Lifeboat Foundation

A team of researchers led by Principal Investigator Dr. Jan Gruber from Yale-NUS College has discovered a combination of pharmaceutical drugs that not only increases healthy lifespan in the microscopic worm Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans), but also delays the rate of ageing in them, a finding that could someday mean longer, healthier lives for humans.

The study, published in the peer-reviewed international journal Developmental Cell on 8 October 2018, lays crucial groundwork for further research into designing drug combinations that produce the same effect in mammals.

“Many countries in the world, including Singapore, are facing problems related to ageing populations,” said Dr. Gruber, whose lab and research team made the discovery. “If we can find a way to extend healthy lifespan and delay ageing in people, we can counteract the detrimental effects of an ageing population, providing countries not only medical and economic benefits, but also a better quality of life for their people.”

Continue reading “Researchers discover drug cocktail that increases lifespan” »

Cancer is the poster child of age-related diseases, and a recent study sheds light on why the risk of cancer rises dramatically as we age.

Abstract

For many cancer types, incidence rises rapidly with age as an apparent power law, supporting the idea that cancer is caused by a gradual accumulation of genetic mutations. Similarly, the incidence of many infectious diseases strongly increases with age. Here, combining data from immunology and epidemiology, we show that many of these dramatic age-related increases in incidence can be modeled based on immune system decline, rather than mutation accumulation. In humans, the thymus atrophies from infancy, resulting in an exponential decline in T cell production with a half-life of ∼16 years, which we use as the basis for a minimal mathematical model of disease incidence. Our model outperforms the power law model with the same number of fitting parameters in describing cancer incidence data across a wide spectrum of different cancers, and provides excellent fits to infectious disease data.

Continue reading “Dr. Sam Palmer – Thymic Involution and Cancer Risk” »

Pharmacist turned Entrepreneur with Ira Pastor? Ep. 241

Investigating a line of old, abandoned research led to Arigos’ innovation.

Use alongside traditional treatment in advanced cases ‘could benefit 3,000 men in UK’.

Congratulations to the Forest Organics team and their awesome new site — https://www.myforestorganics.com/

Hundreds of crops in developing countries are relatively unknown in the developed world because they’re often hard to grow or export. But scientists have found that CRISPR editing can speed up traditional plant breeding techniques.

New DNA tools can decode your natural lifespan…

Your life span is written in your DNA, and we’re learning to read the code.

Could deafness be reversed? Scientists re-grow damaged hair cells that have been killed off by age or noise inside the ear…

Researchers from the University of Rochester found that viruses, genetics and even existing drugs could cause little hairs to regrow in the inner ear. These hairs pick up on noises entering the ear.

Continue reading “Deafness could be reversed? Scientists discover how to regrow lost cells in the ear” »