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It’s in a bad taste to say that other global issues are more urgent than ageing, when pretty much all global issues—ageing included—affect the life, and the quality of life, of many people.


Suppose you’re in your mid-seventies, and you find out that your aortic valve doesn’t work very well. Undergoing a replacement operation—nowadays, a relatively simple and safe procedure—is not only going to help you with your unpleasant episodes of fatigue, chest pain, and dizziness, it may well save your life, minimizing your risk of sudden cardiac arrest.

Your doctor suggests that you undergo the procedure and sends you to a surgeon for the operation; however, when you get there, the surgeon starts yelling at you that, rather than using resources to replace your valve and extend your life, we should fund initiatives to save children in poor countries, build health clinics, train midwives, and fight for equal opportunity and for women’s rights. He then goes on rambling that, until these issues are addressed, he doesn’t want to hear about extending your natural lifespan—after all, since you’re in your mid-seventies, you’re well above the world’s average lifespan; he shoos you and your family out and slams the door on you.

The chances are good that you’d think this person was several sandwiches short of a picnic; you would report him and have him fired for malpractice. Thankfully, you’re not very likely to run into a surgeon like that, but you are likely to bump into people contending the exact same things as the mad surgeon when you replace heart surgery—a very specific form of life extension—with the general concept of life extension. Why is that?

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Pills hailed as the first real “anti-aging” drugs inched a little closer to the market after a study found they cut the number of respiratory infections in the elderly by half.

The drugs: The pills act on an aging-related pathway called TORC1. Inhibiting this pathway “has extended life span in every species studies to date” (like mice and worms), according to Joan Mannick, who lead the study for drug giant Novartis.

Will humans live longer, too? Maybe. But that will take time to figure out. For now, what’s known is that giving people 65 and older these drugs seems to boost their immune function. Elderly people taking the drugs got about 40 percent fewer colds or bronchial infections. About 264 people got the drugs over six weeks and then were tracked for a year.

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Today we have a report from Open Longevity School: Summer Camp 2018, an initiative in Russia focused on developing a personal health and longevity strategy, Elena Milova went to investigate.


When we ask researchers when, in their opinion, the cures for aging will be ready, we often hear an optimistic answer: 20–25 years. As a well-informed optimist, I add another 10 years to this number, because wherever the therapies appear, it will take time for them to be distributed to other countries and become affordable. I will be happy if it takes less time, but what if it doesn’t? I am nearly 40, and when I add 35 years to my current age, I vividly imagine how my reflection in the mirror will show a 75-year-old lady. Honestly, I don’t want to see my body change, and it can explain why I aspire to get first-hand information about any means to slow down aging as soon as possible. Evidence-based information, of course.

Before I tell you my story of discovering how to control my aging, I must provide a disclaimer. This article does not contain any medical recommendations. The websites of the projects I will tell you about, once again, do not contain medical recommendations and cannot be independently used to make health decisions. The experience I will share, and the activities of the projects I will tell you about, are aimed at teaching you about the existing scientific knowledge about aging and interventions that have the potential to change the way we age. Whatever you decide to implement in your everyday life, please talk to your medical advisor first.

I am always looking for the means to keep myself as young as possible. Luckily for me, in Russia, there is a project focused on collecting this kind of information and making it publicly available. It is Nestarenie.ru (translation: “not aging”), an online encyclopedia created by professional sports trainer, valeologist and citizen scientist Dmitry Veremeenko. The amount of information that Dmitry has managed to process is hard to imagine; it consists of more than 70,000 scientific papers. The development of this database took him several years of work. Each article of his encyclopedia summarizes a specific drug, food or lifestyle element that can slow down or even reverse age-related changes, with a deep explanation of the underlying mechanisms. Each of his information-dense articles has lots of internal links to actual scientific papers (including the freshest meta-analyses) and finishes with a list of additional references.

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Is life extension at… odds with probability?


Does probability ensure that you will die, no matter what, once you are old enough? Does it throw the ultimate spanner in the works of life extension? The answer is not as clear-cut as you might think.

Recently, a study from Sapienza University in Italy has revived the idea of the so-called “mortality plateaus”—the apparent flattening of mortality rates in people aged above 100, suggesting that the maximum mortality rate of such people is 50% at age 105 [1]. However, even if this mortality rate remained constant for as long as you lived, you’d still be overwhelmingly likely to die relatively soon.

What may be even more disheartening is that, if you had a constant, larger-than-zero probability of dying, then no matter how small it was, you’d be overwhelmingly likely to die past a certain point in time, be it even billions of years into the future. As a matter of fact, over an infinite time, that probability would be exactly 100%. However, the situation is not as dire as it seems.

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Recent research led by Professor G.V. Shivashankar of the Mechanobiology Institute (MBI) at the National University of Singapore (NUS) and the FIRC Institute of Molecular Oncology (IFOM) in Italy, has revealed that mature cells can be reprogrammed into re-deployable stem cells without direct genetic modification — by confining them to a defined geometric space for an extended period of time.

“Our breakthrough findings will usher in a new generation of stem cell technologies for tissue engineering and regenerative medicine that may overcome the negative effects of geonomic manipulation,” said Prof Shivashankar.

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Researchers isolated several mutations leading to melanoma and reproduced them in the lab using CRISPR.


Two papers authored by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco described the genetic changes that turn harmless moles into malignant melanomas and the experiment they devised to recreate the step-by-step evolution of normal skin cells into cancer cells [1], [2].

Summary ([1])

We elucidated genomic and transcriptomic changes that accompany the evolution of melanoma from pre-malignant lesions by sequencing DNA and RNA from primary melanomas and their adjacent precursors, as well as matched primary tumors and regional metastases. In total, we analyzed 230 histopathologically distinct areas of melanocytic neoplasia from 82 patients. Somatic alterations sequentially induced mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) pathway activation, upregulation of telomerase, modulation of the chromatin landscape, G1/S checkpoint override, ramp-up of MAPK signaling, disruption of the p53 pathway, and activation of the PI3K pathway; no mutations were specifically associated with metastatic progression, as these pathways were perturbed during the evolution of primary melanomas. UV radiation-induced point mutations steadily increased until melanoma invasion, at which point copy-number alterations also became prevalent.

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We wanted to draw your attention to a new publication by James Kirkland and his team. Kirkland is one of the pioneers of senolytics, as he demonstrated that a combination of compounds could remove senescent cells and improve healthspan in mice back in 2015 [1].

The contribution of senescent cells to aging has been the subject of intense research in the last year or two, as researchers have focused on ways to remove these problem cells using therapies known as senolytics.

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Do you want to join in the fight to end age-related disease?


Request for Proposals (RFP)

In cooperation with the Forever Healthy Foundation, SENS Research Foundation (SRF) is inviting candidates to submit research proposals for a Fellowship in Rejuvenation Biotechnology that would be undertaken at our Research Center (RC) in Mountain View, California.

SRF pursues the development of therapies to prevent and reverse age-related disease and disability through a “damage-repair” paradigm: developing interventions that maintain and restore the structural and functional integrity of tissues by directly removing, repairing, replacing, or rendering harmless the cellular and molecular damage of aging. Applications are requested that promise progress in regenerative medicine for the prevention and reversal of age-related disease.

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Researchers used magnetically driven microrobots to carry cells to predetermined spots within living zebrafish and mice, they report in Science Robotics today (June 27). The authors propose using these hair-width gadgets as delivery vehicles in regenerative medicine and cell therapy.

The scientists used a computer model to work out the ideal dimensions for a microrobot; spiky, porous, spherical ones were deemed best for transporting living cells. They printed the devices using a 3D laser printer and coated the bots with nickel and titanium to make them magnetic and biocompatible, respectively. An external magnetic field applied to the animal then leads the microrobots.

To begin with, the research team tested the ability for the robots to transport cells through cell cultures, blood vessel–like microfluidic chips, and in vivo in zebrafish. Further, they used these microrobots to induce cancer at a specific location within mice by ferrying tumor cells to the spot. The team observed fluorescence at the target site as the labeled cancer cells proliferated.

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Take this seriously and you can see how the idea of living for ever is incoherent. If your body could be kept going for a thousand years, in what sense would the you that exists now still be around then? It would be more like a descendant than it would a continuation of you. I sometimes find it hard to identify with my teenage self, and that was less than 40 years ago. If I change, I eventually become someone else. If I don’t, life becomes stagnant and loses its direction.


It’s great that more of us are living to 100, but the transhumanist dream of immortality would betray what it means to be human says philosopher Julian Baggini.

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