Tag: Rejuvenation Biotechnology

Ending Aging Forum 2023 – Announcement by SENS Research Foundation

Ending Aging Forum 2023 – Announcement by SENS Research Foundation

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SENS Research Foundation

Editor’s Note: Our friends, the scientists and staff at the SENS Research Foundation, are hosting the free Ending Aging Forum 2023. Please see the information below about how to attend and gather insights from this virtual event.

~ Gennady Stolyarov II, Chairman, United States Transhumanist Party, September 18, 2023

This event will showcase the newest breakthroughs in rejuvenation biotechnologies happening at the SRF’s Research Center in Mountain View, CA, as well as the research funded at extramural labs.

The Forum will be hosted virtually through Meetaverse, a state-of-the-art Virtual Reality platform.

You won’t need to download any special software or wear a VR headset to walk around in your avatar, enjoy their scientific presentations, and visit their student poster booths in the Conference Hall.

You will also be able to connect with their scientists, team members, and other guests, through one-on-one or group conversations, watch videos and animations placed in the Expo Room, and much more.

Join us and SRF September 21st and 22nd at 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Pacific Time for a fun and educational experience, and come ready to network and meet individuals who support longevity science, activists, and like-minded people who care about a future free of age-related disease.

Event Page: https://www.sens.org/endingagingforum-2023/

Registration Page: http://www.sens.org/eaf2023

Introduction to “Fight Aging!” – Article by Reason

Introduction to “Fight Aging!” – Article by Reason

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Reason

Nothing is given to man on earth – struggle is built into the nature of life, and conflict is possible – the hero is the man who lets no obstacle prevent him from pursuing the values he has chosen.

-Andrew Bernstein

Editor’s Note: In this introductory article to the “Fight Aging!” blog, the author lays out four of the most basic steps one can take. Any person who claims the title of “Transhumanist” would be foolish not to take these basic actions and principles to heart. A Transhumanist should consider these part of the “struggle” they all face, and that they implicitly choose to either confront or evade.

~ Zach Richardson, Director of Publication, United States Transhumanist Party, December 2021

Aging is an Enemy, So Fight It!

Aging saps our strength and ability to enjoy life, cripples us, and eventually kills us. Tens of millions die from medical conditions caused by aging each and every year, and a staggering amount of money is spent on trying – and failing – to cope with this ongoing disaster. Yet the risk of suffering age-related conditions in later life can be reduced for most people through diet and exercise. Furthermore, serious scientific efforts are presently underway to understand and intervene in the aging process – not just to prevent frailty and disease, but also repair and reverse the root causes of aging.

In future decades researchers will assemble new biotechnologies that can defeat aging, restore the old to health and vigor, and prevent the young from ever suffering the ravages of age. Some of these future therapies are already understood and envisioned in some detail, but remain in comparatively early stages of research. Others are just now starting to make the leap into clinical development. We would like these breakthroughs to happen while we are still alive and in good enough health to benefit from them: we miss out on so much as things stand today, pressed by the lack of time and our increasing frailty with age. Imagine instead a world in which everyone has the option of another tomorrow, and the health and vigor to enjoy it, each and every day. But how can we achieve this goal?

The Limited Means of Today, the Biotechnologies of Tomorrow

Present-day medical technologies are far advanced over those available to our ancestors, and as a result we suffer far less than they did. Yet modern medicine can achieve little in comparison to what scientists know is possible for the future. Despite amazing advances in understanding and treating age-related conditions (such as cancer, heart disease, dementia, diabetes, and many others), and despite the cries of the anti-aging marketplace, it is still the case that, for basically healthy people, no presently available therapy or tool is proven in humans to provide more than a fraction of the long-term benefits to health and life expectancy provided by regular exercise or a calorie-restricted diet.

While it is true that no existing medical technology is proven to improve on these lifestyle choices here and now, today, in humans, this state of affairs will not remain true for many more years. If you look to the laboratories, you will see that some researchers can greatly extend the healthy lives of many species, while others put forward clear plans to either slow aging through the manipulation of human metabolism or reverse aging by repairing the cell and tissue damage that causes age-related degeneration. Technology demonstrations for some of these approaches have been carried out in mice in recent years, producing benefits to health and extended healthy life spans. Treatments based on clearance of senescent cells have been demonstrated to reverse the progression of many currently untreatable age-related conditions in mice, for example. The first formal human clinical trials of therapies anticipated to either modestly slow aging or produce limited degrees of rejuvenation started up in 2017, and some of these trials have produced positive results.

A future in which aging becomes a treatable condition awaits us, as time ticks away and, for now, we continue to age just like our ancestors did. This is an era of rapid progress in biotechnology and medicine. As the years pass, the remaining span of healthy life that you and I will likely live to enjoy is ever more determined by the ability of clinical medicine to revert and repair the causes of aging, and ever less determined by lifestyle choices. Thus when we reach for longer, healthier lives, it is vital that we lend our support to the research and clinical development of therapies capable of treating the causes of aging. We must ensure that the public is educated, the fundamental longevity science is funded, the clinical applications of that research fully developed, and the resulting rejuvenation biotechnologies made available – and all this as soon as possible. The clock is ticking, after all, and this is the only approach that will allow us live for significantly longer than our ancestors.

Four Steps Toward Longevity

The following four steps outline a starting point for living longer, a sketch of a framework for thinking about healthy life extension:

Step 1: Stop Damaging Your Health

At its most basic level, aging is nothing more than an accumulation of damage; breakages in the molecular machinery of your cells, a build-up of metabolic waste products that your body cannot break down, the flailing of biological systems that are increasingly unable to cope. Ask yourself this: are you damaging yourself more rapidly than you might otherwise be, perhaps more than you realize? Do you smoke? Do recreational drugs occupy a central position in your life? Do you eat nothing but junk food or are overweight? Do you exercise little or not at all? Do you have a poor relationship with your physician, or haven’t seen a doctor in years? If so, you have a clear starting point. These things can hurt you far more than any presently available strategy for healthy living can help. There is little point in insulating the windows if the door is jammed open.

Find a physician you can trust and talk to about improving your health. You might be surprised at how easy, low-cost, and downright pleasant it is to lead a healthier and thereby longer life.

Step 2: Adopt a Better Diet and Lifestyle

The body is a complex, resilient machine. Unlike our cars, however, we can’t replace it when it breaks down. Given that, it’s scandalous that most people know more about the long-term care of a car than they do about the long-term care of the human body. Fortunately, it’s neither difficult nor expensive to use diet and lifestyle to raise the odds of living a longer and healthier life.

Firstly: adopt some form of calorie-restricted diet, whether straight calorie restriction or some form of intermittent fasting. Calorie restriction and some implementations of intermittent fasting, such as alternate-day fasting, are currently the most robustly, repeatedly proven way of extending healthy life in mammals. While the present scientific consensus is that these practices will not extend life in humans to anywhere near the same degree as in mice, calorie restriction and intermittent fasting have been shown in human studies to provide a range of other beneficial effects on health, such as a greatly lowered risk of suffering all common age-related medical conditions – and these approaches to diet are highly praised by practitioners. You can learn more about calorie restriction at the CR Society website, and here at Fight Aging! you’ll find introduction to calorie restriction that provides helpful guidelines to getting started.

Secondly: exercise as recommended by your physician. The benefits of maintaining a modest regular level of exercise for most people are well-known and well-proven by many scientific studies. As is also true of calorie restriction, these benefits include a greatly reduced risk of suffering almost all of the common age-related diseases.

Thirdly: take a modest amount of supplements appropriate to your age and health. There is a wealth of supplement information available, but much of it is worthless, propagated by irresponsible sellers. This is perhaps the hardest topic to research, and in the end you will have to make a number of decisions yourself based on incomplete or contradictory scientific evidence. The bottom line here, however, is that no presently available supplement or combination of supplements has been shown to provide even a fraction of the benefits of either calorie restriction or exercise, for all that they are widely supposed to be beneficial.

Step 3: Support Progress in Rejuvenation Research

Speaking out in favor of medical research aimed at extending the healthy human life span is just as important as taking care of your health today – even the best of present-day practices will make only a comparatively small difference to your expected future life span. Most age-related conditions are still incurable, and no matter how well you live your life, you will become frail with old age and eventually die from the damage that is accumulating within your body. The aging process causes great suffering for hundreds of millions worldwide each and every day, and absent scientific breakthroughs you will be one of them. Yet that said, we are living in an era of rapid, seething progress in medicine, the life sciences, and biotechnology, far more so than at any time in the past – and we can envisage how aging should be repaired and reversed. Aging will one day be cured, just like any other medical condition, and our job is to ensure that this day arrives soon enough to matter.

A revolution in biotechnology is presently underway, a longevity-focused industry of biotech companies is forming, and the medicine of the near future holds great promise – see, for example, the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) coordinated by the SENS Research Foundation and other scientific groups. This promise is not a guarantee, however. It can only be realized if research and clinical development are fully funded and widely supported. The still-young field of rejuvenation research remains for the most part poorly funded, and while there is a great deal more discussion of the prospect of treating aging as a medical condition than was the case even as recently as a decade ago, most of the public still neither understands nor appreciates the possibilities offered by this research. Further, many politicians, funding institutions, and bioethicists continue to speak out in opposition to the development of medicine to enhance healthy longevity.

If we do not stand up in support of rejuvenation biotechnology – the key to our future health and extended longevity – then research and investment will decline. Without vocal public support and understanding, scientists are reluctant to go out on a limb and fight for the funding needed to create new ways to intervene in the aging process. Without philanthropy for the academic sciences, much of this fundamental research will not be funded. By failing to prevent legislation that slows or criminalizes vital medical research, such as happened for stem-cell research for many years, we only hurt ourselves. Do you want to live a much longer, much healthier life? Do you want your friends, parents, and children to live long and in vigor? Do you want to see the development of biotechnology that can reverse the course of aging and frailty? Then you have to support this research, and be vocal about it! There are many ways to make your voice heard on important issues relating to the future of human health and longevity. A good starting point to learn more on this topic is to become a regular reader of Fight Aging!, explore the site, and sign up for the newsletter.

Step 4: Investigate Early Access to the First Rejuvenation Therapies

New medical technologies do not arrive all at once, fully formed from day one. Early forms of therapy become available in limited ways, or existing drugs are found to have an effect on the mechanism of interest large enough to merit use in animal studies or human trials. So it is for the first rejuvenation treatments to have a large enough impact on aging in animal studies to care about, and that are also producing benefits in their first human trials. As of 2019, the most obvious of these are senolytic therapies that selectively destroy the senescent cells that accumulate to cause considerable harm in old tissues. The existing generic drugs and supplements newly discovered to be senolytic, and shown to work well in numerous animal studies, are being tested in humans.

The informed decision that each of us must make for ourselves is whether to wait for more data from human trials, to wait for the most likely better senolytic therapies presently under development, or to strike out to obtain and try existing senolytic therapies. If the latter, there in turn lies further personal research, learning, and informed decisions. Where to find a physician to prescribe the relevant drugs, for example, or whether to forge ahead as a self-experimenter, with all of the responsibility and accountability that this implies. However it is accomplished, it is almost always possible for informed and proactive individuals to obtain earlier access to new therapies than waiting for the world to move on to the point at which general physicians begin recommending these treatments to patients. Whether or not to choose to do so is a personal decision on risk and benefit, and this same calculus applies to any new medical technology as it arrives, not just senolytic rejuvenation therapies.

Final Thoughts

So there you go: four quick steps that provide a solid starting point for learning more about living longer and the near future of rejuvenation biotechnology. Fifteen years ago, when the longevity science community was smaller and less organized, and the first rejuvenation therapies had yet to even be seriously tested in laboratory animals, it required years of discussion and research to make the leap to understand the existence and importance of step 3 – the necessity of supporting research into human longevity, and the fact that there is legitimate research aimed at human rejuvenation to be supported in the first place. Back in the day, information on longevity science was harder to find, drowned out by irresponsible voices in the anti-aging marketplace, and only rarely discussed in public by scientists in the field.

The core of the Fight Aging! mindset is to recognize that step 3 exists, and that your future largely depends on the pace of progress in medical research aimed at producing human rejuvenation. Don’t get seduced by the noise surrounding step 2, produced by the vast industry associated with lifestyle choices, diet, supplements, and exercise, because it is largely smoke and mirrors. You can’t eat and exercise your way into a healthy life that is decades longer than it would otherwise be, and you can’t eat and exercise your way to a certainty of reaching 100 years of age. Three quarters of the healthiest among us die before reaching 90 even supported by today’s medicine, and most of what is sold to the lost and the gullible under the “anti-aging” banner is useless junk. Only new medical technologies produced by the research community can provide the option of living in good health for far longer than your great-grandparents did, and that can only happen if these technologies are funded and developed rapidly enough.

Fight Aging! is here as a resource. Make good use of it, but always remember that the bottom line is this: a tremendous opportunity exists in the research and development of rejuvenation biotechnology, far beyond anything that can be obtained through diet, exercise, and supplements. Don’t squander that opportunity by ignoring it.

Reason is the founder of The Longevity Meme (now Fight Aging!). He saw the need for The Longevity Meme in late 2000, after spending a number of years searching for the most useful contribution he could make to the future of healthy life extension. When not advancing Fight Aging!, Reason works as a technologist in a variety of industries.
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This work is reproduced here in accord with a Creative Commons Attribution license. It was originally published on FightAging.org.
Anti-Aging Gene Therapy for Dogs Coming This Fall – Article by Steve Hill

Anti-Aging Gene Therapy for Dogs Coming This Fall – Article by Steve Hill

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Steve Hill

Editor’s Note: The U.S. Transhumanist Party features this article by Steve Hill of the Life Extension Advocacy Foundation (LEAF) originally published on the LEAF site on May 8th, 2019.  The article brings attention to a new program that aligns with 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, May 10th, 2019

In an article last May, we covered how Rejuvenate Bio, a startup biotech company led by Professor George Church, was planning to reverse aging in dogs as a step towards bringing these therapies to us. Those plans are now starting to move forward with news of a trial launch in the fall later this year.

Developing anti-aging therapies in dogs is the first step

Back in 2015, the Church lab at Harvard began testing a variety of therapies focused on age reversal using CRISPR, a gene editing system that was much easier and faster to use than older techniques. Since then, Professor Church and his lab have conducted a myriad of experiments and gathered lots of data with which to plan future strategies for tackling aging.

Last year, we learned that Rejuvenate Bio had already conducted some initial studies with beagles and were planning to reverse aging using CRISPR gene therapy. The goal was to move these studies forward to a larger scale as a step towards bringing similar therapies to humans to prevent age-related diseases. Professor Church was so confident that his team would find a solution, he even suggested that he may be one of the first human volunteers once therapies finally reach people.

“Dogs are a market in and of themselves,” Church said during the 2018 Radical Wellness event in Boston. “It’s not just a big organism close to humans. It’s something that people will pay for, and the FDA process is much faster. We’ll do dog trials, and that’ll be a product, and that’ll pay for scaling up in human trials.”

Choosing to develop therapies for dogs helps pave the way for therapies that address the aging processes in humans and could support their approval, which would otherwise be much more challenging. Currently, if you were to tell the FDA that you want to increase lifespan in humans by 20 years, you would need to come back in 20-30 years with the data, which just isn’t practical.

However, if Rejuvenate Bio can produce robust data in dogs showing that some processes of aging have been reversed, it lends considerable justification for human trials. The company is also taking a different tack; instead of focusing on increasing lifespan, it is instead targeting an age-related disease common in dogs, which should be cured if age reversal occurs.

This is based on the concept that in order to treat age-related diseases and cure them, you need to target the root causes of those diseases, which are the underlying aging processes themselves. If Rejuvenate Bio is successful, this would lend additional supporting evidence that directly treating aging to prevent age-related diseases could also work in humans.

Gene therapy trial for mitral valve disease

Rejuvenate Bio has now announced that it will be launching a gene therapy trial in dogs during the fall this year to combat mitral valve disease (MVD), a condition commonly encountered in the Cavalier King Charles Spaniel breed and directly caused by the aging processes. The study will initially focus on this particular breed and expand to include other dogs with MVD as time passes.

We are developing a novel cardio-protective gene therapy to stop the progression of heart failure in dogs. As a part of the technical development, we will launch a study in dogs with Mitral Valve Disease (MVD) in the fall of 2019. This study will provide valuable information that will aid our effort to address MVD.

MVD is due to the failure of the mitral valve in the heart, a one-way valve between the two chambers of the heart that prevents the backflow of blood as it is pumped around the body. As aging occurs, the mitral valve can degenerate, which allows backflow to occur, leading to left atrial chamber enlargement, congestive heart failure, and, ultimately, death.

This gene therapy is focused on adding a new piece of DNA into the cells of the dogs in order to halt the buildup of fibrotic scar tissue in the heart, which is linked to the progression of MVD and other forms of heart failure. Fibrotic tissue is the result of imperfect repair, which occurs when a more complete repair is not possible due to a lack of replacement cells or high levels of inflammation.

The researchers are keen to point out that this new piece of DNA is not passed onto the offspring of the animal and cannot transfer between dogs. This is because the therapy does not alter the DNA in the germline cells, the cells that are involved in reproduction and passing on genetics to an organism’s offspring.

If you wish to enroll your Cavalier King Charles Spaniel in the trial coming this fall, then register your interest with Rejuvenate Bio to learn more about eligibility and how to apply.

Conclusion

This is a very exciting study and, as the company discusses on its project page, the therapy may also be useful for other heart conditions, such as dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM). If the initial results are successful, it would be highly likely that we could see more dog breeds included as well as other conditions, including DCM, added to the program.

We wish Professor Church and Rejuvenate Bio every success, as this forms the basis for potentially moving such therapies into human trials more quickly as well as potentially helping our furry friends to live longer, healthier lives as well. We love our pets, and it is only logical that we should want the same healthy and longer lives for them as we do for ourselves, and the process for them is the same for us: new medical innovations that target the aging processes directly in order to end age-related diseases.

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.

Could Filtering Our Aged Blood Keep us Young? – Article by Steve Hill and Nicola BagalĂ 

Could Filtering Our Aged Blood Keep us Young? – Article by Steve Hill and Nicola BagalĂ 

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Steve Hill

Nicola BagalĂ 

Editor’s Note: In this article, Mr. Nicola Bagalà and Steve Hill present the interview they conducted with Dr. Irina Conboy of Berkeley University and Dr. Michael Conboy of Havard University on the topic of youthful blood.  This article was originally published by the Life Extension Advocacy Foundation (LEAF).

                   ~ Kenneth Alum, Director of  Publication, U.S. Transhumanist Party, February 17, 2018

Due to a recently published study on the effects of young plasma on aged mice, we got in touch with Dr. Irina Conboy of Berkeley University. Dr. Conboy is an Associate Professor at the Department of Bioengineering and an expert in stem cell niche engineering, tissue repair, stem cell aging and rejuvenation. Before we dive into the main topic, let’s familiarize ourselves a little with Dr. Conboy and her work.

Dr. Conboy got her Ph.D. at Stanford University, focusing on autoimmunity. She met her partner in science—and in life—Dr. Michael Conboy at Harvard and they got married before embarking on graduate studies; they celebrated their Silver Anniversary a few years ago. During her postdoctoral studies, she began focusing on muscle stem cells, trying to figure out what directs them to make new healthy tissue and what causes them to lose their ability to regenerate the tissues they reside in as we age [1].

Together with her husband Michael, she eventually discovered that old stem cells could be reactivated and made to behave like young ones if appropriately stimulated. The Conboys’ parabiosis experiments—which consisted in hooking up the circulatory systems of aged and young mice—showed that old age is not set in stone and can be reversed in a matter of weeks [2].

The follow-up work by the Conboys uncovered that age-accumulated proteins, such as TGF-β1, inhibited stem cells’ ability to repair tissues even in young mice, and when TGF-β1 signaling is normalized to its young levels, old mice (equivalent to 80-year old people) have youthful muscle regeneration and better neurogenesis in the hippocampus (the area of the brain that is responsible for memory and learning) [3].

While young blood did appear to be beneficial to old stem cells, their evidence suggested that the real culprit of the broad loss of tissue repair with age was the negative influence of age-accumulated inhibitory proteins in aged tissues and circulation, also called the stem cell niche [4].

This conclusion is certainly compatible with the view of aging as a damage accumulation process [5]. As Irina herself pointed out in this interview, in the parabiosis experiments, the old mice had access to the more efficient young organs: lungs, liver, kidneys and immune system of the younger mice, which likely accounted for many of the benefits observed in the elderly parabiosed mice. With respect to the rejuvenation of the brain, the old mice experienced environmental enrichment by being sutured to young, more active parabionts, and this is known to improve the formation of new brain cells, learning, and memory.

An aged niche blocks the action of old and young stem cells alike very quickly; therefore, as Dr. Conboy observed in an article in the Journal of Cell Biology, we can’t treat the diseases of aging by simply transplanting more stem cells, because they will just stop working. Their niche needs to be appropriately engineered as well. Fortunately, there are potential solutions to this problem; such as the use of artificial gel niches and defined pharmacology that are designed to protect transplanted or endogenous stem cells from the deleterious environment of the old body.

This research holds the potential to significantly postpone the onset of age-related diseases and possibly reverse them one day, including frailty, muscle wasting, cognitive decline, liver adiposity and metabolic failure, but Dr. Conboy remains cautious about the possibilities until more data is in. However, she does think that longer and healthier productive lives could improve people’s attitudes towards the environment and treating each other with compassion and respect—a view that we definitely share.

We managed to catch up with Irina and Michael Conboy and talk to them about their work.

For the sake of those new to the topic, what is it in young blood and aged blood that affects aging?

Irina: Numerous changes in the levels of proteins that together regulate cell and tissue metabolism throughout the body.

Mike: We wondered why almost every tissue and organ in the body age together and at a similar rate, and from the parabiosis and blood exchange work now think that young blood has several positive factors, and old blood accumulates several negative, “pro-aging” factors.

A lot of media attention and funding is currently being directed to youthful blood transfusions; how can we move beyond this to potentially more promising approaches, such as filtering and calibration of aged blood?

Irina: People need to understand not just the titles, abstracts and popular highlights of research papers, but the results and whether they support (or not) the promise of rejuvenation by young blood. In contrast to vampire stories, we have no strong experimental evidence that this is true, and there is a lot of evidence that infusing your body with someone else’s blood has severe side effects (even if it is cell-free).

Mike: Translational research!

Some evidence suggests dilution is the most likely reason that young blood has some beneficial effects; what are your thoughts on this recent study [6] in rats that shows improved hepatic function partially via the restoration of autophagy?

Irina: There are certainly “young” blood factors that are beneficial, not just a dilution of the old blood, and this benefit differs from organ to organ. We have published on improved liver regeneration, reduced fibrosis and adiposity by transfusion of old mice with young blood, but these are genetically matched animals, and in people, we do not have our own identical but much younger twins [7].

If dilution is also playing a role here, then can we expect similar or better results from calibrating aged blood?

Irina: Yes, and our work in progress supports the idea.

In your 2015 paper, you identified that TGF-β1 can be either pro-youthful or pro-aging in nature, depending on its level [8]. In the study, you periodically used an Alk-5 inhibitor to reduce TGF-β1 levels and promote regeneration in various tissues. In the study, you showed that TGF-β1 was important in myogenesis and neurogenesis; is there reason to believe that this mechanism might be ubiquitous in all tissues?

Irina: Yes, because TGF-β1 receptors are present in most cells and tissues.

Also, TGF-β1 is only one of a number of factors that need to be carefully balanced in order to create a pro-youthful signalling environment. How many factors do you believe we will need to calibrate?

Irina: There will be a certain benefit from calibrating just TGF-beta 1, but also additional benefits from more than one or just TGF-beta.

How do you propose to balance this cocktail of factors in aged blood to promote a youthful tissue environment?

Irina: We are working on the NextGen blood apheresis devices to accomplish this.

So, you are adapting the plasmapheresis process to effectively “scrub” aged blood clean and then return it to the patient. This would remove the need to transfuse blood from young people, as your own blood could be filtered and returned to you, and no immune reaction either, right?

Irina: Accurate.

This plasmapheresis technique is already approved by the FDA, we believe, so this should help you to develop your project faster, right?

Irina: Exactly.

Do you think a small molecule approach is a viable and, more importantly, a logistically practical approach to calibrate all these factors compared to filtering aged blood?

Irina: Yes, it is a very feasible alternative to the NextGen apheresis that we are working and publishing on.

It is thought that altered signaling is caused by other aging hallmarks higher up in the chain of events; even if we can “scrub” aged blood clean, is it likely to have a long-lasting effect, or would the factors reach pro-aging levels fairly quickly again if nothing is done about the other hallmarks antagonizing them?

Irina: That needs to be established experimentally, but due to the many feedback loops at the levels of proteins, genes and epigenetics, the acquired youthful state might persist.

Ultimately, could a wearable or an implanted device that constantly filters the blood be the solution to these quickly accumulating factors?

Irina: Maybe, but the first step of a day at a NextGen apheresis clinic once every few months might be more realistic.

Filtering seems to be a far more practical solution, so how are you progressing on the road to clinical trials?

Irina: We are collaborating with Dr. Dobri Kiprov, who is a practicing blood apheresis physician with 35 years of experience, and he is interested in repositioning this treatment for alleviating age-related illnesses.

Senolytics and removing senescent cells and the resulting inflammation they cause during the aging process has become a hot topic in the last year or so. What are your thoughts on senolytics as a potential co-therapy with a blood filtering approach?

Irina: Might be good, but we should be careful, as p16 is a normal, good gene that is needed for many productive activities by many cells.

What do you think it will take for the government to fully support the push to develop rejuvenation biotechnology?

Irina: Clear understanding of the current progress and separating the real science from snake oil is very important for guiding funding toward realistic clinical translation and away from the myth and hype.

The field is making amazing progress, but, sadly, it is plagued by snake oil. As much as an “anti-aging free market” encourages innovation, it also encourages hucksters. How can a member of the public tell the difference between credible science and snake oil?

Irina: I was thinking for some time about starting a popularized journal club webpage where ordinary people can see what we typically critically point out in the lab setting about published papers and clinical trials.

How can our readers learn more about your work and support your research?

Irina: The new Conboy lab website is coming up; meanwhile, contact me and Dr. Mike at iconboy@berkeley.edu and conboymj@berkeley.edu

Conclusion

We would like to thank Irina and Michael for taking the time to answer our questions and for providing the readers with a fascinating insight into their work.

Literature

[1] Conboy, I. M., Conboy, M. J., Smythe, G. M., & Rando, T. A. (2003). Notch-mediated restoration of regenerative potential to aged muscle. Science, 302(5650), 1575-1577.

[2] Conboy, I. M., Conboy, M. J., Wagers, A. J., Girma, E. R., Weissman, I. L., & Rando, T. A. (2005). Rejuvenation of aged progenitor cells by exposure to a young systemic environment. Nature, 433(7027), 760-764.

[3] Yousef, H., Conboy, M. J., Morgenthaler, A., Schlesinger, C., Bugaj, L., Paliwal, P., … & Schaffer, D. (2015). Systemic attenuation of the TGF-β pathway by a single drug simultaneously rejuvenates hippocampal neurogenesis and myogenesis in the same old mammal. Oncotarget, 6(14), 11959.

[4] Rebo, J., Mehdipour, M., Gathwala, R., Causey, K., Liu, Y., Conboy, M. J., & Conboy, I. M. (2016). A single heterochronic blood exchange reveals rapid inhibition of multiple tissues by old blood. Nature communications, 7.

[5] LĂłpez-OtĂ­n, C., Blasco, M. A., Partridge, L., Serrano, M., & Kroemer, G. (2013). The hallmarks of aging. Cell, 153(6), 1194-1217.

[6] Liu, A., Guo, E., Yang, J., Yang, Y., Liu, S., Jiang, X., … & Gewirtz, D. A. (2017). Young plasma reverses age‐dependent alterations in hepatic function through the restoration of autophagy. Aging cell.

[7] Rebo, J., Mehdipour, M., Gathwala, R., Causey, K., Liu, Y., Conboy, M. J., & Conboy, I. M. (2016). A single heterochronic blood exchange reveals rapid inhibition of multiple tissues by old blood. Nature communications, 7.

[8] Yousef, H., Conboy, M. J., Morgenthaler, A., Schlesinger, C., Bugaj, L., Paliwal, P., … & Schaffer, D. (2015). Systemic attenuation of the TGF-β pathway by a single drug simultaneously rejuvenates hippocampal neurogenesis and myogenesis in the same old mammal. Oncotarget, 6(14), 11959.

 

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 Nicola BagalĂ 

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.

Why Rejuvenation Biotechnology Could Benefit You – Article by Nicola BagalĂ 

Why Rejuvenation Biotechnology Could Benefit You – Article by Nicola BagalĂ 

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Nicola BagalĂ 

Editor’s Note: In this article, Mr. Nicola Bagalà discusses the benefits of Rejuvenation Biotechnology (age-reversing technology).  This article was originally published by the Life Extension Advocacy Foundation (LEAF) .

~ Kenneth Alum, Director of  Publication, U.S. Transhumanist Party, October 25, 2017

The benefits are many; some are obvious, and some are less so. The ones I’ll discuss in this article are the ones I see as obvious, tangible, immediate benefits for the people undergoing rejuvenation.

Health

We’ve kind of made a rather big deal of this one, haven’t we? Rejuvenation, we have said time and again, is pretty much all about health. The causal link between biological aging and pathologies is well established, and even when we account for the few elderly who are exceptionally healthy for their age, we’re left with the obvious fact that the older you are, the sicker you are, and even the aforementioned exceptions aren’t in the best of shape.

To the best of my knowledge, the number of people who actively wish to be sick at some point tends to be fairly small; so, when you think that a truly comprehensive rejuvenation platform would allow people to maintain youthful health irrespective of their age, the health benefits of rejuvenation become crystal clear. To be honest, this benefit alone would be enough for me, and I wouldn’t even need to look into the other ones.

Independence

Frailty, failing senses, weakness, and diseases aren’t good friends of independence, but they are good friends of old age. That’s why nursing homes exist in the first place to take care of elderly people who are no longer independent. Again, even the few exceptional cases who manage on their own until death don’t have it easy. Having people doing things for you can be nice in small doses, but having to have people doing things for you, not so much. Rejuvenation would eliminate the health issues that make the elderly dependent on others, which is a rather evident benefit.

Longevity

As odd as it may sound, longevity is really just a ‘side effect’ of health, because you can’t be healthy and dead. The longer you’re healthy enough to be alive, the longer you’ll live. Since rejuvenation would keep you in a state of youthful health, the obvious consequence is that you’d live longer. How much longer exactly is hard to say, but as long as you’re healthy enough to enjoy life, it’s safe to say that longevity would be a benefit; you’d have more time and energy to dedicate to what you love doing, and you could keep learning and growing as a person for an indefinitely long time.

You would not have to worry about the right age to change your job, get married, or start practicing a new sport, because your health wouldn’t depend on your age, and the time at your disposal would not have a definite upper limit. If the first few decades of your life weren’t as good as they could have been for one reason or another, you would still have time ahead and a chance of a better future, which sounds more appealing than ten years in a hospice with deteriorating health to me. (Let’s face it: If your life isn’t very good to begin with, a disease is hardly going to make it better.)

Additionally, a longer life would allow you to see what the future has in store for humanity. I wouldn’t be too quick to think the future will be all doom and gloom.

Today’s world is more peaceful and prosperous than it was in the past, and while there’s no certainty it will be at least this good in the future, there’s no certainty that it won’t be worth living in either. I would argue it’s best not to cross our bridges before we get there, and we shouldn’t opt out of life before we actually reach a point when we don’t care for it anymore, if ever.

I don’t think I will ever have a reason to give up on life or get bored with it, but I accept that somebody might think otherwise. Even so, I think being able to choose how long you want to live, and always living in the prime of health, is a much better deal than the current situation of having a more-or-less fixed lifespan with poor health near the end.

Choice

Ultimately, all of these perks can be summarised into one: choice. If we had fully working rejuvenation therapies available and were thus able to keep ourselves always perfectly healthy, regardless of our age, we could choose whether we wanted to use these therapies or not. Those who wish a longer, healthier life could avail themselves of the opportunity and escape aging for as long as they wanted; those who prefer to age and bow out the traditional way could just as easily not use the therapies.

Rejuvenation would give us an extra option we currently don’t have; everyone is forced to face the burden of aging and eventually die of it, for the moment. Being able to choose what we wish for ourselves is one of the most fundamental human rights and an obvious, unquestionable benefit.

About Nicola BagalĂ 

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.