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The Future of Pensions – Article

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.

UNITY Biotechnology Reports Promising Topline Data from Phase 1 First-in-human Study of UBX0101 in Patients with Osteoarthritis of the Knee

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.

Scientists Have Found Evidence a Strange Group of Quantum Particles Are Basically Immortal

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.

Anti-aging — Telomerase

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:

Ending Age-Related Diseases Conference – June Update

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.

Inching Towards the Regulatory Classification of Aging as a Disease

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.

Lobbyists have made more progress towards classifying aging as a disease. The World Health Organization (WHO) has implemented the extension code “Ageing-related” (XT9T) in the latest version of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD). The previous version, the ICD-10, was released in 1983 and is now replaced by the new version, the ICD-11, which is expected to serve the medical community for many years, much as its predecessor has.

Pomegranate compound with anti-aging effects passes human trial

Urolithin A, a metabolite of biomolecules found in pomegranates and other fruits, could help slow certain aging processes. EPFL spin-off Amazentis, in conjunction with EPFL and the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, has published a paper in the journal Nature Metabolism outlining the results of their clinical trial.

It is a fact of life that skeletal muscles begin to lose strength and mass once a person reaches the age of 50. A recent clinical trial involving two EPFL entities—spin-off Amazentis and the Laboratory of Integrative Systems Physiology (LISP) – showed that urolithin A, a compound derived from biomolecules found in fruits such as pomegranates, could slow down this process by improving the functioning of mitochondria—the cells’ powerhouses. A joint paper presenting the results of the trial, published today in Nature Metabolism, also demonstrates that ingesting the compound poses no risk to human health.

Anti-aging compound from pomegranates proves promising in human clinical trials

Since aging is a key driver of many diseases, targeting that process could be a handy catch-all for treating a range of diseases and improving quality of life for pretty much everybody. Researchers at EPFL have now reported a new step towards that goal, with human clinical trials of a fruit-derived compound showing promise in slowing mitochondrial aging in elderly patients, with no side effects found.

Aubrey de Grey, PhD, Co-founder of SENS Research Foundation

Aubrey de Grey, Ph.D., Chief Science Officer and Co-founder of SENS Research Foundation, delivers an overview of aging and the many health problems that develop in our advanced years.

Dr. de Grey is a respected member of the science community; he is the noted biomedical gerontologist who devised the innovative SENS platform and co-founded the SENS Research Foundation to further it. Dr. de Grey has written about his work and as an established researcher, he has been appointed to the editorial and scientific advisory boards of many journals, organizations, etc. Dr. de Grey is a Fellow of the Gerontological Society of America as well as the American Aging Association. He holds a BA in Computer Science and a Ph.D. in Biology from the prestigious University of Cambridge.

Dr. de Grey discusses his research in aging and the motivations for tackling the career. As he states, aging is the number one medical problem as it causes more suffering. He was motivated to research in this area because he found that not enough was being done to focus on aging and the myriad of problems that come with it. He talks about the many excuses that are given as reasons to simply accept aging as it is, or not focus on it at all, such as “it’s inevitable…everything ages,” or the philosophical—“death gives meaning to life,” or social—“maybe we could do this, but it would create new problems worse than the problem we are solving.” And as the Ph.D. states, none of these excuses stand up to even the faintest scrutiny, however, they still remain quite popular.