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Category: biotech/medical – Page 2,718

FightAging! interviews Mantas from CellAge about their campaign on Lifespan.io / Life Extension Advocacy Foundation and talks about senolytics and synthetic biology.

I mentioned CellAge some weeks ago; a new entry to the collection of companies and research groups interested in developing the means to safely identify and remove senescent cells from old tissues. A few days later one of those companies, UNITY Biotechnology, announced a sizable $116 million venture round, which certainly put the field on the map for anyone who wasn’t paying attention up until that point. In contrast, CellAge are determinedly taking the non-profit route, and intend to make the progress they create freely available to the field. Why are senescent cells important? Because they are a cause of aging, and removing them is a narrowly focused form of rejuvenation, shown to restore function and extend healthy life in animal studies. An increasing number of senescent cells linger in our bodies as we age, secreting signals that harm tissue structures, produce chronic inflammation, and alter the behavior of nearby cells for the worse. Senescent cells also participate more directly in some disease processes, such as the growth of fatty deposits, weakening and blocking blood vessels, that takes place in atherosclerosis. By the time that senescent cells come to make up 1% of the cell population in an organ, their presence causes noticeable dysfunction and contributes significantly to the progression of all of the common age-related diseases.

This coming Monday, the CellAge team will be hosting an /r/futurology AMA event — the post is up already if you want add your own questions for the scientists involved. Earlier this week, the CellAge principals launched a crowdfunding campaign with Lifespan.io: they are seeking $40,000 with stretch goals and rewards beyond that to get started on their vision for senescent cell therapies. If you’ve ever wanted the chance to have a DNA promoter sequence named after you … well, here it is. This has certainly been a busy year for community fundraising in rejuvenation research: I imagine that things will heat up even more in the years ahead. The CellAge view of the field of senescent cell clearance is that the markers currently used to identify senescent cells are too crude and lacking in specificity.

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We recently wrote an article about how we need to redefine what “nanotechnology” means in the context of looking for “nanotech” companies to invest it. When you can use synthetic biology and gene editing to change the way that bacteria function by genetically modifying them, the result are microscopic biological machines. These tiny biological machines sound a whole lot like the nanobots that we were promised which would go around doing cool things without even being visible to the human eye. Earlier this year we profiled three companies that we claimed were working on building nanobot factories that create designer organisms on demand. Let’s take a closer look at one of these companies called Ginkgo Bioworks.

ginkgo-bioworks-logo

Founded in 2008, Massachusetts based startup Ginkgo Bioworks has taken in a total of $154 million in funding so far with their latest $100 million Series C round closing in summer of this year. The Company refers to themselves as “the organism company” and their value proposition has attracted investment from a whole slew of investors who realize the potential of developing new organisms that can replace technology with biology. In their own words, Ginkgo Bioworks is doing “programming without a debugger, manufacturing without CAD, and construction without cranes” which requires a whole lot of intellectual firepower and may be why they have 5 founders:

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Researchers have discovered a way to program cells to inhibit CRISPR-Cas9 activity. “Anti-CRISPR” proteins had previously been isolated from viruses that infect bacteria, but now University of Toronto and University of Massachusetts Medical School scientists report three families of proteins that turn off CRISPR systems specifically used for gene editing. The work, which appears December 15 in Cell, offers a new strategy to prevent CRISPR-Cas9 technology from making unwanted changes.

“Making CRISPR controllable allows you to have more layers of control on the system and to turn it on or off under certain conditions, such as where it works within a cell or at what point in time,” says lead author Alan Davidson, a phage biologist and bacteriologist at the University of Toronto. “The three anti-CRISPR proteins we’ve isolated seem to bind to different parts of the Cas9, and there are surely more out there.”

CRISPR inhibitors are a natural byproduct of the evolutionary arms race between viruses and bacteria. Bacteria use CRISPR-Cas complexes to target and cut up genetic material from invading viruses. In response, viruses have developed proteins that, upon infection, can quickly bind to a host bacterium’s CRISPR-Cas systems, thus nullifying their effects.

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The effects or Inflammation and the effect it has on the immune system are discussed in this article at FightAging!

With age, the immune system falls into a state of ever increasing chronic inflammation, a process known as inflammaging: the immune system is overactive, but nonetheless declines in effectiveness at the same time. Researchers here consider how inflammaging can damage the bone marrow stem cell populations responsible for generating immune cells, possibly the basis for a vicious cycle in which the failures of the immune system feed upon themselves to accelerate age-related damage and dysfunction.

Hematopoiesis is an active, continuous process involving the production and consumption of mature blood cells that constitute the hemato-lymphoid system. All blood cells arise from a small population of hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) in the bone marrow (BM) that have two unique properties: self-renewing capacity, the ability to generate themselves, and multi-lineage differentiation capacity, the ability to produce all blood cell types. Since, in the steady state, most adult HSCs are in the G0 phase of the cell cycle, i.e., they are quiescent and are estimated to turnover slowly on a monthly time scale, daily hematopoietic production is mainly sustained by highly proliferative downstream hematopoietic progenitor cells (HPCs).

Aging of the hematopoietic system is represented by functional declines in both the adaptive and the innate immune system, an immunosenescence that leads to high susceptibility to infections, low efficacy of vaccinations, and increased vulnerability to the development of autoimmunity and hematologic malignancies. It has been show that (a) B cell production decreases significantly with advancing age, i.e., the naive B cell pool diminishes, while the memory B cell pool expands. Diversity of the B cell repertoire also decreases in association with lowered antibody affinity and impaired class switching. B cells are prone to produce auto-antibodies increasing the incidence of spontaneous autoimmunity; (b) de novo T cell production also declines with aging partially due to thymic involution.

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John Glenn, who captured the nation’s attention in 1962 as the first American to orbit the Earth during a tense time when the United States sought supremacy over the Soviet Union in the space race, and who rocketed back into space 36 years later, becoming the oldest astronaut in history, died Dec. 8 at a hospital in Columbus, Ohio. Mr. Glenn, who in his post-NASA career served four terms as a U.S. senator from Ohio, was 95.

The death was confirmed by Hank Wilson, communications director at the John Glenn College of Public Affairs at Ohio State University. Mr. Glenn had a stroke after heart-valve replacement surgery in 2014, but the immediate cause was not announced.

Mr. Glenn was one of the seven original astronauts in NASA’s Mercury program, which was a conspicuous symbol of the country’s military and technological might at the height of the Cold War. He was not the first American in space — two of his fellow astronauts preceded him — but his three-orbit circumnavigation of the globe captured the imagination of his countrymen like few events before or since. Mr. Glenn was the last survivor of the Mercury Seven.

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Artificial blood takes a big step forward!

(HealthDay)—Artificial blood stored as a powder could one day revolutionize emergency medicine and provide trauma victims a better chance of survival.

Researchers have created an artificial that effectively picks up in the lungs and delivers it to tissues throughout the body.

This can be freeze-dried, making it easier for combat medics and paramedics to keep on hand for emergencies, said senior researcher Dr. Allan Doctor. He is a critical care specialist at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

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Israel’s Bonus says lab-grown bones successfully transplanted. Jim Drury reports.

A lab-grown, semi-liquid bone graft has been successfully injected into 11 patients’ jaws to repair bone loss. Israeli biotech firm Bonus Biogroup announced the early stage clinical trial results on Monday. SOUNDBITE (English) ORA BURGER, VICE PRESIDENT OF REGULATION AFFAIRS AT BONUS BIOGROUP, SAYING: “What we are announcing to the world is that real success in our clinical study in regenerating new bone in maxillofacial site in the jaws, it was 100 percent successful in all 11 patients.” The injectable bone grafts are made in the company’s Haifa plant, using cells extracted from patients’ fat tissue. They’re grown in sterile clean rooms, on biodegradable 3D scaffolds, before being injected into the voids in the jawbones.

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Great news for SENS Research and Rejuvenation Biotechnology.

One of the biggest highlights of the year for us has got to be Internet Entrepreneur Michael Greve committing $10 million to SENS-related research and startups. A list of some of the projects he is supporting can be found at the Forever Healthy Foundation. We are so pleased to have the support of Michael and his team in the mission to bring rejuvenation biotechnology to the world.

“In order to accelerate the access to healthy longevity for all of us we directly fund cutting-edge research on molecular and cellular repair to combat the root causes of aging and support the creation of startups turning that research into therapies for human application.” — Michael Greve.

#aging #sens

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