Lifeboat Foundation

Summary: Rilmenidine, a drug commonly prescribed to help treat hypertension can help slow the effects of aging and extend lifespan, a new study reports.

Source: University of Liverpool.

Researchers have found that the drug rilmenidine can extend lifespan and slow aging.

Summary: A subset of taste cells may play a key role in the body’s immune response to harmful oral microbes. The findings could help taste loss associated with infections, aging, and dysregulation of the oral microbiome caused by chemotherapy.

Source: University of Nebraska Lincoln.

Taste cells are heavily exposed to the microbes in the mouth, but their role in helping the body respond to those microbes has not yet been studied in detail.

Improving intelligence has preoccupied society since French psychologist Alfred Binet devised the first IQ test. Since then, the notion that intelligence can be calibrated has opened new avenues into figuring out how it can also be increased.

Psychological scientists have been on the front lines of modifying intelligence. So much intelligence is genetically determined, it is, to a large extent, hereditary. But there are still some areas in which it can be malleable.

Intelligence is generally divided into two categories: fluid intelligence and crystallized intelligence. Fluid intelligence is the ability to reason in an abstract way and solve problems. Someone who can come up with dozens of new uses for, say, a toothbrush would demonstrate superior fluid intelligence. And this is exactly the kind of intelligence that tends to diminish as we grow older. The acquisition of intellectual skills, or the ability to read and comprehend, is known as crystallized intelligence, and this form tends to improve as we age.

Cellular reprogramming builds on the Nobel Prize-winning work of Shinya Yamanaka, who showed that adult cells could be transformed back into stem cells by exposing them to a specific set of genome-regulating proteins known as transcription factors. The Salk team’s innovation was to reduce the exposure times to the so-called Yamanaka factors, which they found could reverse epigenetic changes to the cells without reverting them to stem cells.

While the approach led to clear increases in lifespan in prematurely aging mice, the fact that no one had been able to replicate the result in healthy mice since then raised doubts about the approach. “Different groups have tried this experiment, and the data have not been positive so far,” Alejandro Ocampo, from the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, who carried out the original Salk experiments, told MIT Technology Review.

But now, Rejuvenate Bio claims that when they exposed healthy mice near the end of their lives to a subset of the Yamanaka factors, they lived for another 18 weeks on average, compared to just 9 weeks for those that didn’t undergo cellular reprogramming.

Aging is a complex process best characterized as the chronic dysregulation of cellular processes leading to deteriorated tissue and organ function. While aging cannot currently be prevented, its impact on lifespan and healthspan in the elderly can potentially be minimized by interventions that aim to return these cellular processes to optimal function. Recent studies have demonstrated that partial reprogramming using the Yamanaka factors (or a subset; OCT4, SOX2, and KLF4; OSK) can reverse age-related changes in vitro and in vivo. However, it is still unknown whether the Yamanaka factors (or a subset) are capable of extending the lifespan of aged wild type mice. Here, we show that systemically delivered AAVs, encoding an inducible OSK system, in 124-week-old mice extends the median remaining lifespan by 109% over wild-type controls and enhances several health parameters. Importantly, we observed a significant improvement in frailty scores indicating that we were able to improve the healthspan along with increasing the lifespan. Furthermore, in human keratinocytes expressing exogenous OSK, we observed significant epigenetic markers of age-reversal, suggesting a potential reregulation of genetic networks to a younger, potentially healthier state. Together, these results may have important implications for the development of partial reprogramming interventions to reverse age-associated diseases in the elderly.

All authors performed the work while employed at Rejuvenate Bio Inc. Rejuvenate Bio is a therapeutics company translating gene therapies to treat age-related diseases.

In 2020 I joined the private beta test of Open AI’s Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3), which is an earlier version of ChatGPT. When ChatGPT was released in November 2022, I started experimenting with it. For over two years I’ve been exploring the strengths and limits of this technology and assessing how this tool could be useful to me. I’m also interested how this new technology is being utilized by scientists and academics to make meaningful contributions to academic work and education.

A recent study demonstrated that ChatGPT was able to pass the US Medical Licensing Exam without any special training prior to the exam and was able to demonstrate a high level of insight in its explanations. The results suggest that ChatGPT may be able to assist with medical education.

I published the first article about my experiments with ChatGPT last week. The article entitled How The Evolution Of AI In Healthcare Aligns With Thomas Kuhn’s Structure has been viewed over 13,000 times, and has received and

People suffering from schizophrenia can expect to die 15 years sooner than they ordinarily would. A new study has now found that this could be partly caused by advanced brain aging. The research findings were published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry.

Schizophrenia is associated with an increased risk of premature death, partially as a result of suicide or poor physical health. Studies to date have suggested that the high prevalence of disease, long-term cognitive decline and excess deaths in people with schizophrenia could in part be caused when their brain’s biological age overtakes the chronological age.

According to a few small-scale studies, this discrepancy called brain-predicted age difference (brain-PAD) has been found to be consistently higher in schizophrenic patients compared to healthy individuals. The studies have also shown that the gap between the two ages mainly widens during the first years after the onset of the illness.

In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, a young black woman from Baltimore, died of cancer. However, before her death a small sample of her cells were taken from her without her knowledge, and these cells did not die. Unlike every other previous sample of human cells, these continued to grow and multiply and still do so today. The HeLa cells became the first ‘immortalised human cell line’ and have helped both save and create millions of lives ever since. Video by Dan John Animation by Lily Baker.

A ‘longevity protein’ discovered in the DNA of centenarians promises to rejuvenate the heart by at least 10 years. Hope comes from a preclinical study coordinated by Annibale Puca of the MultiMedica group in Milan and Paolo Madeddu of the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom, funded by the British Heart Foundation and the Italian Ministry of Health and published in ‘Cardiovascular Research’, a journal of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC).