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Category: life extension

My dispatch for Vice from the recent successful RAAD Festival—a giant gathering of longevity enthusiasts:

In less than a month, I’ll mark the two-year anniversary to my presidential campaign for the Transhumanist Party. My run for the White House was never about winning, but spreading the idea that Americans can achieve indefinite lifespans through science and technology—if only the government were to help out and put significant resources into the anti-aging field.

While the US government still hasn’t shown much interest in supporting longevity research for its citizens, the life extension movement is dramatically expanding around the world. Two years ago, the idea of speaking to 1000 longevity advocates in the same convention hall was a pipe dream. Most transhumanist conferences could barely get 100 people in the same room.

Last weekend in San Diego, that all changed. Billed as the biggest life extension festival in history, RAAD Fest took place from August 4–7. Over 1000 participants made it to the sold-out event, making it the largest group of transhumanists and longevity activists ever to assemble in one place.

The success of the festival signals the growing trend of the life extension movement. In the last few years, major companies like Google’s Calico and Human Longevity Inc. have formed to combat aging. Additionally, billionaires like Peter Thiel and Larry Ellison have funded longevity and anti-aging initiatives. Even Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg recently called for science to end all disease this century.

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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]

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Interesting read; like the plug by Rajeev Alur about how the insights from the ExCAPE project has helped advance making QC programmable. Like Alur, I too see many synergies across multiple areas of science & tech. For example, the work on singularity is being advance by the work performed around anti-aging, cancer research, etc. and vice versa. Truly one of my biggest enjoyments of research and innovation is taking a accept or vision, and guessing where else can the concept be leveraged or even advancing other industries.

NSF’s mission is to advance the progress of science, a mission accomplished by funding proposals for research and education made by scientists, engineers, and educators from across the country.

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Keith Comito from LEAF/Lifespan.io talking about the need for a unified call to action and how we have reached a turning point in the life extension movement.

In this talk LEAF President Keith Comito explains how initatives like Lifespan.io (https://www.lifespan.io/campaigns/sens-control-alt-delete-cancer/) fit into the broader goal of building a grassroots movement in support of life extension, with the eventual aim of effecting massive societial change on the issue. If you are looking for a deep dive into the full scope of life extension advocacy, from the dawn of history to current breakthroughs and opportunities, this is it.

This presentation is part of the Designing New Advances conference held by the Institute of Exponential Sciences in the Netherlands, orchestrated by Demian Hoed and Lotte van Noort.

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With only 9 days left on the SENS cancer fundraiser here is an article from Fightaging! that explains why finding novel solutions to treating cancer is critical in the roadmap to longer healthier lives.

This year’s SENS rejuvenation research crowdfunding event puts the spotlight on the SENS Research Foundation’s cancer program. So far more than 300 people have donated, and more than $26,000 has been raised; with ten days left to go, it won’t take that much more of an effort to reach the same number of donors and the same level of support given to last year’s fundraiser, and which led to the success in that research program. As for all of the SENS research initiatives in the science of aging, the SENS Research Foundation’s work on cancer aims to support a big, bold goal in medicine: to build a single type of therapy that can be used to effectively treat all forms of cancer. When achieved, that will greatly increase the pace of progress towards control of cancer, the goal of finally ending cancer as a threat to health. At present the cancer research community spends much of its time and funding on approaches that are highly specific to only one or only a few of the hundred of subtypes of cancer. That is no way to win any time soon, as even with the vast funding devoted to cancer research, there are just too many forms of cancer and too few researchers. What is needed is to change the strategy, to focus on approaches to the treatment of cancer that are no more expensive to develop, but that far more patients can benefit from.

The most promising approach to a universal cancer therapy is to block telomere lengthening in cancerous tissues. Telomeres are a part of the mechanism that limits cell division in all human cells other than stem cells, repeating DNA sequences at the ends of chromosomes that shorten every time a cell divides. In order to achieve unfettered growth all cancers must bypass this limit by continually lengthening their telomeres, a goal that is achieved through mutations that allow cancer cells to use telomerase or the alternative lengthening of telomeres (ALT) processes. If both telomerase and ALT can be blocked in cancer tissue, then the cancer will wither; this is such a fundamental piece of cellular machinery that there is no expectation that cancer cells could find a way around it. Block only one of these two methods of telomere lengthening, however, and the cancer will probably switch to use the other. This has been observed in mice.

Thus it is very important that the research community deploy both telomerase and ALT blockades as a part of a prospective universal cancer therapy. Unfortunately while a number of groups are working on telomerase interdiction, and telomerase is very well studied these days, ALT is still poorly characterized, at the frontiers of what is known of cell biology. ALT doesn’t occur in normal cells, and thus despite the fact that 10% of cancers make use of it, only recently have the necessary tools been developed to work towards understanding and intervention. The SENS Research Foundation is picking up the slack in this overlooked area of development, and with our support is working towards ensuring that the first universal cancer therapies can in fact target both telomerase and ALT, and therefore succeed.

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Dr. Aubrey de Grey of the of the SENS Research Foundation explains the OncoSENS approach to curing ALT-Cancer, the corresponding crowdunding campaign (https://www.lifespan.io/campaigns/sens-control-alt-delete-cancer/), and how this is a vital part of overcoming the ill-effects of aging.

This presentation is part of the Designing New Advances conference held by the Institute of Exponential Sciences in the Netherlands, orchestrated by Demian Hoed, and Lotte Van Norte.

ALT-Cancer refers to those cancers which use the Alternative Lengthening of Telomeres mechanism to attain cellular immortality, as opposed to the expression of the enzyme Telomerase.

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California-based startup Ambrosia is starting clinical trials that will see older people pumped with blood from younger donors, in the hopes of rejuvenating their bodies.

Reversing and eliminating aging has always been one of the true Holy Grails of medical science. Like the search for the rumored Grail, the journey to eliminate aging will be a difficult one– and there is some doubt as to whether it is actually achievable.

But one startup seems like it may have cracked the problem, and is now beginning tests. Ambrosia, a startup based in Monterey, California, is starting a clinical trial to rejuvenate people over 35 by injecting them with young people’s blood.

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More progress with senolytics for treating age related diseases and further vindication for the SENS approach to aging.

The open access paper linked below provides another reason to be optimistic about the therapies to clear senescent cells from old tissues that are presently under development. Here, the researchers created genetically engineered mice in which they could selectively trigger senescent cell death in lung tissues. In older mice, the result was improved pulmonary function, and other improvements in the state of lung tissue — turning back the clock on some of the detrimental age-related changes that take place in the lungs.

Cells become senescent in response to damage or environmental toxicity, or at the end of their replicative lifespan, or to assist in wound healing. The vast majority either destroy themselves or are destroyed by the immune system, but a few manage to linger on. Those few grow in numbers over the years, and more so once the immune system begins to decline and falter in its duties. Ever more senescent cells accumulate in tissues with advancing age, and they secrete a mix of signals that can encourage other cells to become senescent, increase inflammation, and destructively remodel nearby tissue structures. In small numbers senescent cells can help to resist cancer or assist healing, but in large numbers they contribute meaningfully to all of the symptoms and conditions of old age. They are one of the root causes of aging.

Building therapies to destroy senescent cells is the best, easiest, and most direct response. If carried out sufficiently well it would remove this contribution to the aging process entirely, and fortunately the cancer research community has been working on targeted cell destruction for many years now: the technologies exist and just need to be hammered into shape. This class of rejuvenation therapy has been advocated as a part of the SENS vision for the medical control of aging for going on fifteen years now, but only in recent years has the research community made useful progress. As for so many promising lines of research related to bringing aging under medical control, it has been next to impossible to raise funds for this work. The most critical studies in senescent cell clearance, those that proved the case beyond any reasonable doubt, were funded through philanthropy, as is often the case for work at the true cutting edge of medical science.

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Fixing one thing only gets you so far, as all the other forms of damage will still, on their own, kill you. Aubrey de Grey of the SENS Research Foundation believes that only small gains in overall life span are possible without addressing all of the causes of aging.

Five years from now, it will be possible to take a trip overseas to have most of the senescent cells that have built up in your tissues cleared away via some form of drug or gene therapy treatment. That will reduce your risk of suffering most age-related diseases, and in fact make you measurably younger — it is a narrow form of rejuvenation, targeting just one of the various forms of cell and tissue damage that cause aging, age-related disease, and ultimately death. I say five years and mean it. If both of the present senescent cell clearance startup companies Oisin Biotechnologies and UNITY Biotechnology fail rather than succeed, and it is worth noting that the Oisin founders have a therapy that actually works in animal studies, while drugs and other approaches have also been shown to both clear senescent cells and extend life in mice, then there will be other attempts soon thereafter. The basic science of senescent cell clearance is completely open, and anyone can join in — in fact the successful crowdfunding of the first Major Mouse Testing Program study earlier this year was exactly that, citizen scientists joining in to advance the state of the art in this field.

Five years from now, however, there will be no definitive proof that senescent cell clearance extends life in humans, nor that it reduces risk of age-related disease in our species over the longer term. There will no doubt be a few more studies in mice showing life extension. There will be initial human evidence that clearance of senescent cells causes short-term improvements in technical biomarkers of aging such as DNA methylation patterns, or more easily assessed items such as skin condition — given how much of the skin in old people is made up of senescent cells — or markers of chronic inflammation. These are all compelling reasons to undertake the treatment, but if you want definite proof of life extension you’ll have to wait a decade or more beyond the point of first availability, as that is about as long as it takes to put together and run academic studies that make a decent stab at quantifying effects on mortality in old people.

Uncertainty is the state of affairs when considering the effects of potentially life-extending therapies on human life span. Consider the practice of calorie restriction, for example, where theory suggests the likely outcome is a few extra years, but certainly not a large number of extra years or else it would be very apparent in epidemiological data. I think that an enterprising individual could, given a good relationship with the Calorie Restriction Society, put together a 20-year or 40-year study to that would — in theory — produce a decent set of data on practitioners and outcomes in the wild. It won’t happen, most likely, because for one the funding isn’t there for such a study, and secondly we’ll be well into the era of widely available rejuvenation therapies along the way. Those calorie restriction practitioners will be taking advantage of treatments to repair the causes of aging just like everyone else.

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An interview with SENS research Dr. Haroldo Silva and his work with ALT Cancer.

As you might have noticed, the SENS Research Foundation is presently asking for your support in a crowdfunding campaign that aims to close in on a universal therapy capable of effectively treating all types of cancer, one based on blocking telomere lengthening. As is often the case, the SENS network is here using philanthropic donations to pick up necessary work that hasn’t been taken on by the rest of the community, so as to unblock progress. The scientist who will lead the work is Haroldo Silva; he has been focused on this particular branch of cancer research for some years now, and below you’ll find a short interview that covers some of his thoughts on the field and on this effort in particular.

I should emphasize that this SENS initiative is an important component in efforts to completely change the way in which the research community approaches the treatment of cancer. The cancer research community suffers from a high level strategy problem: the majority of treatments are only applicable to a small number of cancer types, out of the hundreds of known types, and the majority of new technology platforms under development will be just as expensive to adapt to a different type of cancer as to build in the first place. A much more efficient approach is needed, as there are only so many researchers and only so much funding in the world. As Silva describes below, blocking telomere lengthening is the most efficient of possible better approaches: all cancers must lengthen their telomeres in order to grow, and abuse a small number of target mechanisms in order to do so.

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