Tag: MouseAge

“Shattered” – Art by Laura Katrin Weston, a.k.a. Katrin Brunier

“Shattered” – Art by Laura Katrin Weston, a.k.a. Katrin Brunier

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Laura Katrin Weston

Commentary by Gennady Stolyarov II, Chairman, United States Transhumanist Party: “Shattered” is a print by Dr. Laura Katrin Weston, a.k.a. Katrin Brunier, the original exemplar which I received in November 2017 due to my donation to the successful MouseAge crowdfunding campaign by Lifespan.io. Along with the three other artworks that I acquired from Dr. Weston – “Teeming”, “Graceful”, and “Squeak” – this print is featured as part of my Longevity Wall.

This work depicts how the forces of ruin can lead once-ornate and beautiful things to become eroded and deteriorated. This process, unfortunately, afflicts human organisms and minds as well, causing much of value to be lost or at least faded with time. Even with age, there remain in everything and everyone traces of the former splendor that can yet potentially be reclaimed – if humanity reconsiders its priorities and decisively commits to the war on ruin, including the quest to overcome aging and death.

Artist’s Description: “Time ravages even the greatest of minds, shattering them into a chaotic cloud of misfired potential. Once simple tasks become impossible, we become unable to live without aid, to live for ourselves any longer.

“I don’t know about you… But I don’t want that future. We have the power to change that. All we need is more support.”

You can find more work by Dr. Laura Katrin Weston at the Katrin Brunier Gallery, an Ethical Investment-Grade Art Gallery for the Neo-Renaissance Era (see its Instagram page). Proceeds from art sales at the Katrin Brunier Gallery will go to support causes such as medical research and conservation.

“Graceful” – Art by Laura Katrin Weston, a.k.a. Katrin Brunier

“Graceful” – Art by Laura Katrin Weston, a.k.a. Katrin Brunier

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Laura Katrin Weston


Commentary by Gennady Stolyarov II, Chairman, United States Transhumanist Party: “Graceful” is a watercolor painting by Dr. Laura Katrin Weston, a.k.a. Katrin Brunier, the original exemplar which I received in November 2017 due to my donation to the successful MouseAge crowdfunding campaign by Lifespan.io. 

This vibrant watercolor image of a hawthorn tree in bloom illustrates that beauty and longevity are indeed compatible. Hawthorn trees can live for up to 700 years – another demonstration that there are no insurmountable obstacles to this kind of graceful longevity. Science and technology must, however, advance, to enable us to maintain vitality for centuries to come.

Artist’s Description: There is a cold, hard truth in humanity that we don’t often like to admit. There is no shame in wanting to remain beautiful, graceful, and vibrant for as long as we can. Yet these feelings are often belittled as being selfish or vain.

There is nothing wrong with being healthy for as long as possible. Perhaps we have grown so used to the frailties and sickness that come with time that we might not know how to react without it.

You can find more work by Dr. Laura Katrin Weston at the Katrin Brunier Gallery, an Ethical Investment-Grade Art Gallery for the Neo-Renaissance Era (see its Instagram page). Proceeds from art sales at the Katrin Brunier Gallery will go to support causes such as medical research and conservation.

“Squeak” – Art by Laura Katrin Weston, a.k.a. Katrin Brunier

“Squeak” – Art by Laura Katrin Weston, a.k.a. Katrin Brunier

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Laura Katrin Weston



Commentary by Gennady Stolyarov II, Chairman, United States Transhumanist Party: “Squeak” is a print by Dr. Laura Katrin Weston, a.k.a. Katrin Brunier, the original exemplar of which I received in November 2017 due to my donation to the successful MouseAge crowdfunding campaign by Lifespan.io.

It is fitting for a project on mouse longevity to involve at least one image of mice – creatures whom life has unfortunately dealt a bad hand, due to their short lifespans (only 3 years for even long-lived mice in the absence of medical intervention), difficulty in getting along with humans, and unnecessary attrition due to disposal practices after lab experiments. “Squeak” invites the viewer to appreciate mice a bit more; if we can extend their lives significantly, we stand a decent chance of achieving dramatic extension of our own lifespans.  Perhaps we can also give some of the mice a break by using photographic markers of aging in experiments, as the MouseAge project seeks to do.

Here, the mice are depicted scurrying along a narrow circular path. The golden circle, with rays emanating outward represents perhaps the great hope that these creatures unknowingly provide to us. One may wonder, as I have done over many months of reflecting on this work, whether these are mutant, two-tailed mice, or whether they each just have their ordinary curly tails, and the track along which they move might simply be painted in the same colors and textures as their tails. (Well, in actuality it is indeed painted that way!) Mutant or not, these mice are rather extraordinary in having become emblems of a species that has added much to our understanding. Unlike most of their brethren to date, these mice have earned their extreme longevity through Laura Katrin Weston’s brush.

You can find more work by Dr. Laura Katrin Weston at the Katrin Brunier Gallery, an Ethical Investment-Grade Art Gallery for the Neo-Renaissance Era (see its Instagram page). Proceeds from art sales at the Katrin Brunier Gallery will go to support causes such as medical research and conservation.

“Teeming” – Art by Laura Katrin Weston, a.k.a. Katrin Brunier

“Teeming” – Art by Laura Katrin Weston, a.k.a. Katrin Brunier

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Laura Katrin Weston


Commentary by Gennady Stolyarov II, Chairman of the United States Transhumanist Party: “Teeming” is a print by Dr. Laura Katrin Weston, a.k.a. Katrin Brunier, the original exemplar which I received in November 2017 due to my donation to the successful MouseAge crowdfunding campaign by Lifespan.io.

Although some may consider the plants depicted in this print to be weeds, Laura Katrin Weston has painted their flowers beautifully. Such plants proliferate in a teeming, but ultimately ephemeral manner – yet this print presents a view that can be enjoyed indefinitely, in effect taming the weeds and presenting their best imagined attributes for our appreciation.

You can find more work by Dr. Laura Katrin Weston at the Katrin Brunier Gallery, an Ethical Investment-Grade Art Gallery for the Neo-Renaissance Era (see its Instagram page). Proceeds from art sales at the Katrin Brunier Gallery will go to support causes such as medical research and conservation.

Looking Back at 2017: A Year in Rejuvenation Biotechnology – Article by Nicola Bagalà

Looking Back at 2017: A Year in Rejuvenation Biotechnology – Article by Nicola Bagalà

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Nicola Bagalà

 

Editor’s Note: In this article, Mr. Nicola Bagalà highlights various events of rejuvenation biotechnology in the year 2017.  This article was originally published by the Life Extension Advocacy Foundation (LEAF).

                   ~ Kenneth Alum, Director of  Publication, U.S. Transhumanist Party, January 11, 2018

Winter kick-off

This year has been pretty intense, with a lot going on both at LEAF and in the rest of the community. January saw the launch of the LEAF website, shortly followed by both the Lifeboat Foundation and Trust me – I’m a biologist partnering with us. Given that it’s been only a year, we’re amazed at how enthusiastic and supportive the community has been—and how fast it has grown, with nearly 30,000 Facebook followers late in December! We’re also very grateful to our friends at Fight Aging! for their encouragement, support, and appreciation for our work, including honoring us by featuring it on their website!

In February, the CellAge campaign launched in late 2016 concluded successfully, also thanks to the matching fund put together by Longecity. That’s also when LEAF President Keith Comito met Mikhail Batin to discuss the Russian initiative Open Longevity and when Series A funding was announced for LYSOCLEAR, a LysoSENS-based approach to treating macular degeneration.

An eventful spring

The Lifespan Heroes campaign was launched in the spring, and thus far, it has greatly helped us carry out our activities, especially in terms of web development—so thank you to all our generous donors!

In the spring, we also started our advocacy projects with global policymakers. During April 10-15, LEAF Board Director Elena Milova attended a training program conducted by the International Institute on Ageing (INIA) in Saint Petersburg, where she met and interviewed INIA director Dr. Marvin Formosa and former Head of the UN Programs on Ageing Dr. Alexandre Sidorenko.

Later in April, the SENS Research Foundation announced a collaboration on a cellular senescence project with the Buck Institute for Research on Aging.

The month of May was busy with conferences and networking; at the International Longevity and Cryopreservation Summit in Madrid, Elena Milova had the opportunity to interview life extension advocate Didier Coeurnelle, London Futurists Chair David Wood, Dr. Jose Luis Cordeiro, Senior Scientist at CONICET Dr. Rodolfo Goya (we hope to support his studies related to Yamanaka factors in 2018 via crowdfunding at Lifespan.io), and SRF’s Chief Science Officer Dr. Aubrey de Grey. Elena herself gave a talk about effective life extension advocacy methodologies; LEAF board member Paul Spiegel also gave a talk about the need for society to adapt to longer lives. In Paris, the International Cell Senescence Association (ICSA) held a conference discussing senescence triggers, physiological functions of senescence, and pathologies and therapies. We announced the event here.

Our Journal Club series was also launched at the end of May, for a total of eight Journal Club episodes this year, which you can watch here. The Journal Club is a monthly science show on which Dr. Oliver Medvedik hosts guests, and this show is supported by our patrons, the Lifespan Heroes. We broadcast this show live to our Facebook Page every month, where we invite the audience to ask questions and join in with the discussion.

Summer news

In the summer, LEAF and MMTP co-hosted a panel featuring Dr. Alexandra Stolzing, Dr. Aubrey de Grey, and Dr. Oliver Medvedik. This live broadcast included discussions about funding, research progress, and advocacy, providing some interesting insights into the field. They were joined by Alen Akhabaev, one of the project donors who supported the MMTP project on Lifespan.io, as well as Steve Hill and Elena Milova from the MMTP and LEAF.

The AgeMeter campaign was launched on Lifespan.io by Elliott Small in July, and in August, we celebrated the first birthday of our crowdfunding platform—you could say Lifespan.io’s birthday present was the MouseAge campaign launched shortly thereafter. The campaign was successful, and the MouseAge app is now ready and expected to be launched shortly. The use of AI is trending more and more in the field of aging research, so this app is certainly only one of many that will be employed in the future.

A great autumn

The autumn has been, without doubt, the busiest time of the year. The Undoing Aging conference was announced by the Forever Healthy Foundation in September, as was a series of small-scale human senolytic pilot studies by Betterhumans. Almost at the same time as the AgeMeter campaign reached 100% of its goal, Dr. Aubrey de Grey joined our SAB (Scientific Advisory Board), shortly followed by Dr. Robert Shmookler Reis. At this time, SRF and the Spiegel Lab launched a collaboration on developing monoclonal antibodies against glucosepane.

September also saw the Basel Life 2017 conference held in Basel, Switzerland, where Dr. Alex Zhavoronkov chaired the Artificial intelligence and block chain in healthcare and the Aging & drug discovery forums. Insilico Medicine’s Young.AI aging-rate tracking app was officially announced at this conference.

Juvenescence by Jim Mellon and Al Chalabi—a thorough, investor-focused introduction to the science of aging and the world of rejuvenation biotech—was published on September 25. LEAF has published two reviews of the book, which you can read here and here.

Open Longevity ICO, a Russian project focused on conducting clinical trials of geroprotective therapies and introducing diagnoses of aging into clinical practice, was launched in September. It is currently entering the second phase of pre-ICO, and we wish Anastasia Egorova’s team good luck.

In October (which is traditionally considered the Longevity Month) we launched the #IAmTheLifespan campaign, inviting all our supporters to make videos describing what brought them to join our cause, and you can watch some of them here. To help out MouseAge, and for Inktober 2017, our volunteer Laura Weston launched a fundraiser offering her beautiful artwork as a reward for donors.

The Pathways to Healthy Longevity 2017 conference was organized on October 15th by Dr. Ilia Stambler, a famous longevity activist, in Bar Ilan University (Israel), with Prof. Nir Barzilai and Prof. Haim Cohen as key speakers.

In late October and early November, the popular YouTube channel Kurzgesagt published End Aging? and Cure Aging?, which were both created with help from the Lifespan.io team. We saw overwhelming support from old and new members of the community, showing that healthy life extension is much more popular with the public than one might think.

As MouseAge reached and surpassed its goal, news started to spread that WHO was planning to leave healthy aging out of the general programme of work 2019-2023; thanks to the advocacy efforts of the community, though, WHO has received plenty of feedback on the issue and may hopefully reconsider.

During November 8-10th, the TransVision conference was held in Brussels. It was organised by Didier Coeurnelle, the head of HEALES, the Healthy Life Extension Society. Among its other objectives, the Technoprogressive declaration presented at the conference mentions the defeat of aging; it’s good to see that this objective is now considered to be of primary importance by a growing number of organisations.

During December, LEAF took part in Project4Awesome; many amazing videos were made to support us, and we’re really grateful to the community for that. It was a truly beautiful display of generosity, and not the only one; thanks to many fantastic donors, including the mysterious Pineapple Fund creator, the SENS Research Foundation has smashed its funding goals for the year. You can read more about the December highlights here.

Coming up in 2018

In 2018, we will be working towards creating more major media collaborations with awesome content creators to spread further awareness about the problem of aging and the upcoming advent of rejuvenation biotechnologies.

Our web development team will be, and in fact already is, working on improving the overall user experience of our followers and scaling our systems up to meet the needs of a larger user base; we experienced a significant growth in this sense after our collaboration videos with Kurzgesagt were published, and we’re most definitely looking forward to this happening again!

Our Journal Club will, of course, continue discussing and providing commentary on the latest aging research news in the company of special guests from the biogerontology world. More livestream events are in the cards too, so keep an eye on our Facebook page, and subscribe if you haven’t already!

As the community grows larger, so does the need to establish and develop regional presences; our next objective will be starting the Russian chapter of LEAF to engage with a wider audience. Aging is a global problem, so the more communities and audiences we can get involved in the fight against age-related diseases, the better.

LEAF will naturally take part in as many events in the healthy longevity world as possible to keep our readers in the loop. A big must is definitely the March 15-17 Undoing Aging conference in Berlin, Germany, as is the April 22-26 Interventions to Extend Healthspan and Lifespan conference in Kazan, Russia. There will certainly be much exciting news to share, so stay tuned!

The Eurosymposium on Healthy Ageing—a scientific conference organized by the European aging research advocacy group HEALES—will be held in Brussels on November 8-10. It is likely that at least a few of the LEAF team will be at the event, and it is sure to be an interesting one.

Finally, of course, more exciting crowdfunding projects are in the works!

About Nicola Bagalà

Nicola Bagalà has been an enthusiastic supporter and advocate of rejuvenation science since 2011. Although his preferred approach to treating age related diseases is Aubrey de Grey’s suggested SENS platform, he is very interested in any other potential approach as well. In 2015, he launched the blog Rejuvenaction to advocate for rejuvenation and to answer common concerns that generally come with the prospect of vastly extended healthy lifespans. Originally a mathematician graduated from Helsinki University, his scientific interests range from cosmology to AI, from drawing and writing to music, and he always complains he doesn’t have enough time to dedicate to all of them which is one of the reasons he’s into life extension. He’s also a computer programmer and web developer. All the years spent learning about the science of rejuvenation have sparked his interest in biology, in which he’s planning to get a university degree.

About LIFE EXTENSION ADVOCACY FOUNDATION (LEAF)

In 2014, the Life Extension Advocacy Foundation was established as a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to promoting increased healthy human lifespan through fiscally sponsoring longevity research projects and raising awareness regarding the societal benefits of life extension. In 2015 they launched Lifespan.io, the first nonprofit crowdfunding platform focused on the biomedical research of aging.

They believe that this will enable the general public to influence the pace of research directly. To date they have successfully supported four research projects aimed at investigating different processes of aging and developing therapies to treat age-related diseases.

The LEAF team organizes educational events, takes part in different public and scientific conferences, and actively engages with the public on social media in order to help disseminate this crucial information. They initiate public dialogue aimed at regulatory improvement in the fields related to rejuvenation biotechnology.

The Best of the SENS AMA – Article by Steve Hill and Aubrey de Grey

The Best of the SENS AMA – Article by Steve Hill and Aubrey de Grey

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Steve Hill

Dr. Aubrey de Grey

Editor’s Note: In this article, Steve Hill highlights the Ask Me Anything on Reddit held on December 7th by Dr. Aubrey de Grey.  This article was originally published by the Life Extension Advocacy Foundation (LEAF).

                   ~ Kenneth Alum, Director of  Publication, U.S. Transhumanist Party, December 13, 2017

 

Dr. Aubrey de Grey from the SENS Research Foundation (SRF) did an Ask Me Anything on Reddit on December 7th, and there were many great questions and answers; we thought it would be a great time to summarize some of the best ones and offer a little commentary.

What do you think were the biggest wins of the last couple of years in SENS-relevant advocacy, research, and development? What has moved the needle?

There have been lots. On the research, I would highlight our paper in Science two years ago, which shows how to synthesize glucosepane, and our paper in Nucleic Acids Research one year ago, which shows simultaneous allotopic expression of two of the 13 mitochondrial genes. Both of those projects have been greatly accelerated in the meantime as a result of those key enabling breakthroughs; watch this space.

On advocacy, I think the main win has been the arrival of private capital; I would especially highlight Jim Mellon and his Juvenescence initiative because he is not only a successful, energetic and visionary investor, he is also a highly vocal giver of investment advice.

We are pleased to have been involved with the second project mentioned here, as we hosted the MitoSENS project at Lifespan.io, where it raised 153% of its initial fundraising goal. Less than a year later, after raising this money, it went on to publish the groundbreaking study showing that backup copies of mitochondrial genes could indeed be created in the nucleus. Dr. de Grey originally proposed the idea over a decade ago amid much scepticism; it is really good to see that years later he has been vindicated. This is the power of crowdfunding and how we as a community can make big changes in science by working together.

How do you feel about the impact of groups like LEAF advocating and reporting on rejuvenation biotech? Has the advocacy and reporting of these groups made your life any easier?

Massively! A huge thing that I say all the time is that advocacy absolutely relies upon the diversity of its messengers. Different people listen to different forms of words, different styles of messaging, etc. The more, the better.

It’s good to know that our work is appreciated and helping. Working together as a community is essential for progress, so it was nice to see this question and response from someone we respect a great deal.

We have said many times before effective advocacy efforts are just as important as the research itself. Professional advocacy has the potential to increase public support and funding, paving the way for the arrival of rejuvenation biotechnology. In the past decade or so, advocacy has mostly been left to volunteers and people such as Dr. de Grey.

Popular causes attract celebrities, public support, funding and investment; if we want a revolution in medicine and how we treat aging, then we must popularize the movement. There has been a serious shortage of full-time and organized advocacy; therefore, we decided to create LEAF to support groups like the SRF, advocate to popularize the cause, and help to raise much-needed funds for research efforts. We are only able to do this thanks to the support of the community, and we are extremely grateful to our Lifespan Heroes for helping us to do the work we do.

Aside from funding, what do you consider to be a burden or delay for your type of research?

Nothing. Seriously, nothing at all. We have the plan, and we have the people. It’s all about enabling those people by giving them the resources to get on with the job.

Indeed, funding for research is one of the four major bottlenecks slowing down the development of therapies that address the aging processes. The more funding the field gets, the more projects can be launched, the sooner breakthroughs can potentially happen, and the greater the benefits will likely be for all of us.

Is there anything new you are able to say about the breaking of cross-links in the extracellular matrix?

Absolutely. Short story, we now have a bunch of glucosepane-breaking enzymes, and we are within a few months of spinning the work out into a startup.

A suspected cause of degenerative aging is the accumulation of sugary metabolic wastes known as advanced glycation end-products (AGEs). These are wastes that are, in some cases, hard for our metabolism to break down fast enough or even at all. Some types, such as glucosepane, can form cross-links, gumming together important proteins such as those making up the supporting extracellular matrix scaffold.

The properties of elastic tissues (skin and the blood vessel walls) derive from the particular structure of the extracellular matrix, and cross-links degrade that structure, preventing it from functioning correctly. AGEs’ presence contributes to blood vessel stiffening with age, and it is implicated in hypertension and diabetes.

That SRF now has candidate enzymes is very significant because it means that there are now potential ways to remove these crosslinks from our tissues. There are many types of crosslinks, and we already know of compounds and drugs that can break other kind of crosslinks; the major problem is glucosepane, as it lasts a very long time, and, so far, nothing is known to remove it. Given that other types of crosslinks can be removed, Dr. de Grey rightly thought that there must be ways to remove (cleave) glucosepane from tissues; now, it seems that we are a step closer to that potentially becoming a reality.

If the SRF is successful in finding ways to break glucosepane crosslinks, this has huge implications for diabetes, hypertension and aging. It is great to hear that the organization is now reaching the point at which it is almost time to develop this as a therapy by creating a startup company.

It seems likely that artificial intelligence will be a necessary tool in order to reach longevity escape velocity. I was wondering how much of a role does artificial intelligence play in your research? Is this something you devote many resources to?

We don’t, but that is because other major players in this field (and good friends of mine), such as Alex Zhavoronkov and Kristen Fortney, are doing it so well already (with Insilico Med and BioAge, respectively). Check out the BioData West conference that will occur in SF a couple of days before our Undoing Aging conference in Berlin; I will be chairing a session on this.

We believe that the application of AI and, in particular, machine learning will prove to be a very valuable tool for research in the coming years. Such systems are ideally suited for high-throughput, laborious tasks that also require high attention to detail and would take humans a long time to do. Drug discovery, image analysis and many more tasks in the lab could potentially be automated, saving time and freeing up researchers to work on other critical tasks.

We are proud to have hosted the MouseAge project this year, which is an AI-based visual aging biomarker application that helps researchers determine the age of mice without the use of harmful tests. In a few months, researchers will be able to use the MouseAge application in the lab to help speed research progress up. This is just one example of how AI can be used in aging research and how the community helped to make it happen.

Given current funding, how far away from robust mouse rejuvenation do you think you are?

My estimate is 5-7 years, but that’s not quite “given current funding”. My overoptimism in saying “10 years” 13 years ago consisted entirely of overoptimism about funding – the science itself has not thrown up any nasty surprises whatsoever – but, nonetheless, I am quite optimistic as of now about funding, simply because the progress we have made has led to a whole new world of startups (including spinoffs from the SENS Research Foundation) and investors, so it’s not only philanthropy anymore. Plus, the increase in overall credibility of the approach is also helping to nurture the philanthropic side. We are still struggling, that’s for sure, but I’m feeling a lot surer that the funding drought’s days are numbered than I felt even two or three years ago.

Robust mouse rejuvenation (RMR) has long been a goal for the SENS Research Foundation, going back to when the SENS approach was initially proposed. RMR was originally outlined as being able to demonstrate and replicate SENS to double the remaining life expectancy of an already aged mouse. This would not mean the first RMR would be a total implementation of all the SENS approaches or that rejuvenation would need to be absolute; it would be a first pass to demonstrate the viability of multiple SENS approaches combined to produce robust results.

Being able to achieve a first-pass RMR could do much to convince academia that the repair approach to aging is plausible and attract more funding and interest in the approach. While RMR working in mice may not sound that exciting, it has huge implications for the field and potentially the rate of funding and progress.

How confident are you still in your previous prediction that humans will be able to control aging by 2029?

I think we’ve slipped a few years, entirely because of lack of funding. The tipping point will be when results in mice convince a critical mass of my curmudgeonly, reputation-protecting expert colleagues that rejuvenation will eventually work, such that they start to feel able to say so publicly. I think that’s on the order of five years away.

We think that the tipping point could well be if senolytics have the same result in humans as they have in mice. Enhanced tissue repair and regeneration in older people would be a very strong case for the repair approach to aging and almost certain to convince the academics sitting on the fence.

Certainly, if AGE breakers could be demonstrated to work in humans, this would also go a long way towards not only convincing academia but also grabbing public interest. Removing AGEs from the skin may potentially reverse wrinkles, for example, and restore skin elasticity, offering a very visual demonstration of repair being plausible.

There is almost certainly going to be a tipping point at which the bulk of academic and public support swings in favour of a repair approach to aging; the only question is when? Well, the sooner the basic science can be done and moved to translational research, the sooner we can all potentially benefit from these technologies. This makes supporting both the research and advocacy of rejuvenation biotechnology very important for progress.

 

About Dr. Aubrey de Grey

Dr. Aubrey de Grey is a biomedical gerontologist based in Cambridge, UK and Mountain View, California, USA, and is the Chief Science Officer of SENS Research Foundation, a California-based 501(c)(3) charity dedicated to combating the aging process. He is also Editor-in-Chief of Rejuvenation Research, the world’s highest-impact peer-reviewed journal focused on intervention in aging. He received his BA and Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in 1985 and 2000 respectively. His original field was computer science, and he did research in the private sector for six years in the area of software verification before switching to biogerontology in the mid-1990s. His research interests encompass the characterisation of all the accumulating and eventually pathogenic molecular and cellular side-effects of metabolism (“damage”) that constitute mammalian aging and the design of interventions to repair and/or obviate that damage. He has developed a possibly comprehensive plan for such repair, termed Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS), which breaks aging down into seven major classes of damage and identifies detailed approaches to addressing each one. A key aspect of SENS is that it can potentially extend healthy lifespan without limit, even though these repair processes will probably never be perfect, as the repair only needs to approach perfection rapidly enough to keep the overall level of damage below pathogenic levels. Dr. de Grey has termed this required rate of improvement of repair therapies “longevity escape velocity”. Dr. de Grey is a Fellow of both the Gerontological Society of America and the American Aging Association, and sits on the editorial and scientific advisory boards of numerous journals and organisations.

About Steve Hill

As a scientific writer and a devoted advocate of healthy longevity technologies, Steve has provided the community with multiple educational articles, interviews, and podcasts, helping the general public to better understand aging and the means to modify its dynamics. His materials can be found at H+ Magazine, Longevity Reporter, Psychology Today, and Singularity Weblog. He is a co-author of the book Aging Prevention for All – a guide for the general public exploring evidence-based means to extend healthy life (in press).

About LIFE EXTENSION ADVOCACY FOUNDATION (LEAF)

In 2014, the Life Extension Advocacy Foundation was established as a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to promoting increased healthy human lifespan through fiscally sponsoring longevity research projects and raising awareness regarding the societal benefits of life extension. In 2015 they launched Lifespan.io, the first nonprofit crowdfunding platform focused on the biomedical research of aging.

They believe that this will enable the general public to influence the pace of research directly. To date they have successfully supported four research projects aimed at investigating different processes of aging and developing therapies to treat age-related diseases.

The LEAF team organizes educational events, takes part in different public and scientific conferences, and actively engages with the public on social media in order to help disseminate this crucial information. They initiate public dialogue aimed at regulatory improvement in the fields related to rejuvenation biotechnology.

Biogerontology Research Foundation Launches Campaign for Photographic Biomarkers of Age

Biogerontology Research Foundation Launches Campaign for Photographic Biomarkers of Age

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Biogerontology Research Foundation

Thursday, August 31st, 2017, London, UK: The Biogerontology Research Foundation announces the launch of a crowdfunding campaign, MouseAge, to develop and test photographic biomarkers of ageing in mice in collaboration with scientists from Harvard University, University of Oxford, Youth Laboratories and Insilico Medicine. The project’s aim is to develop novel biomarkers of ageing in mice for the purposes of testing the effect of healthspan and lifespan-extending interventions. The project is now live at Lifespan.io, a crowdfunding platform for ageing research institutions that has launched several successful campaigns for SENS Research Foundation, International Longevity Alliance and CellAge.

“One of the most fundamental challenges in ageing research today is the development of robust and reliable biomarkers of ageing to serve as the basis by which the efficacy of lifespan and healthspan-extending interventions can be tested. Humans live a long time, and testing the effect of geroprotective interventions in humans using lifespan gains as the main criterion for success would be wildly impractical, necessitating long and costly longitudinal studies. By developing accurate biomarkers of ageing, the efficacy of potential geroprotective interventions could instead be tested according to changes in study participants’ biomarkers of ageing. While significant attention is paid to the development of highly accurate biomarkers of ageing, less attention is paid to developing actionable biomarkers of ageing that can be tested inexpensively using the tools at hand to the majority of researchers and clinicians. The Biogerontology Research Foundation chose to support MouseAge.org because photographic biomarkers of ageing represents a highly actionable alternative to more expensive measures of biological age.” said Franco Cortese, Deputy Director & Trustee of the Biogerongology Research Foundation.

The project utilizes Insilico Medicine’s novel deep learning platforms to correlate changes in physical appearance with biological and chronological age. Insilico is leading the pack in the intersection of deep learning and ageing research, and is well known for its use of advances in genomics, big data analysis, and deep learning for in silico drug discovery and drug repurposing for ageing and age-related diseases. The Biogerontology Research Foundation has collaborated with Insilico Medicine in the development of actionable and practical biomarkers of ageing before through their Ageing.AI project, and both organizations hope that MouseAge is the next in a long line of continuing research into the development of actionable biomarkers of ageing via the intersection of longevity research and deep learning.

“There are many experiments conducted around the world that examine lifespan in mice. The artificially intelligent MouseAge system will help determine which interventions make mice look younger. The plan is to develop an accurate predictor of mouse biological age based on images of mice and then apply transfer learning techniques to other datasets and data types,” said Vadim Gladyshev, MouseAge Research Lead and Professor of Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School.

Milestones for the project include the design of standardized protocols for creating photos and videos of mice, developing a mobile app and server infrastructure for image data collection, developing and testing the project’s main algorithm for mouse age prediction, optimizing feature extraction to investigate visual biomarkers of ageing in mice, creating a central data repository for the project’s data, utilizing transfer learning techniques to make these methods applicable to other model organisms, and ultimately using transfer learning techniques to develop photographic biomarkers of ageing in humans. The project’s principal investigator is Anastasia Georgievskaya, co-founder of Youth Laboratories, a company working at the intersection of ageing research, AI and machine vision, with the ultimate goal of using facial imageing data to predict patient health status.

The ultimate end-goal of MouseAge is to develop an intuitive mobile app to be used by researchers across the globe free of charge, where users can take images of model organisms and have the project’s DP-based algorithms perform age-assessment of images uploaded by users of the app. Both the organizations and researchers behind MouseAge are united in their belief in the promise of AI to accelerate ageing research and to streamline the development of effective healthspan-extending interventions for use in human patients, and hope that MouseAge comes to be remembered as an important landmark in the ongoing paradigm shift away from costly and inefficient sick-care and toward morbidity compression and effective healthspan extension for the benefit of all.

“Ageing research is the most altruistic cause that can generate billions of quality-adjusted life years over time and save the global economy. We are very happy to contribute to and support the MouseAge project. Our Young.AI system for tracking multiple biomarkers during human ageing is currently in the alpha stage and is launching in the fall. However, the biological relevance of many of the biomarkers and interventions is yet to be established, and the MouseAge project contributes to the body of fundamental science required to bridge AI and longevity research. Please support the MouseAge project on LifeSpan.io to contribute to this grand effort”, said Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, Chief Science Officer of the Biogerontology Research Foundation.

About the Biogerontology Research Foundation:

The Biogerontology Research Foundation is a UK non-profit research foundation and public policy center seeking to fill a gap within the research community, whereby the current scientific understanding of the ageing process is not yet being sufficiently exploited to produce effective medical interventions. The BGRF funds and conducts research which, building on the body of knowledge about how ageing happens, aims to develop biotechnological interventions to remediate the molecular and cellular deficits which accumulate with age and which underlie the ill-health of old age. Addressing ageing damage at this most fundamental level will provide an important opportunity to produce the effective, lasting treatments for the diseases and disabilities of ageing, required to improve quality of life in the elderly. The BGRF seeks to use the entire scope of modern biotechnology to attack the changes that take place in the course of ageing, and to address not just the symptoms of age-related diseases but also the mechanisms of those diseases.

MouseAge: Using Artificial Intelligence to Determine Age and Assess Therapies Against Aging – Project by Lifespan.io

MouseAge: Using Artificial Intelligence to Determine Age and Assess Therapies Against Aging – Project by Lifespan.io

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United States Transhumanist Party

According to Article 3, Section V of the Constitution of the United States Transhumanist Party:

“The United States Transhumanist Party supports concerted research in effort to eradicate disease and illness that wreak havoc upon and cause death of sapient beings. We strongly advocate the increase and redirection of research funds to conduct research and experiments and to explore life, science, technology, medicine, and extraterrestrial realms to improve all sentient entities.”

Which is why the U.S. Transhumanist Party is pleased to announce the official launch of the fundraising campaign for the MouseAge project. MouseAge is a longevity-based project started by one of our Allied Organizations, Lifespan.io, of which we’ll provide relevant information below:

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