Lifeboat Foundation

This is a big deal, kids.

For the past five years, Silicon Valley biotech Rejuvenation Technologies has been quietly working on a therapeutic platform to extend telomeres in the human body, with the goal of boosting longevity and healthspan. Yesterday, the company emerged from stealth with a healthy seed funding round of $10.6 million, led by Khosla Ventures.

Rejuvenation has developed a synthetic mRNA-based approach to restoring telomeres to a “healthy length” – capable of reversing a decade of telomere shortening in a single dose. The mRNA produces telomerase, an enzyme that plays a critical role in maintaining the length of telomeres. Following positive preclinical results in lung and liver disease indications, the company is now preparing the path towards its first in-human trials.

Continue reading “Telomere-boosting mRNA therapeutic turns back the aging clock” »

Telomerase helps maintain telomere length in our cells, influences how our bodies age, and why we develop diseases like cancer. If cells had enough telomerase, telomeres might not shorten at all. But in most somatic cells, it’s present in very low amounts — only enough to slow the telomere shortening down.

This is part of a short series of videos where we explore telomeres, telomere length and telomerase, as well as the impacts they have on our health.

Continue reading “The links between telomerase and aging” »

“Preserve health, prevent disease, prolong healthspan,” begins the mission statement of the Kitalys Institute. Lofty goals indeed from the not-for-profit organisation behind the annual Targeting Metabesity conference and a range of initiatives to translate longevity science into genuine public health gains.

Longevity. Technology: The vast majority of companies developing therapeutics in the longevity field are adopting strategies that involve targeting specific indications rather than aging itself. And well they might, because there is currently no precedent for drugs targeting aging at regulatory bodies like the FDA. Kitalys wants to change that, and we caught up with the institute’s founder Dr Alexander “Zan” Fleming to find out more.

An endocrinologist by training, Fleming is well qualified to take on the regulators. He spent more than a decade at the FDA, where he led the medical reviews that resulted in approval of drugs including metformin, as well as the first statin, insulin analogue and PPAR agonist.

A research team headed by Professor Jacob Hanna at the Weizmann Institute of Science has created complete models of human embryos from stem cells cultured in the lab – and managed to grow them outside the uterus up to day 14. As reported today in Nature, these synthetic embryo models had all the structures and compartments characteristic of this stage, including the placenta, yolk sac, chorionic sac and other external tissues that ensure the models’ dynamic and adequate growth.

Longevity. Technology: Cellular aggregates derived from human stem cells in previous studies could not be considered genuinely accurate human embryo models, because they lacked nearly all the defining hallmarks of a post-implantation embryo. In particular, they failed to contain several cell types that are essential to the embryo’s development, such as those that form the placenta and the chorionic sac. In addition, they did not have the structural organization characteristic of the embryo and revealed no dynamic ability to progress to the next developmental stage.

Given their authentic complexity, the human embryo models obtained by Hanna’s group may not only provide an unprecedented opportunity to shed new light on the embryo’s mysterious beginnings, but open the door to new technologies for growing transplant tissues and organs.

Weathered or unhealthy skin is emerging as a major risk factor for almost every single age-related disease, from Parkinson’s to type 2 diabetes.

In new research published in BMC Medicine, the authors recruited a large cohort of participants in order to assess how plant-based foods affect aging trajectories [1].

Previous research has shown that consumption of plant-based foods is associated with healthy aging [2,3]. It can also help to decrease the risk of mortality [4], prevent the development of chronic diseases [5,6], and improve neurological health, such as by lowering the risk of dementia [7] and cognitive impairment [8].

This new study aimed to determine the influence of a plant-based diet on the aging trajectory of the middle-aged Asian population. Researchers recruited over 10,000 people 50 years and older in Taiwan. Participants provided health data four times during the eight years after enrollment, underwent physical examinations, and filled out relevant questionnaires.

Recently, we spoke to Shai Efrati MD, Chair of Aviv Clinics’ Medical Advisory Board and Founder and Director of the world-leading Sagol Center for Hyperbaric Medicine and Research, about the longevity and healthspan benefits of hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT). The Aviv Medical Program is designed for individuals experiencing cognitive and physical decline because of a variety of conditions, including stroke, post-COVID and age-related cognitive decline, Aviv also has an increasing number of clients who wish to improve their cognitive and physical performance and increase their healthspan.

One of Aviv’s patients is Patti Finnegan, a senior living in The Villages in Florida, and we sat down with her to find out what HBOT entails for the patient.

Longevity. Technology: At Longevity. Technology, we often cover therapies and treatments that have been developed or launched, discussing the science behind them and the possible results for the patient. What is less common, however, is to hear from the patients themselves – how did they find the experience and has it made a difference? What starts in a test tube or a white board ends up in a person, so it is important to retain a focus on the end user; after all, while patient population data is important, improving outcomes for actual people is the key goal behind longevity science – real people living longer, healthier lives.

Female kidneys are known to be more resilient to disease and injury, but males need not despair. A new USC Stem Cell-led study published in Developmental Cell describes not only how sex hormones drive differences in male and female mouse kidneys, but also how lowering testosterone can “feminize” this organ and improve its resilience.

“By exploring how differences emerge in male and female kidneys during development, we can better understand how to address sex-related health disparities for patients with kidney diseases,” said Professor Andy McMahon, the study’s corresponding author, and the director of the Eli and Edythe Broad Center for Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at the Keck School of Medicine of USC.

First authors Lingyun “Ivy” Xiong and Jing Liu from the McMahon Lab and their collaborators identified more than 1,000 genes with different levels of activity in male and female mouse kidneys, in a study supported by the National Institutes of Health. The differences were most evident in the section of the kidney’s filtering unit known as the proximal tubule, responsible for reabsorbing most of the nutrients such as glucose and amino acids back into the blood stream.

The current crop of AI robots has made giant leaps when it comes to tiny activities.

There are robots performing colonoscopies, conducting microsurgeries on blood vessels and nerve cells, designing circuit boards, constructing delicate timepieces and conducting fine touch-up operations on fading, aging classical paintings by the masters.

Continue reading “Targeted stiffening yields more efficient soft robot arms” »