Lifeboat Foundation

Blood plasma, cellular reprogramming, endogenous.

You may have heard a lot of talk recently about cellular reprogramming, rejuvenation or even “rejuvenation programming”, but what does that all mean and what are the 3 main strategies that several researchers and companies (maybe Altos Labs) will be further investigating?

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There is nothing inevitable about aging, or about its rate. Californian bristlecone pines are believed to live for 5,000 years, and there are long-lived mammalian creatures as well. Some marine creatures do not display any signs of aging at all, including hydra, jellyfish, planarian worms, and coral. Certain human cells have immortal characteristics too. When a woman gives birth, she produces a baby which is “new”. Her “germline” (reproduction-related) cells produce a child with no signs of age.

These and many other considerations combine with the unreasonable effectiveness of modern AI to lead some people to believe that significant advances in longevity are imminent. These advances probably cannot happen without the active participation of the wider pharmaceutical industry, and the acceptance by policy makers and regulators that aging is a disease, not just an unfortunate and inevitable component of the human condition. There is still considerable reluctance among major pharmaceutical companies to contemplate specific anti-aging therapeutic developments. But there are encouraging signs of this reluctance being challenged, especially at Novartis and AstraZeneca.

Beyond the pharma giants, Mellon reckons there are 255 companies which claim to be specifically targeting aging, of which 35 are listed on stock markets. But he thinks that only a minority of them are genuinely working to tackle aging, as opposed to one of the diseases it causes, like cancer, dementia, or heart disease. He likens the state of the longevity industry today to the internet industry of 20 years ago, when it was still in its dial-up phase, and downloading information (or, heaven forbid, images) was like sucking jelly through a straw. And although longevity will have such a massive impact on all of us that you might expect progress to be expedited, Mellon points out that the internet did not have to go through lengthy and expensive FDA trials at every step.

Autophagy is often likened to the trash management system of the cell. And just as municipal waste services involve collection, transportation and ultimately disposal, so too must the cell’s autophagy system follow a coordinated, multistep process. It first requires cellular refuse to be bagged up inside sack-like structures known as phagophores. These then mature into cargo containers called autophagosomes, which fuse with degradation hubs called lysosomes. Only then do waste products get broken down.

Any part of that cell-cleaning process could go wrong, and they often do as cells age. But if researchers do not fully understand what aspects of autophagy are defective in any particular disease, drugs that modulate the wrong parts of the pathway could do more harm than good. A therapy could, for instance, help the cell to package more trash. “But if your trash compactor isn’t working properly, you’re just going to end up with a room full of trash bags,” says Tim Sargeant, who studies autophagy at the South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute in Adelaide. “That’s one of the dangers here.”

As a result, although some anti-ageing researchers and companies have gone all-in on targeting autophagy, others are more circumspect — especially given the lack of solid evidence in people or even mouse models for many of the proposed interventions.

Frogs briefly treated with a five-drug cocktail administered by a wearable bioreactor on the stump were able to regrow a functional, nearly complete limb.

For millions of patients who have lost limbs for reasons ranging from diabetes to trauma, the possibility of regaining function through natural regeneration remains out of reach. Regrowth of legs and arms remains the province of salamanders and superheroes.

But in a study published in the journal Science Advances, scientists at Tufts University and Harvard University’s Wyss Institute have brought us a step closer to the goal of regenerative medicine.

Many of the all-too-familiar symptoms of aging can be attributed to a build-up of senescent cells, those which have stopped dividing. In a new study, researchers in Japan have identified a protein specific to these cells and developed a vaccine that can clear them away, with tests on mice reducing the effects of aging.

Cells cannot keep dividing forever – eventually they accumulate too much DNA damage through environmental stress, so the body shuts them down and flags them to be cleared out by the immune system. This seems to be an evolutionary defense mechanism against cells turning cancerous.

However, even immune cells aren’t immune from this process, and as they become senescent themselves the immune system gradually loses the ability to clear out senescent cells. As these inactive cells accumulate in the body, they contribute to symptoms of aging and the diseases that come with it.

First known for their link with longevity, sirtuins play a key role in maintaining a cell’s integrity in light of metabolic and environmental damage.

“The change in life expectancy is significant, when you consider that an equivalent jump in human life expectancy would have us living on average until almost 120,” lead researcher Haim Cohen of Bar-Ilan University told the Times of Israel.

A longer life: The average human life expectancy has doubled in just the past 200 years, thanks in no small part to scientific breakthroughs in medicine, nutrition, and disease.

A study explores how supplementing with a compound produced by gut bacteria when digesting foods such as pomegranates could help reverse muscle aging.

Building resilience for healthy aging — dr. charlotte yeh, MD, chief medical officer, AARP services.

Dr Charlotte Yeh, MD Chief Medical Officer, AARP Services, Inc. (https://www.aarp.org/about-aarp/aarp-services/), where she works with the independent carriers that make health-related products and services available to AARP members, to identify programs and initiatives that will lead to enhanced care for older adults.

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