Elizabeth Parrish is a proponent of controversial ideas. Rankled by barriers to trials on potential life-enhancing treatments, she used herself as a guinea pig and says the results have borne fruit – but she has irked the science community in the process.
Experimenting on herself didn’t go down well with scientists, but Elizabeth Parrish is convinced gene therapy can increase the length and quality of our lives, and wants early approval for treatments to stem ‘planet’s biggest killer’.
Some 50,000 people in the U.S. are diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease (PD) every year. The American Institute of Neurology estimates there are one million people affected with this neurodegenerative disorder, with 60 years as average age of onset. Falls and fall-related injuries are a major issue for people with Parkinson’s?up to 70 percent of advanced PD patients fall at least once a year and two-thirds suffer recurring falls. These fall rates are twice as high as those of adults of comparable age, so improving balance in patients with Parkinson’s would provide a major health advantage.
Sunil Agrawal, professor of mechanical engineering and of rehabilitation and regenerative medicine at Columbia Engineering, along with Dario Martelli, a post-doctoral researcher in his group, have been working on this issue with Movement Disorders faculty from the department of neurology at Columbia University Medical Center?Stanley Fahn, a leading expert in Parkinson’s, and Un Jung Kang, division director, and Movement Disorder Fellow Lan Luo. In their latest study, published today in Scientific Reports, the team looked at whether or not Parkinson’s disease affects patients’ balance and diminishes their ability to react and adapt to walking with perturbations. The researchers found that the ability to adapt to multiple perturbations or to modify responses to changing amplitudes or directions was not affected by PD; both the Parkinson’s and the healthy subjects controlled their reactive strategies in the same way.
A single infusion gene therapy treatment improved levels of the essential blood clotting protein Factor VIII, with 85 percent of patients achieving normal or near-normal levels of the blood clotting factor, even many months after treatment.
Summary: British doctors say they have achieved “mind-blowing” results using gene therapy to rid people of hemophilia A. [This article first appeared on LongevityFacts. Author: Brady Hartman.]
We are one step closer to a cure for hemophilia according to the results of a groundbreaking gene therapy trial published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Clinical researchers at the Queen Mary University of London and Barts Health NHS Trust have found that over one year after a single gene therapy treatment, patients with hemophilia A are showing normal levels of the previously missing blood clotting factor, effectively curing them.
New view on mitochondrial DNA could put the brakes on mutations that drive diseases. Scientists perform landmark sequencing of mitochondrial DNA and discover surprising facts.
Summary: New view on mitochondrial DNA could help put the brakes on mutations that drive diseases. [Author: Brady Hartman. This article first appeared on LongevityFacts.]
DNA sequences between mitochondria inside a single cell are vastly different, reported scientists in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. This discovery will help to illuminate the underlying mechanisms of diseases that start with mutations in mitochondrial DNA and provide clues about how patients might respond to specific treatments. The researchers published their findings in the journal Cell Reports this week.
Mutant Mitochondrial DNA
Mitochondria are the tiny organelles that produce energy inside our cells. We have two types of DNA in our bodies, the DNA inside the nucleus of our cells, called nuclear DNA – which stores the vast majority of our genetic code – and a separate DNA inside the mitochondria called mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA).
Whether or not immortality is possible, whether or not one would like it for oneself, it’s important to keep in mind that it is not what biomedical research against ageing is about.
When doing science, it is crucially important to have clear, unambiguous definitions. These definitions must be firmly established to avoid confusion and misunderstandings and possibly to prevent people from going around telling everyone that you’re working on something that you’re actually not.
The I-word
It’s not uncommon, especially for outsiders of a given field, to use an inappropriate word to indicate a more complex concept than the word itself conveys—maybe because they think that the two are close enough or possibly because they just don’t see the difference.
Good stuff from Aubrey. One person is a deathist, another is a maybe, the other is pro-life extension.
Turning back the clock and undoing the ravages of time. Something we’ve probably all wondered about — but could it become reality? Or are we all just wishing our lives away? We may soon be able to stop or even undo the ageing process. By purging the body of so-called ‘retired cells’, scientists say we could look younger, live longer, and defeat disease. Is this science’s answer to the fabled fountain of youth? At the Roundtable was Aubrey de Grey, Biomedical gerontologist and Chief Science Officer at Sens Research Foundation; Lara Marks, a visiting Research Associate at University College London and Historian of Medicine at King’s College London; Professor Ilaria Bellantuono, Stem cell biologist and Professor in musculoskeletal ageing at the University of Sheffield and journalist Salman Shaheen. Roundtable is a discussion programme with an edge. Broadcast out of London and presented by David Foster, it’s about bringing people to the table, listening to every opinion, and analysing every point of view. From fierce debate to reflective thinking, Roundtable discussions offer a different perspective on the issues that matter to you. Watch it every weekday at 15:30 GMT on TRT World.
Nextbigfuture interviewed Michael West, CEO of the startup AgeX for nearly three hours today. The key to human regeneration is from week 3 to week 8 after fertilization of the egg when we are an embryo. In week one and week two, we are a zygote. After week, we are fetus.
Nextbigfuture will follow up this article with several more articles with information from the interview. This article will provide the core of the AgeX approach to full regeneration and radical life extension.
