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Category: life extension

This spring happens to be rich with events promoting research on aging. Just one month after the Undoing Aging conference, jointly organized by the SENS Research Foundation and the Forever Healthy Foundation, we are expecting yet another visionary event in Kazan, Russia that might prove to be another great gift to our community.

Supervised by one of the most active proponents of aging research in Russia, RAS Correspondent Member Dr. Alexey Moskalev, the fifth international Interventions to Extend Healthspan and Lifespan conference will be held in Kazan on April 23–25, 2018.

The conference will gather brilliant scientists from all over the world in one place. To make it more comfortable for international guests, an English translation will be provided for all talks.

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UCLA scientists have developed a new method that utilizes microscopic splinter-like structures called “nanospears” for the targeted delivery of biomolecules such as genes straight to patient cells. These magnetically guided nanostructures could enable gene therapies that are safer, faster and more cost-effective.

The research was published in the journal ACS Nano by senior author Paul Weiss, UC Presidential Chair and distinguished professor of chemistry and biochemistry, materials science and engineering, and member of the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at UCLA.

Gene therapy, the process of adding or replacing missing or defective genes in patient cells, has shown great promise as a treatment for a host of diseases, including hemophilia, muscular dystrophy, immune deficiencies and certain types of cancer.

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This will be an annual conference series to promote awareness of age-related diseases and the ongoing scientific breakthroughs in rejuvenation biotechnology.

More info: https://www.undoing-aging.org/news/undoing-aging-to-return-in-2019

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British doctors have taken a huge step towards curing a common form of age-related chronic eye condition.

Two elderly patients with macular degeneration at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London were given a cutting-edge stem cell therapy as part of a small trial to improve vision for people with sudden and severe loss of vision caused by what’s known as “wet” macular degeneration, in which abnormal blood vessels grow under the retina and macula in the eye. “Wet” macular degeneration is less common than “dry” macular degeneration, but it is a more severe form of the disease that occurs as “dry” macular degeneration progresses. It rarely causes total blindness, but it can cause blurriness and blind spots that make it hard to see clearly. The idea was to replace those diseased eye cells using stem cells that were derived from a human embryo and then inserted into the back of the eye.

Embryonic stem cells are special because they have the ability to become any other cell type in the human body. In this case, they were coaxed into becoming the kind of cell that makes up the retinal pigment epithelium. They were embedded into a scaffold to hold them in place, a living patch of cells only one layer thick. That patch was then surgically inserted under the rods and cones in the back of the eye.

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A neural circuit mechanism involved in preserving the specificity of memories has been identified by investigators from the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Center for Regenerative Medicine and the Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI).

They also identified a genetic “switch” that can slow down #memory generalization — the loss of specific details over time that occurs in both age-related memory impairment and in post-traumatic stress disorder (#PTSD), in which emotions originally produced by traumatic experiences are elicited in response to innocuous cues that have little resemblance to the traumatic memory.

“The circuit mechanism we identified in mice allows us to preserve the precision or the details of memories over the passage of time in adult as well as aged animals,” says Amar Sahay of the MGH Center for #Regenerative Medicine and HSCI, corresponding author of a paper appearing in Nature Medicine. “These findings have implications for the generalization of traumatic memories in PTSD and for memory imprecision in #aging.”

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An interview with Komsomolskaya Pravda during the conference Undoing Aging in Berlin.

A few days ago, LEAF representatives attended the Undoing Aging 2018 conference in Berlin, which was jointly organized by the SENS Research Foundation and the Forever Healthy Foundation. We invited one of the most professional Russian journalists writing about aging, Anna Dobryukha, to this conference, and she will write a series of articles and interviews in Komsomolskaya Pravda (KP) over the next weeks. As these articles are interesting to the global community, we decided to translate them for our blog.

Today, we publish the first article of this series, an interview that Anna conducted with Vitalik Buterin, the creator of the cryptocurrency Ethereum. Vitalik donated 2.4 million dollars to the SENS Research Foundation earlier this year, so let’s find out what Vitalik’s views are on rejuvenation biotech and life extension!

The original article, “King of Ethereum” Vitalik Buterin: the best thing to donate money to is the fight against aging, is by Anna Dobryukha and has been translated by Elena Milova and Joshua Conway.

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Steve Hill from the LEAF team gives some first impressions from the recent Undoing Aging 2018 conference in Berlin.

I have just returned home from the Undoing Aging conference in Berlin, where we spent three days listening to talks by the top researchers in aging, meeting some of the finest minds in research, and talking with thought leaders in the field.

There was a great deal of new and exciting research being presented, some of which has not been published and so cannot be discussed. We will be publishing articles on this news in the coming days as we edit the audio and video from the event. Today, however, instead of discussing research per se, I’ll talk about my impressions of the event.

This was my first conference on aging, and I have to say that I was really impressed with the professional presentation and venue. I have been to many video game conferences in my life, and I have to say it was on par with such events, albeit on a somewhat smaller scale.

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