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.

New research, which has been published today in the EMBO Journal, could suggest a new way of preventing heart failure in older patients.

Heart failure occurs when the heart is not pumping blood around the body as well as it should, most commonly when the heart muscle has been damaged – for example, after a heart attack.

Researchers at Newcastle University have shown that clearing out senescent cardiac muscle cells from the hearts of aged mice restores heart health.

It seems that not a month goes by without a new study showing that senolytics, drugs that remove aged and damaged cells from the body, improve organ or tissue function by reversing some aspects of aging. A new study has shown that removing senescent cells from the hearts of old mice restores heart health and alleviates the detrimental effects of cardiac aging, including myocardial hypertrophy and fibrosis.