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He lay in a hospital bed at the University of Arkansas, stricken with a rare disease. His blood platelet count was so low that even a slight bump to his body could trigger a lethal brain bleed. A doctor told him to write his living will on a piece of paper.

Fajgenbaum was rushed to a CT scan. Tears streamed down his face and fell on his hospital gown. He thought about the first patient who’d died under his care in medical school, and how her brain had bled in a similar way from a stroke.

He didn’t believe he’d live out the scan.

It was a pleasure speaking to Dr. Ronald Kohanski at the 2019 Ending Age-Related Diseases conference. Dr. Kohanski joined the field of aging research in 2005 as a Program Officer for the Division of Aging Biology at the National Institute on Aging. He moved on to become its Deputy Director in 2007 and has held the position ever since. Within aging research, he has focused his efforts on the areas of stem cell and cardiovascular biology.

Besides his work at the NIA, Ronald Kohanski is a co-founder and co-leader of the trans-NIH Geroscience Interest Group (GSIG) with which he has organized several summits to discuss and disseminate the group’s focus. The GSIG directs its attention toward aging as the major risk factor for most chronic age-related diseases, and Dr. Kohanski actively encourages researchers to expand studies beyond laboratory animals. He underwrites the importance of addressing the basic biology of aging explicitly in human and non-laboratory animal populations. He believes that age should be considered a fundamental parameter in research that uses animal models of chronic disease.

Dr. Kohanski was trained in the field of biochemistry. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1981, after which he conducted a postdoctoral fellowship with M. Daniel Lane at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He held a faculty position at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine for 17 years before returning to Johns Hopkins as a faculty member and researcher in the areas of enzymology and developmental biology of the insulin receptor.

Players with quadriplegia are using neuroscience and video games to take on the world.

Dr. Qingsong Zhu, the COO of Insilico Medicine, discussed the use of deep learning in creating biomarkers for aging. Initially discussing existing clocks and the problems with animal translation, he went on to discuss what sorts of markers are ideal for age-related research and the details of training and testing a model that works with these markers, showing that a deep model compares favorably to other models.

He also used his model to show that smoking does, in fact, cause accelerated aging.

Bio printing footage provided by College of Engineering, and heart valve footage provided by Regenerative Biomaterials Group, Carnegie Mellon University.
https://regenerativebiomaterials.com/

Lulzbot invited us out to showcase the BIO, their OPEN SOURCE 3D printer capable of 3D bioprinting. Materials like unmodified collagen and fetal stem cells! It’s open source, and launches at a price of $7500 USD.

Continue reading “3D Printing Organs is CLOSER thanks to Lulzbot BIO” »

undoing-aging.org/videos/julie-andersen-presenting-at-undoing-aging-2019

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MS is thought to affect 100,000 people in the UK, with 14 patients being diagnosed every day, MS Society statistics show.

And in the US, nearly one million are living with the condition, according to the National Multiple Sclerosis Society.

The disorder, which strikes twice as many women as men, damages nerves in the body, causing mobility loss, sight problems, fatigue and pain.