Lifeboat Foundation

Google sister company Calico and drug giant AbbVie are chipping in another $1 billion to cure diseases associated with aging, the companies said Tuesday.

Senolytics developed by UNITY Biotechnology are currently in Phase-1 clinical trials.

Today we are pleased to announce that UNITY Biotechnology is going into human clinical trials with the first true rejuvenation therapy that directly targets one of the processes of aging: senescent cells.

The quiet revolution

Continue reading “The First Rejuvenation Therapy Reaches Human Trials” »

The secret of life extension from vampires.

Getting older and dying is so inconvenient. Eating a healthy diet and exercising is a good start in warding off death, but if you’re looking to truly up your immortality game, the answer is simple: teen blood. For a whopping $8,000, the old and the wealthy can receive a blood transfusion from a teenager. Yes, you read that right.

At Ambrosia’s clinics in San Francisco and Tampa, Florida, the wrinkled are receiving what founder Dr. Jesse Karmazin simply refers to as a “young blood treatment.” Patients are administered a transfusion of around 0.66 gallons of blood acquired from donors between the ages of 16 and 25.

Continue reading “Why Older People Are Using the Blood of Teenagers to Live Longer” »

Jeanne Louise Calment lived for 122 years and 164 days, the oldest verified age of any person, ever. Her interviews revealed a portrait of the centenarian in high spirits: “I’ve only ever had one wrinkle, and I’m sitting on it,” she told reporters when she turned 110.

Calment died in 1997 in Arles, France, where she spent much of her impressively long life. No one else, according to accurate records, has lived beyond 120 years.

Whether there’s a limit to the human life span is an age-old question. An actuary named Benjamin Gompertz proposed in 1825 that mortality rates accelerate exponentially as we grow older.

Continue reading “A New Study Is Questioning The Limits of Human Lifespan” »

An interview with regenerative medicine luminary Dr. Anthony Atala.

After meeting him at the Astana Global Challenges Summit 2018, we’ve kindly been granted an interview by Dr. Anthony Atala, M.D., Director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine and the W. Boyce Professor and Chair of Urology at Wake Forest University.

Dr. Atala is one of the most influential names in the field of regenerative medicine and biotechnology. His research focuses on growing human cells and tissues for use in transplants, and given the constant dire need for organ donors worldwide, his work is poised to improve—and save—the lives of millions. He and his team have already successfully engineered and transplanted bladders into living patients, and as he’s told us himself, more types of tissue have been engineered and tested in models; hopefully, they will one day be usable in patients as well.

Continue reading “Dr. Anthony Atala — Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine” »

July 12th our special one-day biotech and business conference launches in New York City. This event brings together some of the leading experts in aging research and investment and promises to be an action-packed day.

For more information please visit: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/ending-age-related-diseases-inv…5733391806

Video Creator: Jason Shulkin, Motion Graphics Artist. www.jasonshulkin.com

Scientists at Hollings Cancer Center at the Medical University of South Carolina have found that human lung cancer cells resist dying by controlling parts of the aging process, in results published online May 10th in the Journal of Biological Chemistry. The discovery could help us better understand aging and eventually could lead to new treatments for cancer.

Cancer becomes more common as people get older, but scientists are still searching for answers about why this happens. At Hollings Cancer Center, research into the connections between aging and cancer is led by Besim Ogretmen, Ph.D., SmartState Endowed Chair in Lipidomics and Drug Discovery. Ogretmen’s team found that cancer cells have specific ways to resist dying the way normal cells do. They do so by protecting the tips of their chromosomes, which hold our DNA, from age-related damage.

Ogretmen studies how cancer cells are different than normal cells to understand how cancer grows and spreads in the body. His work is part of an $8.9 million program project grant to research how alterations of lipid metabolism affect cancer therapy. The grant is helping fund a clinical trial of an anticancer medicine to inhibit cellular signaling that helps cancer survive. The drug was found to be useful against cancer in the research reported in the group’s new paper.

“I am extremely excited about the research involved in the current Scientific Reports article,” said Joseph I. Shapiro, M.D., senior author and dean of the Joan C. Edwards School of Medicine. “I believe that our team has not only implicated the NAKL discovered by our colleague, Dr. Zijian Xie, in the aging process but identified a novel therapeutic target as well as a specific pharmacological strategy to actually slow the aging process. Although it will be some time before we can test these concepts in human subjects, I am cautiously optimistic that clinical therapeutics will ultimately result.”

The team’s extensive year-long study first focused on aging mice who were given a western diet to stimulate oxidant stress to antagonize the NAKL. The western diet increased the functional and structural evidence for aging; however, the introduction of pNaKtide slowed these changes in the mice. The same results were then replicated when human dermal fibroblasts were exposed to different types of oxidant stress in vitro by stimulating the NAKL, increasing expression of senescence markers, and causing cell injury. With pNaKtide treatment, the researchers demonstrated that the negative attributes associated with aging were significantly dampened.

“Our data clearly suggest that the Na/K-ATPase oxidant amplification loop is intimately involved in the aging process and, if confirmed in human studies, might ultimately serve as a therapeutic target,” said first author Komal Sodhi, M.D., an associate professor of surgery and biomedical sciences at the Joan C. Edwards School of Medicine. “If the pNaKtide can be safely used in humans, it might be possible to study the applicability of that specific agent to the problem of clinical aging.”

Today, we have part one of a two-part interview with Dr. Michael Fossel, the driving force behind Telocyte, a new company focused on telomerase therapy for various diseases, and a strong advocate of telomerase therapy to treat human disease over the past three decades.

I interviewed Dr. Fossel as an individual thought leader in this field and not in his role representing Telocyte, so the opinions stated here are purely his own.

Born in 1950, Michael Fossel grew up in New York and lived in London, Palo Alto, San Francisco, Portland, and Denver. He graduated cum laude from Phillips Exeter Academy, received a joint B.A. and M.A. in psychology in four years from Wesleyan University in Connecticut, and, after completing a Ph.D. in neurobiology at Stanford University in 1978, went on to finish his M.D. at Stanford Medical School in two and a half years. He was awarded a National Science Foundation Fellowship and taught at Stanford University, where he began studying aging with an emphasis on premature aging syndromes. Dr. Fossel was a Clinical Professor of Medicine at Michigan State University for almost three decades and taught the Biology of Aging at Grand Valley State University.