Biotech Will Extend Healthy Life Span

Fight Aging!

Do you want to live a longer life in good health? Simple practices can make some difference, such as exercise or calorie restriction. But over the long haul all that really matters is progress in medicine: building new classes of therapy to repair and reverse the known root causes of aging. The sooner these treatments arrive, the more lives will be saved. Find out how to help »

The mainstream press is starting to catch on to the link between regenerative medicine and healthy life extension. This piece from the Miami Herald quotes Kent Vrana, pharmacology department chair at Penn State University: "Organ-replacement technology could boost the human life span to about 150 years." Using regenerative medicine and tissue engineering to build replacement organs on demand is the brute force, expensive, near term approach to extending healthy life span - if it's broken, buy a new one. Preventative therapies to block the aging process will likely be far cheaper and more effective in the long run, but the scientific community has a long way to go to develop this sort of technology.

Link: http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/business/national/8229615.htm