Lifeboat Foundation

He Jiankui, the Chinese scientist who faced international condemnation in 2018 for creating the first gene-edited children, has presented a new research proposal involving modifying human embryos to address the challenges of the ageing population. He, who was sentenced to three years in prison in 2019 for “illegal medical practices,” resurfaced last year and announced the opening of a research lab in Beijing.

Imagine you could take a medicine that prevents the decline that come with age and keeps you healthy. Scientists are trying to find a drug that has these effects. The current most promising anti-ageing drug is Rapamycin, known for its positive effects on life and health span in experimental studies with laboratory animals. To obtain the maximum beneficial effects of the drug, it is often given lifelong. However, even at the low doses used in prevention for age-related decline, negative side effects may occur, and it is always desirable to use the lowest effective dose. A research group at the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing in Cologne, Germany, has now shown in laboratory animals that brief exposure to rapamycin has the same positive effects as lifelong treatment opening new doors for a potential application in humans.

Combatting the negative effects of ageing is increasingly becoming the focus of research scientists. Lifestyle changes can improve health of older people, but alone is not sufficient to prevent the ills of older age. Repurposing existing drugs for ‘geroprotection’ is providing an additional weapon in the prevention of age-related decline. The current most promising anti-ageing drug is rapamycin, a cell growth inhibitor and immunosuppressant that is normally used in cancer therapy and after organ transplantations. “At the doses used clinically, rapamycin can have undesirable side-effects, but for the use of the drug in the prevention of age-related decline, these need to be absent or minimal. Therefore, we wanted to find out when and how long we need to give rapamycin in order to achieve the same effects as lifelong treatment”, explains Dr. Paula Juricic, the leading investigator of the study in the department of Prof.

Cognitive dysfunction in aging is a major biomedical challenge. Whether treatment with klotho, a longevity factor, could enhance cognition in human-relevant models such as in nonhuman primates is unknown and represents a major knowledge gap in the path to therapeutics. We validated the rhesus form of the klotho protein in mice showing it increased synaptic plasticity and cognition. We then found that a single administration of low-dose, but not high-dose, klotho enhanced memory in aged nonhuman primates. Systemic low-dose klotho treatment may prove therapeutic in aging humans.

The earlier that Alzheimer’s disease and other similar conditions can be spotted, the better the treatment options are, and scientists have discovered a blood biomarker that could signal the risk of dementia many years in advance.

A team from the National Institute on Aging, the University of Texas, and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in the US, as well as other institutions across the world, looked at data on 10,981 individuals collected across the course of 25 years.

In particular, the researchers analyzed the proteome of these individuals: the complete set of proteins expressed in a body, driving all kinds of biological processes from cell communication to hormone levels.

Silicon Valley tech bro Bryan Johnson claims he’s shaved five years off his biological age. Longevity mastermind David Sinclair, Ph.D., says tests show his biological age is a full decade younger than the 53 candles on his birthday cake. Sixty-three-year-old functional medicine doctor Mark Hyman, M.D., say tests clock his biological age at a young 43. But can aging really be cured? Maybe not—but adopting or eschewing certain lifestyle habits to add years to your life.

When it comes to understanding how to reverse aging, there are tests on the market that claim to be able to help you do that. They calculate your ‘biological age’ to see how your body could be aging across various cell-level metrics versus the number of candles on your birthday cake.

But are these tests accurate?

I expect this to double over at least 2 maybe 3 times between now and 2030. AND, we here need to back it at every step if we really want indefinite life extension. Time to pick a side is right now.

The arrival of artificial intelligence into healthcare means everyone could one day have a doctor in their pocket, but Google’s chief health officer has urged caution about what AI can do and what its limits should be.

“There’s going to be an opportunity for people to have even better access to services, [and] to great quality services,” Dr Karen DeSalvo told Guardian Australia in an interview last week.

Continue reading “Dr Google? AI could be doctor in the pocket, but company’s health officer urges caution about its limits” »

Integrated Biosciences, a biotechnology company combining synthetic biology and machine learning to target aging, in collaboration with researchers at the University of California Santa Barbara, today announced a drug discovery platform that enables precise control of the integrated stress response (ISR), a biological pathway that is activated by cells in response to a wide variety of pathological and aging-associated conditions.

A new publication, “Optogenetic control of the integrated stress response reveals proportional encoding and the stress memory landscape,” authored by company founders and featured on the cover of Cell Systems describes a technique that triggers the ISR virtually using light and demonstrates how the accumulation of stress over time shifts a cell’s reaction from adaptation to apoptosis (programmed cell death).

“In a very real way, our platform puts cells into a virtual reality, making them experience stress in the absence of physical stressors,” said Maxwell Wilson, Ph.D., a co-founder of Integrated Biosciences and Assistant Professor of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology at the University of California Santa Barbara.

Ageing is not an inevitable fact of life – many animals have already found ways to delay death. Their clues might help us all enjoy longer and healthier lives.

Autophagy biology has emerged as a ray of hope in addressing age-related diseases such as neurodegenerative disorders. Substantial effort in academia has been directed at advancing our understanding of the field and paving the way for ground-breaking therapies. But with genuine challenges in harnessing the power of autophagy and in developing effective therapies in this disease area, how close are we to really finding the first autophagy boosting drugs…?

The devastating impact of neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), the most common form of Motor Neurone Disease (MND), cannot be overstated. According to the WHO, neurological diseases affect over a billion people globally and are the leading cause of disability and the second leading cause of death worldwide [1, 2]. Incidence is increasing too, predominantly driven by population growth and aging. And, with no prospect of a cure, people who develop these conditions face a bleak future.

Justifiably, this disease area has been the subject of intensive research for many years and there have been some breakthroughs along the way, possibly offering hope for the development of new therapies. However, translating scientific breakthroughs into viable drugs for patients has been enormously challenging.