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Category: life extension

Senolytics to remove senescent cells will deliver the first “repair” based approach to treat the aging process. This is the arrival of true rejuvenation biotechnology in the SENS model of damage repair.

Senescent cell removal with companies such as Unity, entering human clinical trials in the next 18 months will deliver the first true damage repair rejuevenation biotechnology. This will be the first “repair” approach to the aging process and one the SENS Research Foundation has been advocating for over a decade.

#aging #crowdfundthecure

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This is probably important.

Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have discovered a protein that fine-tunes the cellular clock involved in aging.

This novel , named TZAP, binds the ends of chromosomes and determines how long , the segments of DNA that protect chromosome ends, can be. Understanding telomere length is crucial because telomeres set the lifespan of cells in the body, dictating critical processes such as aging and the incidence of cancer.

“Telomeres represent the clock of a cell,” said TSRI Associate Professor Eros Lazzerini Denchi, corresponding author of the new study, published online today in the journal Science. “You are born with telomeres of a certain length, and every time a cell divides, it loses a little bit of the telomere. Once the telomere is too short, the cell cannot divide anymore.”

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Once again the figures show that young to old disparity in the population is the problem not overpopulation. We really need to develop rejvenation biotechnology with all haste.

Once again overpopulation isnt the problem it is the disparity between young and old in the workforce. This makes rejuvenation biotechnology a suitable solution to avoid economic collapse.

“The world is experiencing unparalleled population aging. This poses problems for productivity and growth, unless we do something about it”

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The microglia are central to aging in the brain and science is already finding ways to reverse it like introducing young microglia to the brain to remove plaques associated with Alzheimers. Brain aging is not a one way process!

The difference between an old brain and a young brain isn’t so much the number of neurons but the presence and function of supporting cells called glia. In Cell Reports on January 10, researchers who examined postmortem brain samples from 480 individuals ranging in age from 16 to 106 found that the state of someone’s glia is so consistent through the years that it can be used to predict someone’s age. The work lays the foundation to better understand glia’s role in late-in-life brain disease.

“We extensively characterized aging-altered changes across 10 human and found that, in fact, glial cells experience bigger changes than ,” says Jernej Ule, a neurobiologist at the Francis Crick Institute and the University College London, who led the study with departmental colleague Rickie Patani (@PataniLab) and first author Lilach Soreq. “There’s quite a bit of regional information that will be of interest to different people—for example some will notice a very unique pattern of astrocyte-specific changes in the substantia nigra—and we provide a lot of data that still needs to be analyzed.”

There are three types of glia cells, each providing different kinds of support to neurons: oligodendrocytes insulate, microglia act as immune cells, and astrocytes help with neuron metabolism, detoxification, among many functions. Based on analysis of human tissue samples, primarily from the UK Brain Expression Consortium, the researchers show that astrocytes and oligodendrocytes shift their regional gene expression patterns upon aging, (e.g., which genes are turned on or off) particularly in the hippocampus and substantia nigra—important brain regions for memory and movement, respectively—while the expression of microglia-specific genes increases in all brain regions.

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Playing God is a common objection to developing technologies to increase human lifespan and yet it is never used in relation to current therapies already available.

Here I’ll point out another of the articles going up at the Life Extension Advocacy Foundation, this time on the topic of the naturalistic fallacy where it occurs in opposition to healthy life extension. Our community would like to build medical therapies that address the causes of aging, thereby ending age-related disease and greatly extending healthy human life spans. It has always surprised me to find that most people, at least initially, object to this goal. It seems perfectly and straightforwardly obvious to me that aging to death, suffering considerably along the way, is just as much a problem to be overcome as any other medical condition that causes pain and mortality. Yet opposition exists, and that opposition is one of the greatest challenges faced when raising funding and pushing forward with research and development of rejuvenation therapies.

When it comes to treating aging as a medical condition the naturalistic fallacy is voiced in this way: aging is natural, what is natural is good, and therefore we shouldn’t tamper with aging. If you look around at your houses, your computers, your modern medicine, and consider that such an objection is perhaps just a little late to the game, and hard to hold in a self-consistent manner, then you’re probably not alone. Notably, the same objection is rarely brought up when it comes to treating specific age-related diseases, or in the matter of therapies that already exist. People who are uncomfortable about radical changes to the course of aging and who speak out against the extension of human life are nonetheless almost all in favor of cancer research, treatments for heart disease, and an end to Alzheimer’s disease. Yet age-related diseases and aging are the same thing, the same forms of damage and dysfunction, only differing by degree and by the names they are given.

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The Cellage synthetic biology digest.

The field of synthetic biology holds the potential to treat a variety of aging processes and treat age-related diseases. Synthetic biology allows biologists to create new functions in cells by creating synthetic cellular programs and could allow us to combat age-related diseases in ways never before considered.

#aging #crowdfundthecure

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Not sure where the author got his messaging on AI and QC (namely AI more fluid and human like due to QC); but it sounds a lot like my words. However, there is one lost piece to the AI story even with QC to make AI more human like and that is when you have Synbio involved in the mix. In fact I can not wait to see what my friend Alex Zhavoronkov and his team does with QC in his anti-aging work. I expect to see many great things with QC, AI, and Synbio together.

Nonetheless, I am glad to see others also seeing the capability that many of us do see.

Applications of Artificial Intelligence In Use Today

Beyond our quantum-computing conundrum, today’s so-called A.I. systems are merely advanced machine learning software with extensive behavioral algorithms that adapt themselves to our likes and dislikes. While extremely useful, these machines aren’t getting smarter in the existential sense, but they are improving their skills and usefulness based on a large dataset. These are some of the most popular examples of artificial intelligence that’s being used today.

#1 — Siri

Everyone is familiar with Apple’s personal assistant, Siri. She’s the friendly voice-activated computer that we interact with on a daily basis. She helps us find information, gives us directions, add events to our calendars, helps us send messages and so on. Siri is a pseudo-intelligent digital personal assistant. She uses machine-learning technology to get smarter and better able to predict and understand our natural-language questions and requests.

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More data for caloric restriction and health benefits.

The long-term response to calorie restriction has long been of interest to the aging research community, and particularly in the past few decades as the tools of biotechnology allowed for a more detailed analysis of the metabolic changes that accompany a reduced calorie intake. A restricted diet extends healthy life spans in near all species tested to date, though to a much greater extent in short-lived species than in long-lived species such as our own. Considerable effort is presently devoted to the development of drugs that can replicate some fraction of calorie restriction — more effort than is merited in my opinion, given that the optimal result for extension of human life span achieved via calorie restriction mimetics will be both hard to achieve safely and very limited in comparison to the gains possible through rejuvenation therapies after the SENS model. Repairing damage within the existing system should be expected to outdo attempts to change the system in order to slow the accumulation of damage, in both efficiency and size of result.

Not everyone is interested in the long term, however. The short term health benefits of calorie restriction appear quickly and are surprisingly similar in mice and humans, given that calorie restriction in mice results in significantly extended life and calorie restriction in humans does not. The beneficial adjustments to metabolism and organ function are for the most part larger and more reliable than similar gains presently achievable through forms of medicine. That is more a case of medical science having a long way to go yet than calorie restriction being wondrous, however. Still, the short term benefits are coming to the attention to wider audience within the research and medical community.

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Grassroots funding of fundamental science and private enterprize will lead the way in rejuvenation biotechnology not the traditional funding sources from Government which are shrinking every year.

It is important to understand that innovation and progress is unlikely to come from the Government and the traditional grant system which is shrinking every year. Rejuvenation biotechnology will likely be funded with a mix of fundraising for fundamental breakthrough technologies followed by private enterprize taking discoveries to market. This is why supporting science is critcial as relying on the Government to innovate and drive progress is unlikely to yield results anytime soon.

“Today, researchers compete for government grants at increasingly shorter intervals and with diminishing chances of success: Less than 1 in 5 grant applications succeeds. This inhibits risk taking.

By contrast, private investment in medicine has kept pace with the aging population and is the principal engine for advancement. More than 80% of new drug approvals originate from work solely performed in private companies. Note that such drug approvals come on average 16 years after the beginning of clinical trials, which typically cost $2.5 billion from start to finish. Even if grant-subsidized academics wanted to create a new drug, economic reality prevents it.”

#aging #crowdfundthecure

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