A small California biotech emerged from stealth last year to go after drug discovery’s “data problem,” and now the AI outfit has announced its first public partnership. Terray Therapeutics put out word Wednesday that it reached a deal with Calico Life Sciences, the Google-backed anti-aging biotech co-founded by industry legend.
Celine halioua drops into a crouch and greets Bocce, a Chihuahua-dachshund mix with soulful brown eyes, like a long-lost friend. “Oh my God, you’re so beautiful!” she chirps. The two have just met in an upstairs room at Muttville Senior Dog Rescue in San Francisco, where light streams in through the open windows and urine occasionally streams onto the floor. About a dozen elderly dogs, none taller than a kneecap, putter around on the gray linoleum or nap on blankets. When Halioua kneels, her dark hair tumbling over her shoulder, Bocce rests his head blissfully in her lap.
A tragedy of human-canine relations is that a 10-year-old dog such as Bocce is old, while a 28-year-old person such as Halioua is in the prime of life. Bocce is one of the lucky ones. Many dogs can only dream of living as long as he likely will, because dog lifespan is inversely correlated with body size. It’s the opposite of the wider pattern in the animal kingdom, where elephants easily outlast mice, which in turn outlive mosquitoes. A Chihuahua can expect roughly 15 years of life; an Irish wolfhound or Great Dane around seven or eight.
Halioua hopes that the startup whose name is emblazoned on her slim black T-shirt— Loyal —can start to fix this bug in humanity’s 14,000-year-plus wolf bioengineering project. The company, which she founded in 2019 and leads as CEO, is developing drugs to delay aging in dogs and extend their healthy lifespan. She has raised around $58 million and has two drugs in development. In a few years, she hopes to have the first commercial drug—for any species—to state on the label that it delays aging or extends lifespan. That alone would be a triumph, but Halioua sees it as a springboard to a still greater feat: creating similar drugs for humans.
Genflow has announced that its adeno-associated virus (AAV) research and development programme in Estonia has received a non-dilutive grant award of €250,000 from the Applied Research Programme of Enterprise Estonia, an Estonian governmental institution designed to stimulate business growth in the country.
Longevity. Technology: Genflow’s research programme is focused on the development of an antiaging gene therapy platform designed to target nearly 100 million patients worldwide who suffer from Werner’s syndrome, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) and non-alcoholic steatohepatitis, an advanced form of NAFLD, as well as other major clinical disorders.
This R&D is a collaborative project between Genflow and IVEX lab OÜ, an Estonian company specialising in the research and development of biotech therapeutics.
Far-thinking billionaires are funding innovative research aimed at discovering methods to slow and reverse pathological aging processes. The objective is to accelerate scientific advances that will enable humans to enjoy longer and healthier life spans.
Scientifically reviewed by Dr. Gary Gonzalez, MD, in May 2022. Written by: Michael Downey, Health & Wellness Author.
Prior to this, it was assumed that egg cells (oocytes) would contain a complex array of factors needed to reprogram a somatic cell into becoming an embryonic cell. After all, the feat of transforming an aged egg cell and reprogramming it to make a new animal must be controlled by many factors present in the egg cell, or so they thought. Takahashi and Yamanaka turned this idea upside down when they showed that just four of the Yamanaka factors were needed to achieve this transformation.
They used the Yamanaka factors to reprogram adult mouse fibroblasts (connective tissue cells) back to an embryonic state called pluripotency, a state where the cell behaves like an embryonic stem cell and can become any other cell type in the body.
This discovery paved the way for research into how these Yamanaka factors might be used for cellular rejuvenation and a potential way to combat age-related diseases.
Mounting evidence suggests that humans may have the biological hardware to benefit from some aspects of hibernation. Switching on these mechanisms could treat cardiac arrest, boost longevity and help people travel further into space.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=VFeWQCpAeek&feature=share
“Transhumanism” — The intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the possibility and desirability of fundamentally improving the human condition through applied reason, especially by developing and making widely available technologies to eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities. — whatistranshumanism.org.
“…I suppose I’ve been looking for Eden all my life. I think we all have. And I think that primeval communion between humanity and the rest of life did exist once, and perhaps still does in some pockets. But it is not available to modern people except in memory or longing. And the search can be damaging if it distracts you from the fact that, whatever horrors humanity unleashes, the world is still a wonder if we can just get out of our anxious minds long enough to see it. Which is easier written than done.
Both sides in the argument that runs through Alexandria my latest novel —nature versus culture, body versus mind, human versus machine—find that their worldview has holes in. That’s part of the point, I think. Our world is being eaten by this great, terrible machine, but the machine is a manifestation of us.
If my worldview has changed it is only to reveal to me that any “enemy” we might have is lodged firmly in each of our hearts, and that there is nowhere to escape to that doesn’t lead through it.”
About the Lecturer.
Paul Kingsnorth is an Orthodox English writer and thinker who lives in the west of Ireland. He is a former deputy-editor of The Ecologist and a co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project.
Kingsnorth’s nonfiction writing tends to address macro themes like environmentalism, globalisation, and the challenges posed to humanity by civilisation level trends. His fiction tends to be mythological and multi-layered.
Paul Kingsnorth’s debut novel, The Wake, won the 2014 Gordon Burn Prize and the Bookseller Book of the Year Award, as well as being longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Folio Prize and the Desmond Elliott Prize, and shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize. Beast, the second book in his Buckmaster Trilogy, was shortlisted for the RSL Encore Award 2017. He is also the author of the non-fiction books One No, Many Yeses, Real England, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Savage Gods, as well as two poetry collections, Kidland and Songs from the Blue River.
A new study shows which factor plays a bigger role as we age.
There are many elements that determine how we age. This includes our genetics, the environment, and our age itself. But what key component has the most profound impact on aging?
According to a new study by researchers at the University of California — Berkeley, aging and the environment play more of a key role in determining our health in later years, than genetics. The study was published in the journal Nature Communications.
Aging affects health more than genes.
Genetics DNA
According to a new study by researchers at the University of California – Berkeley, aging and the environment play more of a key role in determining our health in later years, than genetics. The study was published in the journal Nature Communications.
Maybe the science is finally catching up with BioViva CEO Elizabeth Parrish.
As a therapeutic approach, however, gene therapy suffers somewhat from the undue weight of exuberant expectations. For years people have speculated about applications going beyond restoration of lost body function and into biological enhancement, such as longevity. Some now categorize gene therapy as belonging to the realm of transhumanism—the use of medical and surgical interventions to enhance the body, or give it extra capabilities, as opposed to treating things that go wrong.
Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine (WFIRM) scientists working on CRISPR/Cas9-mediated gene editing technology have developed a method to increase efficiency of editing while minimizing DNA deletion sizes, a key step toward developing gene editing therapies to treat genetic diseases.
CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) technology is used to alter DNA sequences and modify gene function. CRISPR/Cas9 is an enzyme that is used like a pair of scissors to cut two strands of DNA at a specific location to add, remove or repair bits of DNA. By modifying gene function, scientists hope to treat genetic diseases by halting a diseased cell’s ability to continue replicating the defective DNA. CRISPR/Cas9 is the most versatile genetic manipulation available and has a wide range of potential applications. While CRISPR/Cas9 mainly generates short insertions or deletions at the target site, it may also make large DNA deletions around the specific target site. These large deletions cause safety concerns and may decrease functional editing efficiency.
The WFIRM team is looking for ways to reduce the chances of this happening. The research described in their recent paper, published recently in Nucleic Acids Research, sought to address the generation of unpredictable on-target long DNA deletions and find a way to guard against them, said lead author Baisong Lu, Ph.D., of WFIRM.
