Today we will be discussing new research published in nature where researchers modified a protein associated with Alzheimer’s disease into a more harmless form, allowing them to remove the damage caused by Alzheimer’s in human cells. This is especially important because the research was not conducted on mice but rather human cells, and shows a potential way to halt the formation of the plaques associated with Alzheimer’s in the first place.
Posted in biotech/medical, life extension
Today, we have a guest article from Dr. Marion Tible, a scientist, and author over at the aging research-focused blog Long Long Life. What follows is an introduction to the senescent cell-clearing therapies known as senolytics, these therapies are poised to enter human trials and if successful could revolutionize how we treat age-related diseases.
What are senolytics?
Discovered in 2015 by a team from Mayo Clinic and the Scripps Research Institute in the United States, senolytics are a growing trend in the anti-aging community. They are very promising drugs in the fight against cellular senescence, a hallmark of aging.
During the recent Undoing Aging conference in Berlin, we worked with Anna Dobryukha from Komsomolskaya Pravda, one of the largest Russian publishing houses. We collaborated on a series of interviews, including this one with Dr. Jonathan Clark from the Babraham Institute.
The Undoing Aging conference, a collaboration between the SENS Research Foundation and Michael Greve’s Forever Healthy Foundation, took place on March 15–17 in Berlin, and it saw many researchers, advocates, investors, and other important members of the longevity community gather together to learn about the latest progress in rejuvenation biotechnology.
LEAF arranged a travel grant for Anna Dobryukha, one of the best Russian journalists writing about aging, longevity, and rejuvenation research, to join us, so it made sense to collaborate with her on the most interesting interviews. Anna works for Komsomolskaya Pravda, one of the largest Russian publishing houses, which has a newspaper, a radio station, and a website with over 40 million readers.
During the conference, we had the opportunity to interview Dr. Jonathan Clark, who has recently been focusing on skin aging and the interactions of collagen in this process. He is the head of the biological chemistry department at the Babraham Institute, where his group carries out aging research. Dr. Clark has some interesting research which he presented at the conference but which has yet to be published, this means that he could not tell us everything he had discovered in this interview, but don’t worry, we have agreed a follow-up interview with him once his data is published.
Will they teach humanities?
Some experts have suggested that autonomous systems will replace us in jobs for which humans are unsuited anyway — those that are dull, dirty, and dangerous. That’s already happening. Robots clean nuclear disaster sites and work construction jobs. Desk jobs aren’t immune to the robot takeover, however — machines are replacing finance experts, outperforming doctors, and competing with advertising masterminds.
The unique demands placed on primary and secondary school teachers make this position different from many other jobs at risk of automation. Students all learn differently, and a good teacher must attempt to deliver lessons in a way that resonates with every child in the classroom. Some students may have behavioral or psychological problems that inhibit or complicate that process. Others may have parents who are too involved, or not involved enough, in their education. Effective teachers must be able to navigate these many hurdles while satisfying often-changing curriculum requirements.
In short, the job demands that teachers have nearly superhuman levels of empathy, grit, and organization. Creating robotic teachers that can meet all these demands might be challenging, but in the end, could these AI-enhanced entities solve our most pervasive and systemic issues in education?
The mice helped the tiny organoids get nutrients, oxygen, and even start developing human neurons.
Getty Images
Scientists at the Salk Institute implanted lentil-sized human brain organoids into the heads of mice, then closed it with a transparent window. The mice looked and behaved like ordinary mice, while supplying blood and nutrients to keep human brains developing for months.
Posted in biotech/medical, genetics, life extension
“Old age isn’t a battle,” she says, quoting Philip Roth, “old age is a massacre.” In the past few years, she has given up on screenings and scans. Not that she is lazy or suicidal. But at 76, she considers herself old enough to die. All the self-help books aimed at her age group tell her otherwise; they talk of “active ageing”, “productive ageing”, “anti-ageing”, even “reverse-ageing”, with a long life promised to anyone who makes an effort, regardless of factors such as genetics or poverty. But to her, ageing is “an accumulation of disabilities”, which no amount of physical activity or rigorous self-denial can prevent. If she has symptoms, she’ll have them investigated. But when a doctor tells her there could be an undetected problem of some kind, she won’t play along.
A great iconoclast has written a polemic about ageing that sends up New Age platitudes and is full of scepticism of the wellness industry.
Blake Morrison
Thu 12 Apr 2018 02.30 EDT Last modified on Fri 13 Apr 2018 19.10 EDT.
If you aren’t freaked out by privacy concerns of DNA testing kits (basically, they may sell anonymized genetic data, but not personally identifiable data), the tests are getting better, and 23andMe’s are on sale today.
I guess any procedure involving the brain feels like a different category of risk to most people. You must face that anxiety every day. I think there are two types of surgical practice that really strike at the core of people’s anxiety. One is brain surgery, where you are operating on something that people see as themselves, their sense of identity, their mind. The other one is, I think, paediatric surgery, where the operation is on the thing most precious to you – your children. I think both create a dynamic where you need to work harder to create trust with your patients.
When it comes to innovation that might link a person’s mind directly with a machine, it seems as much an ethical as a medical question. Is that how you see it? Ethicists are critical in what we do. A working interface would be a real turning point in human evolution. I don’t say that with bombast or hyperbole. And just like with artificial intelligence, we need to take the greatest care in how we think about it. Whether it happens in five years or 50 years, it will happen. I wrote these two science-fiction novels to try to walk people through some of the things that could happen; for example, if others got unauthorised access to these implants, or when corporations got involved. We need to be thinking about these things now, rather than after the fact.
Was one of the motivations in writing your books to work out these things for yourself? Did you feel the same at the beginning of the process as at the end? I had certain ideas in mind when I started the books, but there was an evolution. I came to think less about that individual interface and more about the effect this technology might have on society. We need to think hard about how advances [might] not increase social division.
Peripheral Elevation of a #Klotho Fragment Enhances Brain Function and Resilience in Young, Aging, and α-Synuclein Transgenic Mice.
Klotho is a longevity factor associated with cognitive enhancement when genetically and widely overexpressed over the lifetime of mice. Leon et al. show that peripheral delivery of a klotho fragment, αKL-F, acutely enhances cognition and neural resilience in young, aging, and disease model mice, establishing its therapeutic relevance and dissecting its underlying mechanisms.
