There are multiple software options that analyze your genetic data and make recommendations on which supplements you should be taking.
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Category: biotech/medical – Page 2,557
Defeating age-related diseases may create challenges for society, but is that worse than not doing anything?
In these six years, I’ve spent as a rejuvenation advocate, I’ve had to deal with the traditional objections raised against the idea of longer lifespans. These objections touch a variety of different topics, but they aren’t terribly many: we’re talking about maybe a dozen of them, and these days, I hardly ever hear an objection I haven’t discussed before.
However few or many, and deserving of specific answers, these objections may be, they can all be reduced down to a single, general form: “Rejuvenation biotechnologies would cause [insert problem here], so it’s best not to go there.” And just like there are specific answers for each specific objection, there are general answers for their general form—Aubrey de Grey’s famous “two more general answers”.
These two general answers question the validity of two implicit assumptions contained in all objections, general or specific.
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Scientists are altering a powerful gene-editing technology in hopes of one day fighting diseases without making permanent changes to people’s DNA.
The trick: Edit RNA instead, the messenger that carries a gene’s instructions.
“If you edit RNA, you can have a reversible therapy,” important in case of side effects, said Feng Zhang of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, a gene-editing pioneer whose team reported the new twist Wednesday in the journal Science.
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One of the most defining scientific discoveries in recent decades is the development of induced pluripotent stem cells, which lets scientists revert adult cells back into an embryonic-like blank state and then manipulating them to become a particular kind of tissue.
But now a new model could do away with this time-consuming process, taking out the middle step and directly programming cells to become whatever we want them to be.
“Cells in our body always self-specialise,” explains bioinformatics researcher Indika Rajapakse from the University of Michigan.
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The first results of two human clinical trials using stem cell therapy for age-related frailty have been published, and the results are very impressive indeed. The studies show that the approach used is effective in tackling multiple key age-related factors.
Aging research has made significant progress in the last few years, with senescent cell clearing therapies entering human trials this year, DNA repair in human trials, and a number of other exciting therapies nearing human testing. We are reaching the point where therapies that target aging processes are no longer a matter of speculation; they are now an undeniable matter of fact.
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A new vaccine targeting dozens of new strains of pneumonia could potentially save “hundreds of thousands of lives” according to researchers. Early studies show the new vaccine effectively protects against a variety of bacteria that causes pneumococcal disease including pneumonia, meningitis and sepsis.
Since the introduction in the early 2000s of vaccines targeting the most deadly forms of pneumonia, the World Health Organization has estimated global deaths of children from the disease have been cut in half. Alongside better nutrition and access to antibiotics, a vaccine against the 23 most deadly pneumonia-causing bacteria has been held as responsible for the millions of lives saved.
Now a team of scientists from the University at Buffalo and New York University’s Langone Medical Center has developed a new vaccine that targets another 50 strains of a bacterium called Streptococcus pneumoniae, the primary bacteria responsible for pneumococcal disease.
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I Am The Lifespan
Posted in biotech/medical, life extension
Over the past few years, there has been a tradition of longevity researchers and activists around the world to organize events on or around October 1 — the UN International Day of Older Persons, or Longevity Day. In recent years this has been extended to include the entire month of November as a Longevity Month where activists organize various activities and events to raise awareness for aging research.
This year we have continued this tradition with the Longevity Month “I am the Lifespan” event, where people tell us their story and how they got interested in aging research and doing something about age-related diseases. and it has been a great success so far. Lots of people have sent in their stories and we have been publishing them on our Facebook page the last few weeks. We wanted to share some of these stories with you and a little about the people behind them.
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Recently, we have explored the benefits that rejuvenation biotechnologies promise to bring to ourselves and the people close to us. I would imagine that most people have no difficulty acknowledging these benefits, but even so, many people tend to focus on potential large-scale downsides of rejuvenation while neglecting entirely its benefits on society at large.
The following is a brief discussion of how, in my opinion, anti-aging biotechnologies would positively impact the whole of humanity—assuming they were widely employed, as they should be.
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CHICAGO — Small RNA molecules originally developed as a tool to study gene function trigger a mechanism hidden in every cell that forces the cell to commit suicide, reports a new Northwestern Medicine study, the first to identify molecules to trigger a fail-safe mechanism that may protect us from cancer.
The mechanism — RNA suicide molecules — can potentially be developed into a novel form of cancer therapy, the study authors said.
Cancer cells treated with the RNA molecules never become resistant to them because they simultaneously eliminate multiple genes that cancer cells need for survival.
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