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Category: life extension – Page 452

Aubrey de Grey at Ending Age-Related Diseases 2019

Today, we’re releasing another keynote from Ending Age-Related Diseases 2019, our highly successful two-day conference that featured talks from leading researchers and investors, bringing them together to discuss the future of aging and rejuvenation biotechnology.

In his talk, Estimating the True Complexity of Comprehensive Rejuvenation, the famous Aubrey de Grey of SENS Research Foundation discussed the intricacies of creating a complete rejuvenation biotechnology framework, including the differing rates of age-related damage and the ramifications of the extensive crosstalk between different types of this damage.

Researchers discover that the rate of telomere shortening predicts species lifespan

A flamingo lives 40 years and a human being lives 90 years; a mouse lives two years and an elephant lives 60. Why? What determines the lifespan of a species? After analyzing nine species of mammals and birds, researchers at the Spanish National Cancer Research Center (CNIO) found a very clear relationship between the lifespan of these species and the shortening rate of their telomeres, the structures that protect the chromosomes and the genes they contain. The relationship is expressed as a mathematical equation, a formula that can accurately predict the longevity of the species. The study was done in collaboration with the Madrid Zoo Aquarium and the University of Barcelona.

“The telomere shortening rate is a powerful predictor of ,” the authors write in the prestigious journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

The study compares the telomeres of mice, goats, dolphins, gulls, reindeer, vultures, flamingos, elephants and humans, and reveals that species whose telomeres shorten faster have shorter lives.

Adam Ford Talks With Jim Mellon of Juvenescence

Today, we want to highlight an interview with billionaire investor Jim Mellon that our friend, Adam Ford of Science, Technology, and the Future, has conducted. Like us, Adam was at the Undoing Aging conference in Berlin earlier this year, and, just as we were, he was busy conducting a number of interviews with the researchers and industry thought leaders there.

Jim Mellon is an interesting figure in the industry and the cofounder of Juvenescence, a company that has been investing in a number of promising companies that are developing rejuvenation biotechnology to treat age-related diseases.

In this video, he talks about how the company formed and the investment landscape in the aging research field, and he touches upon public availability of these technologies as well as overpopulation. Jim has been closely watching the industry for some years now, and he and his company have been making a number of investments in companies that are moving towards clinical trials.

Scientists Agree on 5 Foods to Boost Brain Health and Longevity

With the rise of fad diets, “superfoods,” and a growing range of dietary supplement choices, it’s sometimes hard to know what to eat.

This can be particularly relevant as we grow older and are trying to make the best choices to minimize the risk of health problems such as high blood pressure, obesity, type 2 diabetes, and heart (cardiovascular) problems.

We now have evidence these health problems also all affect brain function: they increase nerve degeneration in the brain, leading to a higher risk of Alzheimer’s disease and other brain conditions including vascular dementia and Parkinson’s disease.

Asia’s affluent boomers are making aging aspirational

Medical tourism has some overlap with the anti-aging market, but the way these consumers are thinking about their own longevity will likely bring up new questions for providers. Middle-aged Asian consumers don’t want to buy youth, they want to buy things that make them appreciate where they are right now.

Middle-aged Asian consumers are giving the anti-aging market a run for its money.

FDA announces new policy framework for development of regenerative medicine products

Today the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced a comprehensive policy framework for the development and oversight of regenerative medicine products, including novel cellular therapies.

The framework — outlined in a suite of four guidance documents — builds upon the FDA’s existing risk-based regulatory approach to more clearly describe what products are regulated as drugs, devices, and/or biological products. Further, two of the guidance documents propose an efficient, science-based process for helping to ensure the safety and effectiveness of these therapies, while supporting development in this area. The suite of guidance documents also defines a risk-based framework for how the FDA intends to focus its enforcement actions against those products that raise potential significant safety concerns. This modern framework is intended to balance the agency’s commitment to safety with mechanisms to drive further advances in regenerative medicine so innovators can bring new, effective therapies to patients as quickly and safely as possible. The policy also delivers on important provisions of the 21st Century Cures Act.

We’re at the beginning of a paradigm change in medicine with the promise of being able to facilitate regeneration of parts of the human body, where cells and tissues can be engineered to grow healthy, functional organs to replace diseased ones; new genes can be introduced into the body to combat disease; and adult stem cells can generate replacements for cells that are lost to injury or disease. This is no longer the stuff of science fiction. This is the practical promise of modern applications of regenerative medicine.

What is regenerative capacity of humans?

Aubrey de Grey, Ph.D., Vice President of New Technology Discovery for AgeX Therapeutics, discusses how primitive organisms have better regenerative capacity than more complicated organisms such as humans. In humans, Dr. de Grey notes, our best regenerative abilities are at the embryonic stage. During the Embryonic Fetal Transition, out ability to regenerate plummets and continues to diminish as we age. Dr. de Grey discusses the role evolution plays in this and how scientists may be able to “revive” our regenerative power. This video is part of a series from AgeX on research into aging and human longevity. For more information on Agex Therapeutics, please visit http://www.agexinc.com.

Artificial Intelligence Based Approaches to Identify Molecular Determinants of Exceptional Health and Life Span-An Interdisciplinary Workshop at the National Institute on Aging

Artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a powerful approach for integrated analysis of the rapidly growing volume of multi-omics data, including many research and clinical tasks such as prediction of disease risk and identification of potential therapeutic targets. However, the potential for AI to facilitate the identification of factors contributing to human exceptional health and life span and their translation into novel interventions for enhancing health and life span has not yet been realized. As researchers on aging acquire large scale data both in human cohorts and model organisms, emerging opportunities exist for the application of AI approaches to untangle the complex physiologic process(es) that modulate health and life span. It is expected that efficient and novel data mining tools that could unravel molecular mechanisms and causal pathways associated with exceptional health and life span could accelerate the discovery of novel therapeutics for healthy aging. Keeping this in mind, the National Institute on Aging (NIA) convened an interdisciplinary workshop titled “Contributions of Artificial Intelligence to Research on Determinants and Modulation of Health Span and Life Span” in August 2018. The workshop involved experts in the fields of aging, comparative biology, cardiology, cancer, and computational science/AI who brainstormed ideas on how AI can be leveraged for the analyses of large-scale data sets from human epidemiological studies and animal/model organisms to close the current knowledge gaps in processes that drive exceptional life and health span. This report summarizes the discussions and recommendations from the workshop on future application of AI approaches to advance our understanding of human health and life span.

Aging is often described as the outcome of interactions among genetic, environmental and lifestyle factors with wide variation in life and health span between and within species (Newman and Murabito, 2013; Partridge et al., 2018; Singh et al., 2019). Exceptional life and health span represents an extreme phenotype characterized by exceptional survival (well-beyond average life expectancy), delayed onset of age-related diseases (before 80 years of age) (Pignolo, 2019) and/or preservation of good health/function relative to their peers (Perls et al., 2000, 2002; Kaeberlein, 2018). The identification of SNP associations with exceptional life and health span is a starting point for identifying targets for interventions that could potentially promote healthy human aging.

Bioinformatic prediction of critical genes and pathways involved in longevity in Drosophila melanogaster

The pursuit of longevity has been the goal of humanity since ancient times. Genetic alterations have been demonstrated to affect lifespan. As increasing numbers of pro-longevity genes and anti-longevity genes have been discovered in Drosophila, screening for functionally important genes among the large number of genes has become difficult. The aim of the present study was to explore critical genes and pathways affecting longevity in Drosophila melanogaster. In this study, 168 genes associated with longevity in D. melanogaster were collected from the Human Ageing Genomic Resources (HAGR) database. Network clustering analysis, network topological analysis, and pathway analysis were integrated to identify key genes and pathways. Quantitative real-time PCR (qRT-PCR) was applied to verify the expression of genes in representative pathways and of predicted genes derived from the gene–gene sub-network. Our results revealed that six key pathways might be associated with longevity, including the longevity-regulating pathway, the peroxisome pathway, the mTOR-signalling pathway, the FOXO-signalling pathway, the AGE-RAGE-signalling pathway in diabetic complications, and the TGF-beta-signalling pathway. Moreover, the results revealed that six key genes in representative pathways, including Cat, Ry, S6k, Sod, Tor, and Tsc1, and the predicted genes Jra, Kay, and Rheb exhibited significant expression changes in ageing D. melanogaster strain w1118 compared to young ones. Overall, our results revealed that six pathways and six key genes might play pivotal roles in regulating longevity, and three interacting genes might be implicated in longevity. The results will not only provide new insight into the mechanisms of longevity, but also provide novel ideas for network-based approaches for longevity-related research.

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