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It is looking increasingly likely the mysterious Google Calico have very modest ambitions regarding increased lifespans for humans given the comments made by Dr. Aubrey de Grey and others and the direction they are taking with their research. Modest increases of lifespan over the kind of robust therapies of SENS seems pretty dissapointing.


More about Google Calico and their aim to modestly increase lifespan. People like Dr. Aubrey de Grey and Nathaniel David from rising biotech star Unity.

“To some, Calico’s heavy bet on basic biology is a wrong turn. The company is “my biggest disappointment right now,” says Aubrey de Grey, an influential proponent of attempts to intervene in the aging process and chief science officer of the SENS Research Foundation, a charity an hour’s drive from Calico that promotes rejuvenation technology. It is being driven, he complains, “by the assumption that we still do not understand aging well enough to have a chance to develop therapies.” Indeed, some competitors are far more aggressive in pursuing interventions than Calico is.

They are very committed to these fundamental mechanisms, and bless them for doing that. But we are committed to putting drugs into the clinic and we might do it first,” says Nathaniel David, president and cofounder of Unity Biotechnology. This year, investors put $127 million behind Unity, a startup in San Francisco that’s developing drugs to zap older, “senescent” cells that have stopped dividing. These cells are suspected of releasing cocktails of unhelpful old-age signals, and by killing them, Unity’s drugs could act to rejuvenate tissues. The company plans to start with a modestly ambitious test in arthritic knees. De Grey’s SENS Foundation, for its part, has funded Oisin Biotechnologies, a startup aiming to rid bodies of senescent cells using gene therapy.”

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Senescent cell removal holds great potential but are all research approaches equal?


Some scientific commentary on senescent cell clearing (Senolytics) and the different approaches the research community is engaged in.

“Researchers are taking two broad approaches to cellular senescence at the present time. The first is to build therapies that can selectively destroy senescent cells, following the SENS rejuvenation model of periodic removal of damage. If the number of senescent cells is managed so as to keep that count low, then they will not cause further harm. This has the advantage of being straightforward and requiring little further research to put into practice. A range of demonstrated treatments and potential treatments already exist — gene therapies, immunotherapies, senolytic drugs, and so forth — and companies such as Oisin Biotechnologies and UNITY Biotechnology are bringing some of these technologies to the clinic.”

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Synthetic biology meets senolytics at Lifespan.io

We are developing tools to help researchers accurately target and remove dysfunctional cells in the body that have entered a state called “senescence”, and thereby assist in restoring it to youthful functionality. Please subscribe, share, and fund our campaign today! ►Campaign Link: https://www.lifespan.io/campaigns/cellage-targeting-senescent-cells-with-synthetic-biology/ ►Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/user/LifespanIO?sub_confirmation=1


Our society has never aged more rapidly – one of the most visible symptoms of the changing demographics is the exponential increase in the incidence of age-related diseases, including cancer, cardiovascular diseases and osteoarthritis. Not only does aging have a negative effect on the quality of life among the elderly but it also causes a significant financial strain on both private and public sectors. As the proportion of older people is increasing so is health care spending. According to a WHO analysis, the annual number of new cancer cases is projected to rise to 17 million by 2020, and reach 27 million by 2030. Similar trends are clearly visible in other age-related diseases such as cardiovascular disease. Few effective treatments addressing these challenges are currently available and most of them focus on a single disease rather than adopting a more holistic approach to aging.

Recently a new approach which has the potential of significantly alleviating these problems has been validated by a number of in vivo and in vitro studies. It has been demonstrated that senescent cells (cells which have ceased to replicate due to stress or replicative capacity exhaustion) are linked to many age-related diseases. Furthermore, removing senescent cells from mice has been recently shown to drastically increase mouse healthspan (a period of life free of serious diseases).

Here at CellAge we are working hard to help translate these findings into humans!

CellAge, together with a leading synthetic biology partner, Synpromics, is going to develop synthetic promoters which are specific to senescent cells (SeneSENSE), as promoters that are currently being used to track senescent cells are simply not good enough to be used in therapies. The most prominently used p16 gene promoter has a number of limitations, for example. As our primary mission is to expand the interface between synthetic biology and aging research as well as drive translational research forward, we will offer senescence reporter assay to academics for free. We predict that in the very near future this assay will be also used as a quality control step in the cell therapy manufacturing process to make cell therapies safer!

As our secondary goal, we will focus on validating gene therapies for senescent cell eradication (SeneHEALTH) – initially for patients with progeroid syndromes, then for patients who underwent radiotherapy (during which the number of senescent cells are increased) or developed age-related disease and eventually for healthy individuals.

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Dr. Aubrey de Grey from the SENS Research Foundation was kind enough to talk in support of CellAge and their campaign on Lifespan.io

We are developing tools to help researchers accurately target and remove dysfunctional cells in the body that have entered a state called “senescence”, and thereby assist in restoring it to youthful functionality. Please subscribe, share, and fund our campaign today! ►Campaign Link: https://www.lifespan.io/campaigns/cellage-targeting-senescent-cells-with-synthetic-biology/ ►Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/user/LifespanIO?sub_confirmation=1


Our society has never aged more rapidly – one of the most visible symptoms of the changing demographics is the exponential increase in the incidence of age-related diseases, including cancer, cardiovascular diseases and osteoarthritis. Not only does aging have a negative effect on the quality of life among the elderly but it also causes a significant financial strain on both private and public sectors. As the proportion of older people is increasing so is health care spending. According to a WHO analysis, the annual number of new cancer cases is projected to rise to 17 million by 2020, and reach 27 million by 2030. Similar trends are clearly visible in other age-related diseases such as cardiovascular disease. Few effective treatments addressing these challenges are currently available and most of them focus on a single disease rather than adopting a more holistic approach to aging.

Recently a new approach which has the potential of significantly alleviating these problems has been validated by a number of in vivo and in vitro studies. It has been demonstrated that senescent cells (cells which have ceased to replicate due to stress or replicative capacity exhaustion) are linked to many age-related diseases. Furthermore, removing senescent cells from mice has been recently shown to drastically increase mouse healthspan (a period of life free of serious diseases).

Here at CellAge we are working hard to help translate these findings into humans!

CellAge, together with a leading synthetic biology partner, Synpromics, is going to develop synthetic promoters which are specific to senescent cells (SeneSENSE), as promoters that are currently being used to track senescent cells are simply not good enough to be used in therapies. The most prominently used p16 gene promoter has a number of limitations, for example. As our primary mission is to expand the interface between synthetic biology and aging research as well as drive translational research forward, we will offer senescence reporter assay to academics for free. We predict that in the very near future this assay will be also used as a quality control step in the cell therapy manufacturing process to make cell therapies safer!

As our secondary goal, we will focus on validating gene therapies for senescent cell eradication (SeneHEALTH) – initially for patients with progeroid syndromes, then for patients who underwent radiotherapy (during which the number of senescent cells are increased) or developed age-related disease and eventually for healthy individuals.

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Cellular senescence is a complicated process but here it is explained in a simple infographic. The removal of senescent cells (senolytics) is a very hot topic right now and it represents the arrival of the first of the SENS therapies.

CellAge is one of the companies engaged in senolytic research and they are running a campaign on Lifespan.io if you would like to learn more about them.

https://www.lifespan.io/campaigns/cellage-targeting-senescent-cells-with-synthetic-biology/


Lifespan.io / Life Extension Advocacy Foundation

@lifespanio

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Are you an avid supporter of aging research and a keen longevity activist?
The Biogerontology Research Foundation is offering select summer internships for talented individuals. You’d join a passionate and supportive team in researching diagnostic, prognostic, and therapeutic strategies; advising a panel of investors in developing a roadmap to promote longevity science and related technologies across the globe.

The advertised positions are 3 month internships, with the possibility of continuing afterwards. Free accommodation will be provided for in London, alongside a negotiable salary.

The Biogerontology Research Foundation is a UK based think tank dedicated to aging research and accelerating its application worldwide.

Apply to: [email protected]


Are you an avid supporter of aging research and a keen longevity activist?

The Biogerontology Research Foundation is offering select summer internships for talented individuals. You €™d join a passionate and supportive team in researching diagnostic, prognostic, and therapeutic strategies; advising a panel of investors in developing a roadmap to promote longevity science and related technologies across the globe.

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Not posting for any political reasons. Only to show that this guy who is firmly behind Anti Aging tech will be a close adviser to the next President.


Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist and conservative libertarian, has long been a misfit in Silicon Valley.

Now as one of the tech industry’s main bridges to President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming administration, Mr. Thiel is playing a central role in helping shape the relationship with a president most tech titans didn’t want.

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Progress with Alzheimers and this time approaching it from the direction of Tau as a target rather than Beta Amyloid. This therapy has been tested in people and whilst it is only the first step hopefully this will lead to an effective treatment for this horrific diseases and and end to the suffering it brings.


Progress towards immunotherapies that can clear tau for Alzheimers here. Most therapies are focused on misfolded amyloid-β proteins but this particular approach targets Tau and the first in human test has proceeded!

“The authors of the study have developed a vaccine that stimulates the production of an antibody that specifically targets pathological tau, discovering its “Achilles’ heel”. It is able to do this because healthy tau undergoes a series of changes to its structure forming a new region that the antibody attacks. This new region (the “Achilles’ heel”), while not present in healthy tau, is present in diseased tau early on. Therefore, the antibody tackles all the different varieties of pathological tau. In addition to this important specificity, the antibody is coupled to a carrier molecule that generates a considerable immune response with the added benefit that it is not present in humans, thus avoiding the development of an immune reaction towards the body itself.”

#aging #crowdfundthecure

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Removing Glucosepane crosslinks from tissue is one of the most important things groups like SENS Research Foundation are doing and their progress relies on our support.


In this interesting open access paper, the authors propose that too little attention has been given to immune cell behavior in tissues rather than in blood, and that means that researchers have overlooked the possibility that age-related changes in the extracellular matrix structures that support tissues might be a significant cause of the growing immune dysfunction that takes place in later life. One of the more important of these changes in the extracellular matrix is the growing presence of cross-links, persistent sugary compounds produced as a byproduct of normal metabolic operations that chain together the large molecules of the extracellular matrix. In doing so these cross-links change the chemical and structural properties of the matrix and the tissue as a whole, producing results such as loss of elasticity in skin and blood vessels, which in turn contribute to a variety of age-related diseases. If cross-linking does indeed contribute to immunosenescence, the decline of the immune system with age, then that only increases the importance of ongoing research funded by the SENS Research Foundation aimed at safely breaking down this unwanted form of metabolic waste. In humans near all persistent cross-links appear to involve a single class of compound, glucosepane. So in theory there is only a single target here, needing just one drug development program to make a large difference to long-term health and longevity.

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