When British billionaire Jim Mellon wants to map out an investment strategy, he likes to write a book first. Out of that process came his most recent work — Juvenescence: Investing in the Age of Longevity. Now he and some close associates with some of the best connections in biotech are using the book as inspiration to launch a new company — also named Juvenescence — with plans to make a big splash in anti-aging research.
The immune system plays a key role in tissue regeneration and the various types of immune cells such as macrophages, can help or hinder that repair process.
Inflammation is part of the immune response but with aging that immune response becomes deregulated and the inflammation becomes excessive. Excessive levels of inflammation generally speaking inhibit tissue regeneration and when that inflammation is continual, as it often is in aging, this leads to a breakdown in the ability to heal injuries.
As well as a deregulated and dysfunctional immune system aging also sees rising numbers of senescent cells accumulate which also cause inflammation. The immune system fails as we age and stops clearing away these cells leading to a downward spiral of inflammation and increasingly poor tissue repair.
Cory Doctorow has made several careers out of thinking about the future, as a journalist and co-editor of Boing Boing, an activist with strong ties to the Creative Commons movement and the right-to-privacy movement, and an author of novels that largely revolve around the ways changing technology changes society. From his debut novel, Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom (about rival groups of Walt Disney World designers in a post-scarcity society where social currency determines personal value), to his most acclaimed, Little Brother (about a teenage gamer fighting the Department of Homeland Security), his books tend to be high-tech and high-concept, but more about how people interface with technologies that feel just a few years into the future.
But they also tend to address current social issues head-on. Doctorow’s latest novel, Walkaway, is largely about people who respond to the financial disparity between the ultra-rich and the 99 percent by walking away and building their own networked micro-societies in abandoned areas. Frightened of losing control over society, the 1 percent wages full-on war against the “walkaways,” especially after they develop a process that can digitize individual human brains, essentially uploading them to machines and making them immortal. When I talked to Doctorow about the book and the technology behind it, we started with how feasible any of this might be someday, but wound up getting deep into the questions of how to change society, whether people are fundamentally good, and the balance between fighting a surveillance state and streaming everything to protect ourselves from government overreach.
Join us Live on 28th July on our Facebook Page and lets talk some science. Dr. Oliver Medvedik hosts our monthly Journal Club and this time we are talking about a new protein destroying missle system that could target undruggable diseases developed at Dundee University, UK.
Journal Club is a monthly live event and runs thanks to the support of our patrons. You can become a patron here: https://www.lifespan.io/campaigns/join-us-become-a-lifespan-hero/
We are holding our third Journal Club live stream event on July 28th at 13:00 EST/18:00 UK. Dr. Oliver Medvedik live from Cooper Union NYC and the Ocean level Patrons will be discussing a recent research paper with the opportunity for viewers to join the chat, comment and ask questions.
The paper we will be discussing is the recent AdPROM study where researchers from Dundee University, UK, created a missile system capable of targeting and destroying proteins within the cell, this opens up the door for treating undruggable diseases and tackling some of the aging processes. We discuss the research here in an article.
Customized cancer vaccines that match the unique genetic makeup of individual tumors have just passed phase 1 trials.
Cancer is predominantly a disease of aging caused by genomic instability. Finding effective ways to prevent and treat cancer is therefore of great interest to those working in the field of aging research as well as those working in oncology.
Therapies that target combinations of neoantigens, distinctive markers on the surface of cancer cells that the immune system learns to identify, is one potential approach to treating cancer. These neoantigen combinations vary between one patient and another and this is the focus of a new study which we will talk about today[1].
Immunotherapy is an approach to cancer treatment that seeks to make the immune system better at detecting and destroying cancer. This has the advantage over traditional drugs in that there should be fewer side-effects from using the body’s own defences to fight cancer.
With the NASA GLOBE Observer app and a thermometer, citizen scientists can help collect data on how the eclipse changes atmospheric conditions near you. Find out more on how to participate: http://go.nasa.gov/2eFvxbK # Eclipse2017.
Re-engineered macrophages to treat cancer.
Today we have a new study where researchers have created immune cells that ignore the way cancer tries to hide from detection.
Hiding in plain sight
The Macrophages are one of the types of immune cell and are responsible for dealing with dangerous cells, such as those which have become cancerous. The problem is most cancer cells bypass the immune system by fooling the immune cells into leaving them alone. Cancer cells present certain molecules on their surface that act like a “do not eat me” signal to macrophages which would otherwise engulf and digest them.
Chronological age has been typically used as a way to gauge how someone is aging, however this is a poor measure indeed. People tend to age at different rates due to a variety of reasons, environment, diet, diseases in earlier life, stress, exercise and lifestyle all play a role in how a person ages.
Clearly a better way to measure aging is needed if we are to accurately assess how someone is aging for the purposes of health monitoring and research. One way to do this is to use functional aging as a way to determine how someone is aging.
Functional aging is defined as a combination of the chronological, physiological, mental, and emotional ages of a person that give an overall measure of their rate of aging.
DARPA created the Safe Genes program to gain a fundamental understanding of how gene editing technologies function; devise means to safely, responsibly, and predictably harness them for beneficial ends; and address potential health and security concerns related to their accidental or intentional misuse. Today, DARPA announced awards to seven teams that will pursue that mission, led by: The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard; Harvard Medical School; Massachusetts General Hospital; Massachusetts Institute of Technology; North Carolina State University; University of California, Berkeley; and University of California, Riverside. DARPA plans to invest $65 million in Safe Genes over the next four years as these teams work to collect empirical data and develop a suite of versatile tools that can be applied independently or in combination to support bio-innovation and combat bio-threats.
Gene editing technologies have captured increasing attention from healthcare professionals, policymakers, and community leaders in recent years for their potential to selectively disable cancerous cells in the body, control populations of disease-spreading mosquitos, and defend native flora and fauna against invasive species, among other uses. The potential national security applications and implications of these technologies are equally profound, including protection of troops against infectious disease, mitigation of threats posed by irresponsible or nefarious use of biological technologies, and enhanced development of new resources derived from synthetic biology, such as novel chemicals, materials, and coatings with useful, unique properties.
Achieving such ambitious goals, however, will require more complete knowledge about how gene editors, and derivative technologies including gene drives, function at various physical and temporal scales under different environmental conditions, across multiple generations of an organism. In parallel, demonstrating the ability to precisely control gene edits, turning them on and off under certain conditions or even reversing their effects entirely, will be paramount to translation of these tools to practical applications. By establishing empirical foundations and removing lingering unknowns through laboratory-based demonstrations, the Safe Genes teams will work to substantially minimize the risks inherent in such powerful tools.
