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Category: life extension

Nathaniel David from Unity Biotech giving a talk about the potential of Senolytics and how science can break the natural limit to lifespan. David is the CEO of Unity Biotechnology a company taking SENS based Senolytic drugs into human clinical trials in the next year or so. Very exciting as this is the first true rejuvenation biotechnology therapy to be deployed in humans.

Unity is leading the way for the first rejuvenation technologies in the #sens model. Here we have Nathaniel David from Unity talking about the potential of Senolytics and increased lifespans.

Unity Biotechnology is one of a number of companies developing Senolytic therapies to clear senescent cells from the body and they will no doubt be joined by them in the future a sure sign of the rising interestin the field.

There is however no doubt at this moment in time that Unity is leading the charge and with recent investment from Amazon’s Bezos and their movement into human clinicial trials within a year or so they are certainly the pioneers of this exciting new therapy.

#aging #crowdfundthecure

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A look back at one of the milestones for SRF and the first successful fundraiser on Lifespan.io for MitoSENS.

We need your support at this critical juncture of the MitoSENS project. The MitoSENS team has already demonstrated the rescue of cells containing mitochondrial mutations, and has recently generated highly promising preliminary data showing the rescue of the complete loss of a mitochondrial gene. Our next steps will focus on improving the effectiveness of the targeting system, so that we can repeat our success with one mitochondrial gene to all thirteen. We will then transition this work into animal models of mitochondrial dysfunction. This would be a crucial step in what may be the development of an eventual cure for aging and aging related diseases.

We have a talented team of highly trained mitochondrial biologists working on MitoSENS. Right now the rate-limiting factor is the cost of the expensive reagents that we use for these experiments. Increasing our funding with this campaign will allow us to double the pace of our research and bring results to the public that much faster. We have made preliminary progress on rescuing function with a second gene, ATP6, and your support will help us perfect our targeting of both ATP8 and ATP6. This requires more cells, more viruses, and many new synthetic gene sequences. Specifically, we will spend your generous donations on cell culture reagents, oxygen consumption measurements, virus production, quantitative reverse transcription PCR, DNA synthesis services, and publication of our results in a peer-reviewed journal.

Your support will help take us there.

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Wearable fitness devices could help you with your personal longevity strategy.

NEW YORK — Activity monitors could improve our health and extend our lives — if only we could be motivated to use them. Those are the conclusions of two new studies about the promise and perils of relying on fitness trackers to measure and guide how we move.

The monitors, which are expected to be a popular holiday gift again this year, can generally track our steps, speed, stance (sitting or not), distance, energy expenditure and heart rate. The absolute accuracy of these numbers, however, is somewhat suspect, with past studies finding errors in many of the monitors’ measurements. But the inaccuracies are usually consistent, the studies show, so the trackers can reliably indicate how our movements change from day to day.

The broader problem with activity monitors has been that we have not known whether the information they generate actually relates directly to our health. We have not had proof that what most trackers tell us is healthy actually is.

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Fat tissue, immune dysfunction and cellular senescence are closely related. Here we have some commentary from Reason at Fightaging! once of our new Patron sponsors about some recent research liking these factors together.

“Cellular senescence is one of the root causes of aging, and there are at present serious, well-funded efforts underway to produce rejuvenation therapies based on the selective destruction of senescent cells in old tissues. This progress is welcome, but it could have started a long time ago. It has taken many years of advocacy and the shoestring production of technology demonstrations to finally convince the broader community of scientists and funding institutions that the evidence has long merited serious investment in treatments to clear senescent cells”.

#sens #aging

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New technology driving down the cost of research and therapies!

New technology arriving that will help drive down the costs of gene therapies.

“The researchers were able to use a closed, semi-automated benchtop system to produce genetically-modified HSCs in just one night and hope that such systems will increase the availability and affordability of cell therapies”.

#sens #aging

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Led by Nikolay Kandul, senior postdoctoral scholar in biology and biological engineering in the laboratory of Professor of Biology Bruce Hay, the team developed a technique to remove mutated DNA from mitochondria, the small organelles that produce most of the chemical energy within a cell. A paper describing the research appears in the November 14 issue of Nature Communications. There are hundreds to thousands of mitochondria per cell, each of which carries its own small circular DNA genome, called mtDNA, the products of which are required for energy production. Because mtDNA has limited repair abilities, normal and mutant versions of mtDNA are often found in the same cell, a condition known as heteroplasmy.

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Hitting the pause button on development in embryos has implications for understanding aging.

UC San Francisco researchers have found a way to pause the development of early mouse embryos for up to a month in the lab, a finding with potential implications for assisted reproduction, regenerative medicine, aging, and even cancer, the authors say.

The new study—published online November 23, 2016 in Nature —involved experiments with pre-implantation mouse embryos, called blastocysts. The researchers found that drugs that inhibit the activity a master regulator of called mTOR can put these early embryos into a stable and reversible state of suspended animation.

“Normally, blastocysts only last a day or two, max, in the lab. But blastocysts treated with mTOR inhibitors could survive up to 4 weeks,” said the study’s lead author, Aydan Bulut-Karslioglu, PhD, a post-doctoral researcher in the lab of senior author Miguel Ramalho-Santos, PhD, who is an associate professor of obstetrics/gynecology and reproductive sciences at UCSF.

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Progress towards making a blood scrubber to calibrate the pro aging factors in blood. Irina Conboy has spent the last 20 years working on parabiosis and signalling factors in blood and this is yet another step forward for their research.

Whilst many are seeking the secret sauce in young blood the data suggests it is much more likely the case that old blood contains too many pro-aging factors eg, TGF-beta, TNF-a, IL-6, CD38 etc… The aim is now to filter old blood and calibrate such factors in order to promote a pro-youthful signalling environment. If only this device was small enough to wear or implant.

In what could be a fresh chapter in the never-ending story of the search for eternal youth, scientists are to tinker with people’s blood in the hope of slowing down the ageing process and preventing age-related diseases.

Researchers in California plan to launch a clinical trial of the radical – and highly experimental – approach in the next six months, after a small study in mice found the treatment had promise.

People who take part in the trial will have their blood passed through a machine that resets abnormal levels of proteins seen in older blood. The scientists believe these high levels of certain proteins can hamper the growth and maintenance of healthy body tissues, and so contribute to their deterioration in old age.

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29th November in Berlin there is a meetup for LE enthusiasts.

Announcing our year-end meetup in Berlin.

Join our casual get together of like-minded people. We chat about extending our healthy lifespans and the latest developments in this exciting field.

Again, a lot has happened since our last meetup, great science news and our decision to build a dedicated team for project “Personal Longevity Strategy (see also forever-healthy.org/careers)

This is most likely going to be the last one for this year.

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