Lifeboat Foundation

A new antibiotic developed by a Flinders University researcher is being heralded as a breakthrough in the war against a drug resistant superbug. Bacteria are winning the fight against antibiotics as they evolve to fight off traditional treatments, threatening decades of advancements in modern medicine, with predictions they will kill over 10 million people by 2050. The scientific development of new, effective and safe antibiotics is crucial in addressing the ever-growing threat posed by drug resistant bacteria around the world.

Clostridium difficile infection (CDI) is a potentially deadly infection in the large intestine most common in people who need to take antibiotics for a long period of time, particularly in Australia’s ageing population. Dr Ramiz Boulos, adjunct research associate at Flinders University and CEO of Boulos & Cooper Pharmaceuticsals, says the fact CDI is becoming resistant to traditional antibiotics is alarming and highlights the need to develop more effective treatments.

“Cases of CDI disease are rising and the strains are becoming more lethal. If there is an imbalance in your intestines it can begin to grow and release toxins that attack the lining of the intestines which leads to symptoms,” says Dr Boulos. Over the past ten years, various strains of C. difficile have emerged, and are associated with outbreaks of severe infections worldwide. One particular strain is easily transmitted between people and has been responsible for large outbreaks in hospitals in the United States and Europe. “It’s concerning when you consider CDI is one of the most common infections acquired during hospital visits in the Western hemisphere, and the most likely cause of diarrhea for patients and staff in hospitals.”

Continue reading “Fighting Deadly Drug Resistant Bacteria in Intestines with New Antibiotic” »

I had an amazing time on the podcast with David Sinclair today! He dropped some amazing knowledge about the current state of the science of longevity!

Pharmaceutical microbiology, quality assurance, healthcare, cleanroom, contamination control, microbiology, tim sandle, sterility, disinfection.

A new, very good article on aging, modern aging research and its history, RAAD feest and other initiatives, on model organisms, genetics and future lifespans. “… In early December 2018, just a few months after RAADfest, I visited the Buck Institute for a daylong symposium titled “Live Better Longer: A Celebration of 30 Years of Research on Aging.” That wasn’t an arbitrary demarcation: Aging is one of the rare areas of modern science with a specific launch date. In this case, it was January 1988, when Tom Johnson, a behavioral geneticist at the University of California, Irvine, published a paper that linked a genetic mutation he named “age-1” to longer lifespans in a transparent, microscopic, mostly hermaphroditic roundworm known in scientific circles as C. elegans. Prior to Johnson’s discovery, aging had not received a lot of attention from researchers. In the 1820s, Benjamin Gompertz, a self-trained mathematician, concluded that humans don’t start to break down at some magic age but are constantly declining and losing the ability to repair themselves, a concept now referred to as the Gompertz law of mortality. The first hint that there might be a cellular mechanism underlying the aging process came more than a century later, in the 1930s, when two Cornell scientists discovered that rats kept on calorically restricted diets lived significantly longer than their more satiated brethren. But overall, the field was mostly known as being a haven for charlatans and quacks peddling immortality elixirs and other magical cures — a reputation that continued even after Johnson’s work was published…In 1993, Cynthia Kenyon, an assistant professor at the University of California, San Francisco, discovered that mutations on a different gene, called daf-2, caused C. elegans to live twice as long as expected. Several years later, Gary Ruvkun, a researcher at Harvard Medical School, showed that these so-called worm-aging genes were closely related to genes in the insulin-signaling system of humans. Around the same time, MIT’s Guarente and some of his colleagues discovered the first of several genes in yeast — which are also present in humans — linked to dramatically extended lifespan…” https://medium.com/s/2069/how-long-will-we-live-in-2069-f03e698f6de2

With this promising research on the horizon, how long might humans live in the future? Fantastical claims to longevity have existed since the dawn of recorded time, but reliable data about maximum human lifespan only dates to the mid-1950s, when the Guinness Book of World Records began independently verifying claims. Even then, initially corroborated ages can end up disproven: On December 27, Russian researchers published a paper arguing that the current world record holder, a Frenchwoman named Jeanne Calment, who said she was 122 when she died in 1997, had stolen her mother’s identity and was actually 99 at the time.

Assuming Calment wasn’t a fraud, since 1955, 46 people have made it to age 115. Nine of them have made it to 117 — and only two, Calment and an American woman named Sarah Knauss, have made it past 117. (Knauss died in 1999 at age 119). Over that same time frame, just under 11 billion people have been alive. That means roughly .0000004204133 percent of people have made it to 115. You’re 79,333 times more likely to get hit by lightning than you are to live to 115; 22,455 times more likely to end up in the emergency room from a golf cart accident; and 11,817 times more likely to get murdered.

Continue reading “How Long Will We Live in 2069?” »

We specialize in the cryo-preservation of humans and pets, DNA & tissue storage as well as cryonics outreach and public education.

UNITY Biotechnologies has recently announced an expansion of its first-stage human trial of UBX0101, a drug that has been shown to have senolytic properties in mice [1] and that the company hopes will be useful in treating painful osteoarthritis of the knee.

An expanded clinical trial

UNITY Biotechnologies, a $495 million biotech company in the process of creating senolytic medicines that target one of the aging processes, has just announced an expansion of its first-stage human trial of the first drug in its pipeline (UBX0101), which targets painful osteoarthritis of the knee.

Attitudes about life extension have significantly changed within the last decade.

While medical schools have had the idea that aging should be brought under medical control for over a century, the explicit desire to greatly extend one’s life remained rare – until very recently. A new study by YouGov, a market intelligence company that researches multiple topics, found that, today, one in five Americans agrees with the statement “I want to live forever.” Is this the result of some sort of bias, or does it mean that we are reaching a turning point, after which society will start boldly and unambiguously clamoring for the cure for aging?

The desire for a long life

Continue reading “The American Public Increasingly Desires Life Extension” »

He uses infrared lasers, cryotherapy machines, and a lot of stem cells.

We have launched a new webinar series featuring discussion panels with the researchers + Q&A session for patrons. The first episode hosted by Dr. Oliver Medvedik will feature Dr. Aubrey de Grey, Dr. Matthew O’Connor, Michael Rae, and Dr. Amutha Boominathan from the SENS Research Foundation.

If you are a Lifespan Hero you can join us live for the show and get access to the recording for a few months before the public release.

Our work is largely supported by the generosity of our monthly patrons, the Lifespan Heroes, and this year, we will be showing our appreciation for that support with the launch of a brand new initiative – our new webinar series where you can meet the scientists working on the solutions to aging and age-related diseases.

Continue reading “Announcing a New Webinar Series – MitoSENS” »