Researchers at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health have discovered a new aging clock that can accurately determine both chronological and biological age in a wide variety of species.
Aging and the nucleolus
There are two kinds of age: chronological age, which is strictly the number of years that something has lived, and biological age, which is influenced by diet, exercise, environment, and similar factors. Biological age is the superior measure of true age and is an accurate predictor of all-cause mortality.
These molecules not only rapidly improve symptoms, but remarkably, also appear to renew the underlying brain impairments causing memory loss in preclinical models.
“Currently there are no medications to treat cognitive symptoms such as memory loss that occur in depression, other mental illnesses and aging,” says Dr. Etienne Sibille, Deputy Director of the Campbell Family Mental Health Research Institute at CAMH and lead scientist on the study.
What’s unique and promising about these findings, in the face of many failures in drug development for mental illness, is that the compounds are highly targeted to activate the impaired brain receptors that are causing memory loss, he says.
They’re little battlers, the greatest survivors on the planet and you may have them in your garden, writes Lana Hart.
They’ve been boiled, frozen, put in vacuums, starved, and exposed to unbearable pressures and radiation — but scientists can’t kill this creature.
They are the only animal to have survived all five of earth’s mass extinctions. This incredible feat is due to their development of unique survival mechanisms not seen in other parts of the animal kingdom.
A collection of sixteen senior scientists have created an academy in Boston in order to showcase the important work currently being conducted on human aging and how researchers are developing ways to slow or even reverse it.
The Academy for Health and Lifespan Research is a nonprofit organization that will be organizing a series of forums at which researchers will share knowledge and research data, helping to improve the flow of information in this field.
The Academy will also be actively lobbying governments around the world to improve funding for aging research and to help improve regulatory pathways in ways that make it easier to develop therapies that target the aging processes in order to prevent age-related diseases.
“Dongsheng’s fabulous work on the involvement of the hypothalamus in aging first came to my attention six years ago, as a result of a groundbreaking paper on the role of GnRH, and he spoke at the last Cambridge conference in 2013. His group’s research has since continued to make immense progress, including very recent advances, and I’m delighted that he has agreed to update us in Berlin”, says Aubrey de Grey.
https://www.undoing-aging.org/news/dr-dongsheng-cai-to-speak…aging-2019
We recently visited the Longevity Leaders Conference in London and had the opportunity to speak with Kelsey Moody, the CEO of Ichor Therapeutics, a company focused on targeting age-related diseases by targeting the aging processes themselves. We previously interviewed him back in 2017, so it was the ideal time to catch up on what had been happening with his company since then.
Ichor and its portfolio companies have been very busy over the last year, so I thought it was time that we caught up on progress. Can you tell us how things are going for the Ichor group?
Ichor really had a good year in 2018. We raised over $16 million across our portfolio, and that’s really allowed us to scale up all aspects of our operations. We’re at over 50 employees now, mostly bench scientists and research technicians, and we’re really delivering on our goal of being a vertically integrated biopharmaceutical company.
