Lifeboat Foundation

Kelsey Moody of Ichor Therapeutics presented on the LysoClear development program at the Ending Age-Related Diseases conference organized by the Life Extension Advocacy Foundation earlier this year. LysoClear is an example of the commercial development of a rejuvenation therapy, taken all the way from the starting point of the discovery of microbial enzymes capable of breaking down certain forms of harmful age-related molecular waste that contribute to aging and age-related diseases. The actual research is largely done, and the task now is to focus on manufacture, regulatory approval, and entry into the clinic.

Taken end to end, I think that this development program might be able to lay claim to being the first and oldest of the modern rejuvenation research initiatives, starting sometime back in the early 2000s. It began at the Methuselah Foundation as LysoSENS, the first of the SENS programs to get underway with modest philanthropic funding. Some of you may remember gathering dirt from graveyards to send in for analysis, in the hunt for microbial species that consume the molecular waste that our bodies cannot remove. Researches knew that those microbes existed because graveyards do not accumulate this waste — it is being broken down by something in the environment. The program carried forward into the SENS Research Foundation when it spun out from the Methuselah Foundation, and a portion of it was later licensed to Ichor Therapeutics, and became LysoClear.

Continue reading “Kelsey Moody Presenting on the LysoClear Program at Ending Age-Related Diseases 2019” »

Wonderful news, the MitoMouse project has successfully reached its initial $50k goal and is well on the way towards the first stretch goal! This now means the projecct will launch at the lab and the MitoMouse strain will be created.

The next step for this ambitious project is to actually create progency from the SickMice and MitoMice in order to have an effective model to test the mitochondrial repair approach, which has already been shown to work in cells, in living animals. If successful it would be vindication for mitochondrial repair therapy and move the therapy closer to translation to humans. Here is Dr. Amutha Boominathan, the leader of the MitoMouse Project at the SENS Research Foundation, to tell us a little more about the first stretch goal for the project.

Obama even allotted $1.2 billion to the annual budget for the establishment of a special task force devoted to the issue, one that would develop an action plan for stopping the fast spread of antibiotic resistant bacteria like MRSA.

A Game Changing Study

Continue reading “Marijuana: The Super Antibiotic Of The Future” »

Small proteins also promise to revise the current understanding of the genome. Many appear to be encoded in stretches of DNA—and RNA—that were not thought to help build proteins of any sort. Some researchers speculate that the short stretches of DNA could be newborn genes, on their way to evolving into larger genes that make full-size proteins. Thanks in part to small proteins, “We need to rethink what genes are,” says microbiologist and molecular biologist Gisela Storz of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development in Bethesda, Maryland.

Tiny proteins help power muscles and provide the toxic punch to many venoms.

The newly fashionable pills and foods meant to increase the variety of healthy bacteria in our bodies can actually have the opposite effect.

Playing with a simple bean machine illustrates how deterministic laws can produce probabilistic, random-seeming behavior.

Evening gowns with interwoven LEDs may look extravagant, but the light sources need a constant power supply from devices that are as well wearable, durable, and lightweight. Chinese scientists have manufactured fibrous electrodes for wearable devices that are flexible and excel by their high energy density. Key for the preparation of the electrode material was a microfluidic technology, as shown in the journal Angewandte Chemie.

Dresses emitting sparkling light from hundreds of small LEDs may create eye-catching effects in ballrooms or on fashion shows. But wearable electronics can also mean sensors integrated in functional textiles to monitor, for example, water evaporation or temperature changes. Energy storage systems powering such wearable devices must combine deformability with high capacity and durability. However, deformable electrodes often fail in long-term operation, and their capacity lags behind that of other state-of-the-art energy storage devices.

Electrode materials usually benefit from a fine balance of porosity, conductivity, and electrochemical activity. Material scientists Su Chen, Guan Wu, and their teams from Nanjing Tech University, China, have looked deeper into the material demands for flexible electrodes and developed a porous hybrid material synthesized from two carbon nanomaterials and a metal-organic framework. The nanocarbons provided the large surface area and excellent electrical conductivity, and the metal-organic framework gave the porous structure and the electrochemical activity.

Insulin, a hormone essential for regulating blood sugar and lipids, is normally produced by pancreatic β cells. In many people with diabetes, however, pancreatic cells are not (or no longer) functional, causing a chronic and potentially fatal insulin deficiency that can only be controlled through daily insulin injections. However, this approach has serious adverse effects, including an increased risk of life-threatening hypoglycaemia, and it does not restore metabolic balance. In order to improve therapy, researchers at the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland, have identified a protein called S100A9 which, under certain conditions, seems to act as a blood sugar and lipid regulator while avoiding the most harmful side effects of insulin. This discovery, that can be read in Nature Communications, paves the way for better treatment of diabetes and could significantly improve the quality of life for tens of millions of people affected by insulin deficiency.

Today, insulin injections are essential for the survival of patients with type 1 diabetes or a severe form of type 2 diabetes. However, this treatment is not without risk: overdose can trigger hypoglycaemia, i.e. a drop in blood glucose levels that can lead to coma or even death. But underdosed, it can lead to equally dangerous hyperglycaemia. In addition, insulin is involved in the control of ketones, elements that are produced when the liver breaks down lipids in the absence of sufficient glucose reserves, which become toxic in too large quantities. In addition, long-term insulin treatments cause excess fat and cholesterol in the blood and therefore increases the risk of cardiovascular disease.

As early as 2010, Roberto Coppari’s team, a professor at the Diabetes Centre of the UNIGE Faculty of Medicine, highlighted the gluco- and lipid-regulatory properties of leptin, a hormone involved in hunger control. “However, leptin has proved difficult to use pharmacologically in human beings due to the development of leptin resistance,” says Roberto Coppari. “In order to overcome this problem, we shifted our focus on the metabolic mechanisms triggered by leptin rather than on the hormone itself.”

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“Does Aubrey de Grey make SENS?” This is episode 12 of my Pessimistic Guide to Anti-Aging Research. I describe (and judge) some elements of A. de Grey’s numerous activities.