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Forever Healthy Foundation Provides a $150,000 Challenge Fund to Match SENS Rejuvenation Research Donations

More news about SENS Research Foundation fundraiser and a look back at some of the achievements so far.

#sens #aging

Good news! Thanks to the generous pledges of new SENS Patrons, signing up for monthly donations to the SENS Research Foundation over the past two weeks since the fundraiser started, the $24,000 matching fund put up by Josh Triplett and Fight Aging! is nearly met. Just a little more left to reach the target: if you are the next person to sign up, the next year of your donations to the SENS Research Foundation will be matched dollar for dollar. But if you miss out on that, donations made before the end of the year can still be matched. The Forever Healthy Foundation’s Michael Greve, who earlier this year pledged $10 million to SENS rejuvenation research and startup companies building rejuvenation therapies, has put up a further $150,000 challenge fund. He will match all donations to the SENS Research Foundation made before the end of 2016, and there is still a way to go in order to meet that target. So help us get this done!

Why support the SENS Research Foundation, and their ally the Methuselah Foundation? Because these organizations have proven capable of using your charitable donations more effectively than any other in order to make significant progress towards an end to aging and age-related disease. For fifteen years now, the principals and their network of advocates and scientists have nudged, debated, and funded researchers to ensure that the broader research community builds the basis for human rejuvenation. Aging is an accumulation of molecular damage, and if that damage is repaired sufficiently well, a goal that modern medicine is only just starting to grapple with despite decades of evidence, then the result will be a halt to the processes of degenerative aging. An end to the disease, dysfunction, and suffering of aging.

New protein provides critical link between aging and age-dependent disease

New hope for age related macular degeneration.

The discovery of a novel protein that links aging and age-dependent retinal diseases could lead to potential new treatments for conditions that cause sight loss in later life.

In a study in mice, to be published in the journal eLife, researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison reveal that Transmembrane 135 (Tmem135) regulates retinal aging, and that mutations in the protein result in age-dependent disease.

Tmem135 has previously been associated with fat storage and long life in the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans, but its molecular function has never been characterized clearly. The new study shows that irregular levels of the protein lead to symptoms of a common age-related retinal disease called macular degeneration.

Measuring the Effects of Prevention on Heart Disease

Heart disease prevention measures have made some impact on mortality rates. Looking after your heart is absolutely critical for your longevity plan.

Despite the rising proportion of the older population who choose to be overweight or obese, risk of heart disease has declined somewhat in past few decades. This outcome can be attributed to prevention in the sense of at least some people taking better care of their health by specifically targeting measures such as blood pressure and blood lipid levels, coupled with prevention in the sense of treatments such as statins that also reliably influence these measures. Increased blood pressure with age, or hypertension, directly impacts risk of cardiovascular disease and other conditions by putting additional stress on tissue structures and causing the heart to remodel itself detrimentally. Higher blood lipid levels on the other hand contribute to the progression of atherosclerosis, attacking blood vessel walls to form fatty deposits that can later break to cause blockages or ruptures of blood vessels. These are all things best avoided if possible, but until the advent of rejuvenation therapies after the SENS model the best that can be done is to slow down the damage.

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The Future of Surgery Is Robotic, Data-Driven, and Artificially Intelligent

As far back as 3,500 years ago ancient Egyptian doctors were performing invasive surgeries. Even though our tools and knowledge have improved drastically over time, until very recently surgery was still a manual task for human hands.

When it came out about 15 years ago, Intuitive Surgical’s da Vinci surgical robot was a major innovation. The da Vinci robot helps surgeons be more precise and dexterous and to remove natural hand tremors during surgery.

In the years since da Vinci first came out, many other surgical robots have arrived. And today there’s a new generation coming online, like the Verb robot, a joint venture between Google and Johnson and Johnson. This means surgery is about to get even more interesting. Surgical robotics will be able to do more than just improve dexterity and reduce incision size…

Can your own immune system kill cancer?

It definitely can.

NEW YORK (CNN) — There was another big win in the advancement of immunotherapy treatments for cancer this week.

The Food and Drug Administration approved an immunotherapy drug called Keytruda, which stimulates the body’s immune system, for the first-line treatment of patients with metastatic non-small-cell lung cancer.

In other words, the drug could be the very first treatment a patient receives for the disease, instead of chemotherapy. Keytruda is the only immunotherapy drug approved for first-line treatment for these patients.

An Age-Associated Decline in Thymic Output Differs in Dog Breeds According to Their Longevity

Immune system decline one of the hallmarks of aging and something that we should be concerned about addressing.

The age associated decline in immune function is preceded in mammals by a reduction in thymic output. Furthermore, there is increasing evidence of a link between immune competence and lifespan. One approach to determining thymic output is to quantify signal joint T cell receptor excision circles (sj-TRECs), a method which has been developed and used in several mammalian species. Life expectancy and the rate of aging vary in dogs depending upon their breed. In this study, we quantified sj-TRECs in blood samples from dogs of selected breeds to determine whether there was a relationship between longevity and thymic output. In Labrador retrievers, a breed with a median expected lifespan of 11 years, there was an age-associated decline in sj-TREC values, with the greatest decline occurring before 5 years of age, but with sj-TREC still detectable in some geriatric animals, over 13 years of age. In large short-lived breeds (Burnese mountain dogs, Great Danes and Dogue de Bordeaux), the decline in sj-TREC values began earlier in life, compared with small long-lived breeds (Jack Russell terriers and Yorkshire terriers), and the presence of animals with undetectable sj-TRECs occurred at a younger age in the short-lived breeds. The study findings suggest that age-associated changes in canine sj-TRECs are related to breed differences in longevity, and this research highlights the use of dogs as a potential model of immunosenescence.

Citation: Holder A, Mella S, Palmer DB, Aspinall R, Catchpole B (2016) An Age-Associated Decline in Thymic Output Differs in Dog Breeds According to Their Longevity. PLoS ONE 11(11): e0165968. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0165968

Editor: Douglas Thamm, Colorado State University, UNITED STATES

Scientists develop world’s first light-seeking synthetic nanorobot

With bots the size of a single blood cell, this could spur a huge leap in the field of non-invasive surgeries.

Scientists have developed the world’s first light-seeking synthetic nanorobot which may help surgeons remove tumours and enable more precise engineering of targeted medications.

It has been a dream in science fiction for decades that tiny robots can fundamentally change our daily life. The famous science fiction movie “Fantastic Voyage” is a very good example, with a group of scientists driving their miniaturised Nano-submarine inside human body to repair a damaged brain.

We’ve Figured Out How to Program Living Cells

In Brief:

Researchers at MIT have developed an easy-to-use “biological programming language” that allows genetic engineers (or just about anyone) to design biological circuits and “hack” the genomes of living cells.

The evolution of human technology has proceeded in lockstep with the biological evolution of our species. For millions of years we were content with our primitive Oldowan choppers and Acheulean bifaces; in the Neolithic, we started playing with more sophisticated tools, and the Bronze and Iron ages followed in quick succession.

This World-First Brain Implant Is Letting a ‘Locked-In’ Woman Communicate

A paralysed woman in the Netherlands is the first to be fitted with a new type of brain implant that allows patients who cannot speak or move to communicate using nothing but their thoughts.

The new implant, which works with a computer interface to help her spell out words and sentences, can be used anywhere, allowing her to communicate with people in the outside world, without medical experts on hand to help.

“This is a world first,” neuroscientist and lead researcher Nick Ramsay, from the University Medical School Utrecht, told CNN. “It’s a fully implantable system that works at home without need for any experts to make it work.”

Researchers show how a targeted drug overcomes suppressive immune cells

Immunotherapies and progressing rapidly and could be a way to help your own body fight cancer by allowing the immune system to see the cancer cells and attack them.

A Ludwig Cancer Research study shows that an experimental drug currently in clinical trials can reverse the effects of troublesome cells that prevent the body’s immune system from attacking tumors. The researchers also establish that it is these suppressive cells that interfere with the efficacy of immune checkpoint inhibitors. This class of immunotherapies lifts the brakes that the body imposes on the immune system’s T cells to unleash an attack on cancer cells.

“Though checkpoint inhibitors have durable effects when they work, not all patients respond to the treatment,” says Taha Merghoub, an investigator at the Ludwig Memorial Sloan Kettering Collaborative Laboratory who led the study with Director Jedd Wolchok. “Part of the reason for this is that some tumors harbor -associated myeloid , or TAMCs, that prevent T cells from attacking .”

In a study published online today in Nature, Merghoub and his team used mouse models of cancer to show that the effects of TAMCs can be reversed by an appropriately targeted therapy.

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