Cancer has been prominent on the schedule here of late - rightfully so, as it's a big, bad problem we're going to have to solve if we want to enjoy any healthy life extension brought about by regenerative medicine, immune system repair and the like.

One of a number of approaches demonstrating progress of late is the use of viruses to kill cancer cells:

The new [therapy] uses a genetically-engineered form of the adenovirus, which normally causes colds. ... When injected into cancerous tumors, the virus quickly multiplies in the cancer cells and kills them, the team said. ... The new adenovirus can target only cancer cells and does not harm normal cells, the team said. ... Following three rounds of injections, more than 90 percent of cancer cells in the brains, liver, lungs and womb of mice disappeared within 60 days, the team said. Clinical tests will be carried out early next year and last 18 months.

It's scientific judo: find an existing biological system that does some or most of what you'd like to achieve, and tinker it into shape for the task at hand. Viruses are good at killing cells, are simple enough for modern biotechnology to manipulate, and can be made to be very selective. Here are another two teams working away at turning viruses into cures for the cancer that waits in your future:

New cancer-fighting virus kills invasive brain cells

Researchers funded by The Terry Fox Foundation and the Canadian Cancer Society have found that a cancer-fighting virus called VSV kills the most malignant form of brain cancer in mice.

...

The research team first modified the virus by altering one of the genes to make it safer in normal cells but still able to kill cancer cells. They then used a new way of delivering the virus - intravenously instead of directly into the tumour - and were able to target the main tumour as well as the tumour cells that had spread from the main mass.

...

"An ideal cancer-fighting virus should have effective delivery into multiple sites within the tumour, evade the body's immune responses, reproduce rapidly, spread within the tumour and infect cells that have spread. In this study, that's exactly what we found that VSV has done when injected intravenously," says Dr. Forsyth.

The researchers tested VSV on 14 cell lines of malignant glioma and found that the virus infected and killed all cell lines. The normal cell lines - those that did not contain malignant glioma cells - were not affected.

Mayo Clinic Cancer Center: Harnessing the measles virus to attack cancer

Mayo Clinic Cancer Center has opened a new clinical study using a vaccine strain of the measles virus to attack recurrent glioblastoma multiforme, a largely untreatable brain tumor. This is the second of several pending molecular medicine studies in patients using measles to kill cancer.

...

Many cancer cells, including glioblastoma cells, overexpress a specific protein, CD46, which allows tumor cells to evade destruction by the immune system. Strains of the measles virus, including the one in this study, seek out this protein, entering the glioblastoma multiforme tumor. Upon entry, the virus begins to spread, infecting nearby tumor cells and fusing them, which augments the effect of infection and increases cancer cell death.

Technorati tags: biotechnology, cancer research

Posted by Reason at 8:39 PM
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Both the New York Times and Wall Street Journal rolled out articles on calorie restriction research today; more than that, they are representive of the mainstreaming of the will to a gentle, slow, modest form of healthy life extension as pushed by the folk behind the Longevity Dividend proposal. The New York Times first:

Many scientists regard the study of life extension, once just a reliable plotline in science fiction, as a national priority. The number of Americans 65 and older will double in the next 25 years to about 72 million, according to government census data. By then, seniors will account for nearly 20 percent of the population, up from just 12 percent in 2003.

Earlier this year, four prominent gerontologists, among them Dr. Miller, published a paper calling for the government to spend $3 billion annually in pursuit of a modest goal: delaying the onset of age-related diseases by seven years.

Doing so, the authors asserted, would lay the foundation for a healthier and wealthier country, a so-called longevity dividend.

While in general I'm all for raising public awareness of any plasticity of the human lifespan, we've all seen the objections to the Longevity Dividend; it is unambitious and slow, setting the bar so low that the target gains will probably happen anyway. It is the sort of lowest common denominator big tent approach that gets politicians to spend tax dollars on inefficient ways forward while ignoring the real possibilities of doing far better.

As I've pointed out in the past, the stage is being set for the same sort of conflict that occurred in nanotechnology in recent years. On the one hand, you have the larger group of moderates who support a slowing of aging via understanding and manipulating metabolic processes. On the other side, a smaller group of engineers who support the reversal of aging by repairing known forms molecular damage. The moderates - who are chasing large sums of public money from the government - may come to feel they must defend their inferior path against people with better plans and more ambitious targets. The nanotechnology fight was quite ugly; one can hope that it won't happen for healthy life extension science.

We all benefit when the atmosphere is one of friendly competition and may the best science win. At heart, the folk working on metabolic science have the right intentions:

“It’s a just big waste of talent and wisdom to have people die in their 60s and 70s,” said Dr. Sinclair of Harvard.

And just as big a waste in any following decade. Hopefully more people will come to see that in the years ahead - if 10 extra years, why not 20, or 30, or more? There is no age at which it is anything other than a tragedy that people suffer and die, with no help nor rescue.

But on to the WSJ piece, which - sadly - requires registration. A few interesting quotes:

A company that Dr. Sinclair co-founded in 2004, Sirtris Pharmaceuticals Inc., of Cambridge, MA, has begun testing a resveratrol-based drug in diabetic patients. It has raised $82 million from venture capitalists, a hefty sum for an early-stage biotech.

...

It faces competition from Elixir Pharmaceuticals Inc., also based in Cambridge, which Dr. Sinclair's former mentor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology biologist Leonard Guarente, co-founded in 1999 to develop drugs based on gene variants that slow aging. The niche also includes BioMarker Pharmaceuticals of Campbell, CA, and LifeGen Technologies of Madison, WI, both of which focus on mimicking CR with drugs.

The companies hope to develop therapies for diseases, not antiaging pills. One reason is that the Food and Drug Administration doesn't recognize aging as a problem warranting treatment. But if a drug could retard aging, it might delay the onset and possibly the progression of age-related diseases. "When you slow aging," says University of Illinois epidemiologist S. Jay Olshansky, "you push a host of diseases to later ages at one fell swoop -- cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer's, diabetes, as well as everything else that's negative about growing older."

The FDA issue makes my blood boil; it so distorts the entire process of funding, research and development that no meaningful non-philanthropic funding will be dedicated to directly attacking the problem of aging. This is not even to get into the ongoing disaster that government intervention has made of medical research in the US. High prices, forgone opportunities, vanishing investment. Such is the end result of repressive regulation.

If telomerase inhibitors were a new kind of computer chip, they would have been on every Wal-Mart pharmacy shelf and selling for ten dollars a bottle by now. ... In a free system, life insurance companies, consumer magazines, and other competing interests would provide medical databases. Maybe even the AMA would become a force for "truth-in-medicine," as it was to some degree before the creation of the FDA. Under common law but free of arbitrary regulation, drug development would be as fast as computer development. Cancer would be extinct and human beings would finally, really, own their own bodies.

But back to the WSJ piece; I think you'll find this interesting:

Dr. Sinclair later got another call from Mr. LoGiudice, this time inviting him to make a pitch for funding to one of Mr. Rasnow's wealthy acquaintances, Paul Glenn, a venture capitalist and a longtime supporter of research on aging. After Dr. Sinclair did so, the Glenn Foundation for Medical Research in Santa Barbara, CA, awarded $5 million to Harvard Medical School to launch a center on the basic mechanisms of aging with Dr. Sinclair as its founding director. Now plans are afoot to expand the center into a leading institute on aging, says Mr. Glenn, with start-up funding of $[75 - 100] million.

You should head over to the Paul F. Glenn Laboratories for the Biological Mechanisms of Aging and take a look; seems it'll be getting much bigger fairly soon.

Technorati tags: biotechnology, calorie restriction, life extension

Posted by Reason at 6:07 PM
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We need reliable, low-cost, effective cancer therapies as a part of the next few decades of our attempts to live longer, healthier lives. Ultimately, we'll need something better than that - some form of fix or replacement for the very complex, fundamental cellular structures and mechanisms that make our cells work, but in the end lead to cancer - but it doesn't do to look too far ahead when you haven't yet fixed the first rung of the ladder. If the years ahead proceed much as I would expect, we'll see great gains in regenerative medicine and restoration of the newly-understood elderly immune system, amongst other advances. Just these alone will lead to more years of healthy life for average folk who generally took care of their health - and a large jump in the number of cancers in the population. Under the present cellular blueprint, the longer your body runs, the more likely it is to generate the unchecked, malfunctioning cells that cause cancer.

From the high level view - the view of building infrastructure and progress decade by decade - the most promising anti-cancer strategy of the moment appears to be a matter of finding and targeting the most obvious biochemical signatures that distinguish cancerous cells from healthy cells. There are a lot of them, as it turns out, of varying effectiveness. More are discovered with each passing month:

A new class of drugs - being developed by a major pharmaceutical company - targets an enzyme that helps cells divide; in cancer, this enzyme, called Aurora B, goes into overdrive, possibly leading to uncontrolled and abnormal cell divisions.

In essence, cancer cells are quite different. They act differently, and their biochemical programming is different. The breakneck pace of advance in biotechnology, driven by advances in processing power and the ability to engineer ever more effectively at the nanoscale, is now enabling researchers to take advantage of this fact. Firstly, scientists are able to cost-effectively identify actual, detectable differences between cancer cells and healthy cells. Secondly, scientists can cost-effectively design and produce complex molecules - drugs - to interact precisely with cancer cells in a given fashion. This second part of the equation was a tough and uncertain process as recently as 15 years ago; while still a challenge, it has become much easier in recent years. Given another decade of progress, turning out the design for a molecule to precisely perform a given biological task - with no side-effects - will be a short task that a researcher hands off to a computer.

On the practical drug engineering side, one very promising avenue of inquiry is based on the use of dendrimers, branching bush-like molecules that are not at all toxic, and don't trigger the immune system. The Wikipedia entry has a pretty picture, but the National Dendrimer & Nanotechnology Center introdution is somewhat more helpful.

Dendrimers are the first large, man-made molecules with precise, nano-sized composition and well-defined three-dimensional shapes. Current polymer molecules are long, spaghetti-like strands that grow in only two directions. Dendrimer molecules grow three-dimensionally by the addition of shells of branched molecules to a central core. The cores are also spacious and have “sticky” points on the outside to which various chemical units can be attached. By adjusting chemical properties of the core, the shells, and especially the surface layer, dendrimers can be tailored to fit the needs of specific applications.

Because you can easily attach an array of tailored molecules to a dendrimer - such as the drugs you have just designed to detect, interact with or kill cancer cells - it allows considerable efficiency in the development process. Knowing you have a safe way to hook together a cancer detector, a key to get inside the cancer cell, and the payload that will kill the cell, you can focus on making the best possible component parts of your new cancer therapy. Researchers are doing just this, and some of them are getting pretty good at it.

On the whole, I am optimistic on the prospects for the defeat of cancer. Resources are pouring into the field, and the trend in supporting and enabling technologies is towards accelerating progress. The long term solution will be tougher - but then, we'll be much, much better at this biotechnology business by the time that comes around to being next in the queue.

Technorati tags: biotechnology, cancer, life extension

Posted by Reason at 1:06 PM
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A recent release shows scientists pulling together varied threads of research into a view of aging, changing metabolism and neuron death in neurodegenerative disease. A number of different age-related neurodegenerative diseases involve a diminishing population of specific, essential cells in a small part of the brain. Parkinson's disease is one, and Huntington's - examined in this article - is another.

Their new evidence ties a metabolic defect to the loss of neurons in the striatum, the brain's "movement control" region. That neurodegeneration leads to the uncontrollable "dance-like" movements characteristic of the fatal, genetic disorder.

The researchers suggest that the selective loss of cells occurs because some parts of the brain are much more vulnerable to changes in metabolism. They also propose that the reduction in metabolic efficiency with aging - due to general molecular wear and tear, or other age-related conditions resulting from molecular wear and tear - contributes to the prevalence of neurodegenerative conditions in the old. In other words, metabolic decline is a necessary precursor.

As metabolic function generally diminishes in older people, such a connection might explain why many neurodegenerative diseases--such as Lou Gehrig's, Alzheimer's, and Parkinson's diseases, for example--tend to emerge and worsen with age

In the case of Huntington's, that decline comes from a genetic error that appears to mess up mitochondrial function - the essential process by which the body generates energy to power cells - hence young people can suffer the condition if that error is severe enough.

The problem, they found, lay instead in fat cells known as brown adipose tissue (BAT). In rodents, BAT is the primary tissue that controls body temperature. When the brain signals that the body is cold, the gene called PGC-1a increases production of a protein in BAT that leads the cellular powerhouses known as mitochondria to generate heat instead of energy.

In the BAT of hypothermic Huntington's mice, PGC-1a levels rose but failed to elicit the other events required to maintain normal body temperature, they found.

The link to mitochondria-regulating PGC-1a led the team back to the brain, and specifically to the striatum. That brain region is most affected in Huntington's disease and is particularly sensitive to mitochondrial dysfunction.

The researchers found that tissue taken from striatums of Huntington's disease patients and mice showed reduced activity of genes controlled by PGC-1a. They further found reduced mitochondrial function in the brains of Huntington's mice.

While scientists continue to work on uncovering the first cause of age-related changes in the body, there are intermediate term strategies for treating people who suffer from these very specific neurodegenerative conditions. One such strategy is to develop the technology to use embryonic stem cells to grow replacement neurons for those small populations in decline:

Unlike normal somatic cells, human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) can proliferate indefinitely in culture in an undifferentiated state where they do not appear to undergo senescence and yet remain nontransformed. Cells maintain their pluripotency both in vivo and in vitro, exhibit high telomerase activity, and maintain telomere length after prolonged in vitro culture. Thus, hESCs may provide an unlimited cell source for replacement in a number of aging-related neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease as well as other neurological disorders including spinal cord injuries.

Taming and understanding embryonic stem cells is the key to the next generation of regenerative medicine: any tissue for replacement in the body, produced on demand in a precisely controlled fashion.

Technorati tags: regenerative medicine, stem cell research

Posted by Reason at 9:40 AM
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Via the transhumantech list, signs of movement from the world of cryonics research:

Suspended Animation will be hosting a special meeting at the end of May, 2007 to disseminate important new information about cryonics research & development, and services.

Under the broad title "Advances in Human Cryopreservation," we will present progress reports from a wide range of sources including 21st Century Medicine, Critical Care Research, Suspended Animation, Alcor Foundation, The Cryonics Institute, and the American Cryonics Society. The presentations will be entirely new-not derived from speeches that have been delivered elsewhere.

From the rather attractive PDF-format meeting materials:

We will provide information about the most ambitious research plan in the history of cryobiology, describing stage one of an unprecedented effort to achieve reversible whole-body vitrification without the need for cell repair via [future] nanotechnology.

That's a pretty bold plan, given the current state of thinking on and practice of cryonics; I look forward to seeing more of the details.

As the attention of more of the older members of the healthy life extension community turns - sensibly - to cryonics, it will be most interesting to see how an increased flow of support and funding translates into research and a plan for future development, growth and professionalism. Younger folk can hope to engineer a future of rejuvenating biotechnology - such as that proposed by the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence - that will rescue us before we die from old age. A good backup plan is a good backup plan, however, and we should be glad that a fair number of people are working on that.

Technorati tags: cryonics, life extension

Posted by Reason at 8:10 PM
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The latest volume of Interdisciplinary Topics in Gerontology contains a brace of papers on calorie restriction - or dietary restriction (DR) as folk in that field call it - and its beneficial effects on metabolism. Some of the more interesting ones:

The Role of Hormesis in Life Extension by Dietary Restriction:

The level of food restriction that results in life extension and retarded aging in rodents also enhances their ability to cope with intense stressors. Moreover, this level of dietary restriction (DR) leads to a modest increase in the daily peak concentration of plasma free corticosterone, which strongly points to DR as a low-intensity stressor. These findings suggest that hormesis plays a role in the life-extending and anti-aging actions of DR.

Secrets of the lac Operon:

Elevated blood glucose associated with diabetes produces progressive and apparently irreversible damage to many cell types. Conversely, reduction of glucose extends life span in yeast, and dietary restriction reduces blood glucose. Therefore it has been hypothesized that cumulative toxic effects of glucose drive at least some aspects of the aging process and, conversely, that protective effects of dietary restriction are mediated by a reduction in exposure to glucose.

Anti-Inflammatory Mechanisms of Dietary Restriction in Slowing Aging Processes:

Underlying the beneficial effects of DR is the attenuation of system-wide inflammatory processes including those occurring within the central nervous system. During normal aging a progressive neuroinflammatory state builds in the brain involving astrocytes and microglia, the primary cellular components of neuroinflammation. DR attenuates the age-related activation of astrocytes and microglia with concomitant beneficial effects on neurodegeneration and cognition.

Dietary Restriction in Aging Nonhuman Primates:

Using rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta), an extensive array of physiological measures have been conducted in both males and females to evaluate the effects of DR. Monkeys benefit from DR with a lower body weight, body fat, blood glucose and thus are at lower risk for developing diabetes.

While metabolic science is an inefficient way forward insofar as healthy life extension is concerned, it is fascinating to watch scientists apply the new tools and knowledge of biotechnology to understanding the way in which we work. Calorie restriction in particular is an interesting field; many major metabolic mechanisms are altered very beneficially simply by eating less while still obtaining suitable levels of nutrients. There may be quite a number of separate processes that contribute to the overall benefit of practicing calorie restriction as a lifestyle.

It won't get us to radical life extension, but if you want to increase your chances of living into an era of working anti-aging medicine capable of repairing the molecular damage that makes you old, then calorie restriction looks to be a smart choice today.

Technorati tags: calorie restriction, life extension, science

Posted by Reason at 8:04 PM
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Congratulations are due to researcher John Schloendorn and the Methuselah Foundation team:

The Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University has awarded biochemist John Schloendorn a $30,000 scholarship that will enable him to pursue anti-aging research as a Ph.D. student in the School of Life Sciences. Schloendorn is part of the institute's inaugural doctoral graduate assistantship class of 2006.

...

Schloendorn's research has been and is supported by a seed grant made by the Methuselah Foundation, a charity dedicated to accelerating the process of discovering methods to defeat the debilities caused by aging.

This is an excellent example of the way in which the combination of funding and success leads to more funding and greater success. Schloendorn has made worthy first steps in the search for bacterial enzymes that can safely degrade intracellular aggregates and thus remove their contribution to degenerative aging - and there will be more to come.

Schloendorn's work has led to the isolation and characterization of bacteria that efficiently degrade several recalcitrant cholesterol breakdown products, among them 7-ketocholesterol, that are thought to play a major role in atherosclerosis (the cause of almost all heart attacks and strokes). His future objective is to isolate the enzymes responsible for the breakdown and test their therapeutic prospects in cell models of the disease, with the ultimate goal of creating medical bioremediation treatments for humans.

In this way, by intelligently backing the right researchers and research programs, the Methuselah Foundation can multiply the impact of donations for SENS research funding by attracting outside resources to projects that are proving themselves successful. It's five figures this year, but it'll be more next, and yet more the year following. Momentum breeds more momentum.

Technorati tags: biotechnology, medical research, SENS

Posted by Reason at 9:40 PM
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You, like me, were young once. Leaving the vigor of youth behind feels like a great loss - especially after you've worked your way up to freedom, self-esteem and a life you like, but the only way your body wants to go is downhill, one failing piece at a time. Pining for lost youth is futile; it won't bring anything back. Putting aging out of your mind is self-destructive: you can't waltz through life in a state of willfull, unprepared self-delusion and not expect to run into trouble. Flailing around in the grip of airy promises made by the "anti-aging" marketplace is just as bad, and for a whole slew of similar reasons.

A thousand and one people out there in the world are trying their hardest to convince you they have a silver bullet that will prevent, slow or cover up aspects of degenerative aging. From the perspective of the radical life extension that will be possible in the years ahead, none of these folk are selling anything worth a damn.

Face the facts: you're not young anymore. Life is change, and making the best of today is not the same as making the best of yesterday. Fail to internalize that and you'll trash the present - and the foundations of your future - in the name of self-pity and nostalgia. Don't sacrifice yourself to the past; it's not as though you have to.

So what are you going to do about all this? What do you do with any failing machinery? If you're smart, you'll recognize that you are lucky enough to live in an age in which you can do more than rearrange your feelings about aging. The biotechnology revolution will deliver therapies capable of restoring your lost youth by repairing the molecular damage that causes aging - but it is up to all of us to determine the time that passes between now and the advent of this real rejuvenation medicine.

We can neglect advocacy and the support of determined, serious rejuvenation research, in which case progress will be slow - and many or all of us will age, suffer and die. But if we put our shoulders behind the wheel of progress, we have a chance at recapturing our lost youth - not just in our state of mind, but for real, in our bodies. Think about that.

Technorati tags: aging, life extension, rejuvenation

Posted by Reason at 9:33 PM
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It's never all plain sailing in medical science, biotechnology and related areas of research that are of interest to supporters of healthy life extension. I don't generally look at the failures here or at the Longevity Meme - I assume we've all seen more than enough failure to know what it looks like, and that it is pervasive. I also assume that we know what follows failure for those dedicated enough to keep working: eventual success.

So it irks me that some of those who stand in opposition to scientific progress take the lazy shortcut of seizing upon a given failure and holding it up as evidence of impossibility. Bah. People failed to fly for a long time before they finally did, and a great deal of flying is happening these days.

Stem cell therapies - and indeed anything that involves manipulating exceedingly complex and not fully understood chunks of our biochemistry - is inherently challenging. There are failures all over the world, every day; this is how scientists learn.

The team injected the cells into the brains of rats, which had been given a chemical that causes damage similar to that seen in Parkinson's. The new cells integrated into the animals' brains and produced copious amounts of dopamine. As a result, the animals' motor coordination improved almost to the point of being normal, according to the report in yesterday's online edition of the journal Nature Medicine.

But when the animals were autopsied after three months and their brains were examined microscopically, the team found multiple tumors, indicating that some of the injected cells did not settle into the job of being neurons but rather had begun to grow uncontrollably.

...

Thomas Okarma, president of Geron, a California company that hopes to gain Food and Drug Administration permission to treat spinal-cord-injury patients with modified embryonic stem cells next year, said his company's cells have shown no sign of causing tumor growth in any of its animal studies.

But he said the FDA has asked for additional extensive data on exactly that question before it will give its final okay.

"What they worry about, and rightly so, is there are rogue undifferentiated cells lurking in the cell population that we haven't detected," Okarma said.

Geron cultivates its embryonic stem cells differently than others, he said, adding that no tumors have been seen in animals up to nine months after injections into the rodents' injured spinal cords. Moreover, he said, the cells survive and help the animals recover, in part by secreting special factors that spur new nerve growth around the injury.

Some people don't understand the nature of change, to the point of failing to see that success comes from clever persistence in the face of failure. Don't be one of those people, and you'll go far in life.

Technorati tags: stem cell research

Posted by Reason at 8:50 PM
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It is straightforward to see that when useful stem cells can be generated easily, then research, the technology base, and the development of therapies will progress more rapidly. I suspect that, from the perspective of twenty years hence, the real value of adult stem cells and first generation autologous stem cell therapies will be in the technologies, infrastructure and experience gained from the exercise - especially experience in controlling the differentiation of stem cells into the desired type.

With this in mind, it has been educational to watch just how much scientists have been doing with stem cells taken from skin - from hair follicles, to be precise - over the past few years. My attention was drawn today to a proof of concept work in differentiating skin stem cells:

Nestin+ hair follicle-associated cells of murine skin can be isolated and differentiated in vitro into neuronal and glial cells. Therefore, we have asked whether human skin also contains nestin+ cells, and whether these can be differentiated in vitro into neuronal and/or glial cell populations. In this methodological pilot study, we show that both are indeed the case - employing purposely only very simple techniques for isolating, propagating, and differentiating nestin+ cells from normal human scalp skin

...

Therefore, human scalp skin can serve as a highly accessible, abundant, and convenient source for autologous adult stem cell-like cells that offer themselves to be exploited for neuroregenerative medicine purposes.

The near future of regenerative medicine is bright indeed. Enough funding and ingenuity are present in the field to see through a revolution in how we view and treat degenerative conditions.

Technorati tags: stem cell research

Posted by Reason at 4:33 PM
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The all-volunteer Methuselah Foundation is presently a real growth opportunity in making meaningful longevity research a reality. Do you want to live a longer, healthier life? If so, keep your eye on the ball here.

The Thiel $3 million matching grant will see the foundation top $10 million in funding within the next few years, as it is filled by new donors. The first foundation-funded research in support of the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence - fixing the molecular damage that causes aging - is underway and soon to expand. The Foundation chair, biomedical gerontologist Aubrey de Grey is well known and now has high-level fundraising cachet in addition to the attention of scientists and the media. The MPrize for anti-aging research is a reputable, high-profile research prize in a time at which research prizes are all the rage, well-understood and a popular cause. Aging and longevity science is presently undergoing a revolution in intent and capabilities. I could go on.

It has to be said - having been out there stumping for donors and publicity back when the Foundation was just the MPrize, and the fund was a mere $15,000 - that I'm damn impressed at how far this has come. So many similar efforts have failed, become sidetracked or never amounted to much - but the Methuselah Foundation has succeeded, and succeeded in making a mark. Succeeded because ever more people saw its merits and put their strength behind the wheel.

Have you noticed that we're up to 107 members of The Three Hundred now? There's another amazing success that has pushed the Foundation along from strength to strength. I'm happy to be in such august, forward-looking company - and may we live just as long as our names will.

All of this is stage one; as is so often the case, the years of hard work and donations are a matter of building an opportunity - of building a lever long enough to move the world, a horn loud enough to rouse the masses to action. And here it is, the chance of a lifetime.

Do you want to make a difference - a real difference - to the future of healthy life extension, longevity research and the bottom line of how long you are going to live? Then volunteer with the Methuselah Foundation! The next few years of expansion and endeavor - multi-million dollar fundraising, growing opportunities in research, raising awareness and much more - will need a larger volunteer crew than presently exists. If you have something to offer, jump on in and help make the future a better place for all of us!

I thought I'd leave the last word to Anne C.:

If there's one thing I've learned from all this so far, it's that there's no reason to think of yourself as someone who can't do anything, or that there are just special people in the world who get "chosen" to help out in certain areas. If you want to help out with something, or you think you have something to say, just put it out there and see what happens!

Technorati tags: activism, life extension

Posted by Reason at 8:40 PM
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Chris Phoenix, co-founder of the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology, dropped me a line to remind of past updates to the version of his essay "Nanotechnology and Life Extension" over at the Longevity Meme. After updating, I feel I should remind you folk that the article is just as good a read today as it was when first penned:

A few thousand years ago, people lived about thirty years. From their point of view, we have already extended our lives to an amazing degree. However, from where we stand today, we can see that we still have a long way to go. Some people still die in their 40's from cancer, heart attack, stroke, and infections. This is tragic, and frustrating. Today's medicine is only somewhat able to deal with these and other conditions--and it has barely started to attack the problem of aging. But we can see light at the end of the tunnel.

Fifty years from now, what causes of death will be preventable? That depends largely on the technology we will have available, so let's start by projecting some technology trends. Gene sequencing and identification will be as easy as a blood sugar test. Medical devices such as artificial hearts and insulin pumps will be implantable and well-integrated with the body's natural demands. Surgical instruments will be more delicate and less destructive; what today is "major surgery" will be done wit