Fight Aging!

The SENS Research Foundation's 2016 crowdfunded research initiative is focused on progress towards a universal cure for all forms of cancer, and needs our help to hit its goals within the next six weeks. Here is a poster to help spread the word:

Today's cancer therapies are both expensive and highly specific. There are hundreds of types of cancer, and many of them can evolve to defeat any one therapy as it is delivered. The research community can greatly improve this state of affairs, however, as it is possible to build a truly universal cancer therapy - one that cancers cannot evolve resistance to - by blocking telomere lengthening. All cancers rely on the abuse of ways to extend telomeres in order to grow without restraint. Telomeres become shorter with each cell division, a crucial part of the mechanisms that normally limit the number of times a cell can replicate. Since all forms of cancer bypass replication limits in this way, an effective method of safely shutting down telomere extension might be used to bring an end to all cancers. Even better, since there are only a few ways in which cells can lengthen telomeres, building such a universal cancer therapy will probably cost much the same as any one of the present generation of cancer therapies that can only be used on one or a few of the hundreds of types of cancer. If we want to defeat cancer in our lifetimes, this is the way to go: find the common mechanism and strike there. The SENS Research Foundation is building a crucial part of this technology, using philanthropic donations from people like you and I to pick up the slack where the research mainstream has thus far failed to build the needed tools.

The cancer patient advocacy community and the aging patient advocacy community overlap to some degree, but most cancer research advocates and supporters have never heard of this research. It is still comparatively new. Many of you reading this post will know people who are involved in the cancer establishment in one way or another: researchers, survivors, supporters, and more. Please do reach out. Point them to the SENS Research Foundation crowdfunding project, or the Fight Aging! interview with researcher Haroldo Silva, where the science is explained, and ask them where best to seek support for this important venture. The more people we can introduce to this research program, the better off we all are in the long term. The path to defeat cancer really is a matter of changing the economics and strategy of cancer research: a switch in to focus on universal therapies produced for the same cost as current therapies, but that are capable of effectively treating a far greater range of cancer types - or, as is the case here, all cancer types.

You are welcome to take the fundraising poster above and make good use of it. Since text resizes badly, there is a 4200px x 2800px version for printing and the 600px x 400px version above for other uses. If you want to improve upon the design yourself, then you might find it useful to know that the fonts are Mic32 New Rounded, for the SENS Research Foundation logo, and Tex Gyre Heros for the rest. You can also extract a usefully resizeable SENS logo from the 2012 annual report PDF if you are so minded. Everyone can make a difference! I encourage you to reach out to your communities, and tell them something that they didn't know about the possibilities for the future of cancer research, and how important it is to help make them a reality by donating today.