://www.youtube.com/user/SENSFVideo
Facebook ► https://www.facebook.com/sensf
Twitter ► https://twitter.com/senstweet

“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.

Our research emphasizes the application of regenerative medicine to age-related disease, with the intent of repairing underlying damage to the body’s tissues, cells, and molecules. Our goal is to help build the industry that will cure the diseases of aging. ”

Aubrey de Grey ► http://goo.gl/Tc5QHl

Aubrey David Nicholas Jasper de Grey is an English author and theoretician in the field of gerontology and the Chief Science Officer of the SENS Research Foundation. He is editor-in-chief of the academic journal Rejuvenation Research, author of The Mitochondrial Free Radical Theory of Aging (1999) and co-author of Ending Aging (2007). He is known for his view that medical technology may enable human beings alive today to live to lifespans far in excess of any existing authenticated cases.

De Grey’s research focuses on whether regenerative medicine can thwart the aging process. He works on the development of what he calls “Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence” (SENS), a collection of proposed techniques to rejuvenate the human body and stop aging. To this end, he has identified seven types of molecular and cellular damage caused by essential metabolic processes. SENS is a proposed panel of therapies designed to repair this damage.

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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.

He gave a somewhat future-facing talk at the conference, which may surprise some people given his senior position at Berkeley; however, we consider this a sign of how times have changed in the last decade. Ten years ago, talking about ending aging would potentially have damaged your career and gotten you unfairly labeled as fringe, much as Dr. Aubrey de Grey was for many years until many others joined his crusade to end aging. It was therefore refreshing to hear Steven talk so positively about the future of biomedical science and about doing something about aging itself in order to end age-related diseases.

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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 , a special population of 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.

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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.

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