Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: life extension

By 2034 the annual cost of diabetes in the US will be comparable to the market capitalization of Google.

Diabetes comes in two main forms, type 1 and type 2. Type 1 diabetes is caused by a failure of the body to produce the hormone insulin that helps sugar molecules to be absorbed by your cells. This type of diabetes is commonly caused by an autoimmune reaction in which the body attacks the pancreas, the gland that produces insulin, and normally occurs during childhood. The second form is when the body becomes insensitive to insulin; the hormone is still there but the cells no longer respond to it. In the Dutch language this form used to be called ‘ouderdomsdiabetes’ meaning ‘diabetes of old age’. This description is no longer accurate as even teenagers have now been diagnosed with it.

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This tongue-in-cheek article highlights an interesting experience I had a few days ago on the Immortality Bus in North Carolina:

One wants to live forever, the other wants to push reset on the US Constitution. Both are running for president in 2016. As Republican and Democrat presidential candidates prepare for December’s debates, pioneering Transhumanist Zoltan Istvan and cybersecurity legend John McAfee met for the first time this week for their own debate, over several large drinks in a motel bar.

Istvan, who is currently touring the US aboard a coffin-shaped campaign bus, and McAfee both have technology at the core of their campaign policies, but in terms of specific policy this is where the similarities end.

“I can’t think of a more horrific concept than immortality,” McAfee told Istvan soon after meeting in Charlotte, North Carolina. “It is anti-evolutionary. We need to die and die young preferably; dying is the most beautiful of all things. I’d get behind a platform where you kill everyone at 30. I would fight you tooth and nail to stop you making people live forever.”

John McAfee zoltan istvan elections

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Last week the FDA announced that they have granted permission for the TAME trial. The Targeting Aging with Metformin (TAME) trial is the first human trial specifically looking at an anti-aging drug in humans.

Repurposing An Old Medicine

Metformin is an old drug, first approved in France in 1957, for the treatment of type 2 diabetes and polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS). However extracts from the French liliac (Galega officinalis), the plant containing a precursor of metformin, has been used to treat frequent urination, a symptom of diabetes, since the Middle Ages. In 2012 in the US about 60 million prescriptions for metformin were written, making metformin the most used antidiabetic drug. Amazingly, every year about 37,000 metric tons of metformin are produced! Metformin is also a super-cheap drug, costing only cents per dose.

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C. elegans roundworm (credit: The Goldstein Lab)

When researchers at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) in California administered an antidepressant called mianserin to the Caenorhabditis elegans roundworm in 2007, they discovered the drug increased the lifespan of the “young adulthood” of roundworms by 30–40 per cent.

So, does that mean it will work in humans? Not necessarily. “There are millions of years of evolution between worms and humans,” says TSRI researcher Michael Petrascheck. “We may have done this in worms, but we don’t want people to get the impression they can take the drug we used in our study to extend their own teens or early twenties.”

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This article is based on my skype conversation with Elizabeth Parrish, founder and CEO of BioViva. BioViva is a biotech company in the Seattle area focused on developing gene therapies to mitigate the diseases of aging. Liz is currently experimenting these therapies on herself. Her research was recently covered in a MIT Technology Review article and she did an AMA on Reddit you may want to check out.

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An Immortality Bus campaign report today on CNET from South Carolina and transhumanism discussed. http://www.cnet.com/videos/the-cravecast-visits-the-future-with-u-s-presidential-candidate-zoltan-istvan/ And here’s the original story: http://www.cnet.com/news/the-cravecast-welcomes-the-presidential-candidate-who-speaks-for-the-robots/

The Transhumanist Party candidate called in from the campaign trail and his “Immortality Bus” to help us look forward to 2016… and to 2050.

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Glucosepane is one of the most significant mechanisms of aging and yet very few people are working on it!

As we age skin and blood vessels lose their elasticity. People care too much about the skin and too little about the blood vessels, but that is always the way of it. Appearance first and substance later, if at all. Yet you can live inside an aged skin; beyond the raised risk of skin cancer its damaged state arguably only makes life less pleasant, and the present state of medical science can ensure that the numerous age-related dermatological dysfunctions can be kept to a state of minor inconvenience. Loss of blood vessel elasticity, on the other hand, will steadily destroy your health and then kill you. Arterial stiffening causes remodeling of the cardiovascular system and hypertension. The biological systems that regulate blood pressure become dysfunctional as blood vessels depart from ideal youthful behavior, creating a downward spiral of increasing blood pressure and reactions to that increase. Small blood vessels fail under the strain in ever larger numbers, damaging surrounding tissue. In the brain this damage contributes to age-related cognitive decline by creating countless tiny, unnoticed strokes. Ultimately this process leads to dementia. More important parts of the cardiovascular system are likely to fail first, however, perhaps causing a stroke, or a heart attack, or the slower decline of congestive heart failure.

From what is known today, it is reasonable to propose that the two main culprits driving loss of tissue elasticity are sugary cross-links generated as a byproduct of the normal operation of cellular metabolism and growing numbers of senescent cells. Elasticity is a property of the extracellular matrix, an intricate structure of collagens and other proteins created by cells. Different arrangements of these molecules produce very different structures, ranging from load-bearing tissues such as bone and cartilage to elastic tissues such as skin and blood vessel walls. Disrupting the arrangement and interaction of molecules in the extracellular matrix also disrupts its properties. Persistent cross-links achieve this by linking proteins together and restricting their normal range of motion. Senescent cells, on the other hand, secrete a range of proteins capable of breaking down or remodeling portions of the surrounding extracellular matrix, and altering the behavior of nearby cells for the worse.

The most important cross-linking compound in humans is glucosepane. Our biochemistry cannot break down glucosepane cross-links, and as a result it accounts for more than 99% of cross-links in our tissues. This isn’t a big secret. Given this you might expect to find researchers working flat out in scores of laboratories to find a viable way to break it down. After all here we have one single target molecule, and any drug candidate capable of clearing even half of existing cross-links would provide a treatment that can both reverse skin aging and vascular aging to a much greater degree than any presently available therapy. The size of the resulting market is every human being, the potential for profit staggering. Yet search on PubMed, and this is all of relevance that you will see published on the topic in the past few years:

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