Lifeboat Foundation

https://youtu.be/STisIGbJIAI via @michiokaku

Tam Hunt interviews Prof. Morgan Levine about her work with epigenetics and aging.

One of the biggest breakthroughs in biology in the last few decades has been the discovery of epigenetics. Rather than changing the genes themselves, epigenetics change how genes are expressed, allowing our cells to differentiate between their various types.

However, the epigenetics of our cells change over time. There is some debate over how much epigenetic alterations are a cause or a consequence of other age-related damage, but they are one of the primary hallmarks of aging.

Continue reading “Interview with Prof. Morgan Levine” »

Editor’s Note: The U.S. Transhumanist Party features this article by Nicola Bagalà and Michael Nuschke of the Life Extension Advocacy Foundation (LEAF), originally published on the LEAF site on May 15th, 2019. The article brings attention to and responds to concerns related to the impacts of increased longevity on pension systems, a possible result of our mission of ending age-related diseases, which the U.S. Transhumanist Party supports as part of our policy goals.

~ Brent Reitze, Director of Publication, United States Transhumanist Party, June 15th, 2019

If you work in social security, it’s possible that your nightmares are full of undying elderly people who keep knocking on your door for pensions that you have no way of paying out. Tossing and turning in your bed, you beg for mercy, explaining that there’s just too many old people who need pensions and not enough young people who could cover for it with their contributions; the money’s just not there to sustain a social security system that, when it was conceived in the mid-1930s, didn’t expect that many people would ever make it into their 80s and 90s. Your oneiric persecutors won’t listen: they gave the country the best years of their lives, and now it’s time for the country to pay them their due.

It’s a start. So far so good, senolytics.

SAN FRANCISCO, June 18, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — UNITY Biotechnology, Inc. (UNITY) [NASDAQ: UBX], a biotechnology company developing therapeutics to extend healthspan by slowing, halting or reversing diseases of aging, today announced promising results from its first-in-human Phase 1 study of UBX0101 in patients with moderate to severe osteoarthritis (OA) of the knee. The study demonstrated that UBX0101 was safe and well-tolerated. Improvement in several clinical measures, including pain, function, as well as modulation of certain senescence-associated secretory phenotype (SASP) factors and disease-related biomarkers was observed after a single dose of UBX0101.

Nothing lasts forever. Humans, planets, stars, galaxies, maybe even the Universe itself, everything has an expiration date. But things in the quantum realm don’t always follow the rules. Now, scientists have found that quasiparticles in quantum systems could be effectively immortal.

That doesn’t mean they don’t decay, which is reassuring. But once these quasiparticles have decayed, they are able to reorganise themselves back into existence, possibly ad infinitum.

This seemingly flies right in the face of the second law of thermodynamics, which asserts that entropy in an isolated system can only move in an increasing direction: things can only break down, not build back up again.

Aging is one of the world’s greatest health problems. And subsequently, is the cause of most fatal diseases. Age-related processes are inevitable and cause a range of diseases. It is much more efficient and effective to tackle the aging itself rather than each disease it causes.

At the end of every chromosome are telomere caps which degrade as we age. This causes a number of issues. For example:

The human body secretes an enzyme that might increase our lifespan if properly developed.

We are drawing close now to the Ending Age-Related Diseases Conference in New York City, so with less than a month before the big day, today is the ideal time to have a look at what has been happening.

Tickets are priced at only $500 and include access to two action-packed days of aging research and biotech business discussion. There will be talks covering the latest research progress along with talks involving the business and investment side of the industry, and this conference will feature a total of 34 leading experts in the field of rejuvenation biotechnology.

Refreshments and lunch are provided on site for your enjoyment during both days of the conference, and a conference program is available here.

This post originally appeared at Fight Aging!

Sizable factions within the research and advocacy communities are very interested in having aging officially classified as a disease, meaning its inclusion in the International Classification of Diseases maintained by the World Health Organization, as that is the basis for the definition of disease used by national regulatory bodies. The view is that this would open the door to greater large-scale institutional funding, more relevant clinical trials for therapies targeting the mechanisms of aging, and that this greater level of funding and activity will percolate back down the chain of research and development to accelerate progress. I think this a reasonable argument to make, though I would advocate for greater effort to be placed on finding a way to bypass the system rather than change it directly – the threat of competition tends to be more effective than petitions as a way to force change.

Continue reading “Inching Towards the Regulatory Classification of Aging as a Disease” »