Today, we are delighted to announce that we have launched a new crowdfunding campaign on Lifespan.io: the NAD+ Mouse Project by Dr. David Sinclair and his team at Harvard Medical School.

NAD+ is a vitally important molecule that is found in every cell in your body and is involved in DNA repair, tissue growth, nutrient sensing and metabolism, cell-to-cell signaling, and many other cellular processes. Quite simply, without NAD+, cells would not work and life would be impossible. If you would like to learn more about NAD+ and its role in aging, check out our articles here, here, and here.

On the new article by Prof Dr S. Olshansky published in JAMA, advising to focus on healthspan extension not on lifespan extension. No, I personally believe that we can still focus on lifespan extension. We could obtain indefinite healthy life extension by different methods of rejuvenation because the rejuvenation process eliminates the main reason for sickness ie the aging diseases and renders us healthy again! And also only through indefinite life extension we could close the gap of tens of years between the lifespan in different social and ethnic groups (Lens-Pechakova, Rejuvenation Res. 2014 Apr;17:239–42)

Clinicians, scientists and public health professionals should proudly “declare victory” in their efforts to extend the human lifespan to its very limits, according to University of Illinois at Chicago epidemiologist S. Jay Olshansky.

In an article published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Olshansky writes that the focus should shift to compressing the “red zone” — the time at the end of life characterized by frailty and disease, and extending the “healthspan” — the length of time when a person is alive and healthy.

Today, we have an update from the MitoSENS team over at the SENS Research Foundation. As some of you may recall, MitoSENS was the first project we hosted on our research fundraising platform Lifespan.io back in August 2015. The project was successfully funded and raised $46,128, which was 153% of the funds needed. The extra funds were used to increase the scope of the project, which resulted in a paper being published in the prestigious Oxford Journal.

Since then, the team has been busy working on transferring the other mitochondrial genes to the nucleus, and they have given us an update to let everyone know how things are progressing at the lab. Dr. Matthew “Oki” O’Connor had the following to say about progress and the future.

Hi, everyone! Time for another exciting mito update. This time, we’ve got 2 teasers for you. The first is that we’re preparing a story about a new trick that we’ve discovered to improve the allotopic expression of mito genes. We’re still confirming that we’re 100% sure that we’re right before writing up the manuscript and making an announcement, but we’re very close. Yes, that means we’re getting it to work on more genes. Stay tuned!

Besides healing wounds, this technique could be useful for repairing skin damage, countering the effects of aging, and better understanding skin cancer.