Fight Aging!

Registration is open for Rejuvenation Biotechnology 2014, which will be held later this year in Santa Clara, California on August 21st. This is hopefully the first of many events to be organized by the SENS Research Foundation in the gap years between the main SENS conferences in the UK, to encourage work on - and enthusiasm for - developing the means to treat and ultimately cure degenerative aging. SENS, the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence, provides a clear research and development plan to build the first versions of treatments capable of repairing the known root causes of aging: various forms of cellular and molecular damage that accumulate with age.

A critical part of the process of establishing any new technology or paradigm - medical or otherwise - is broadening the base of developers as soon as possible. Work must spread beyond the academic research community and into the business research and development community, becoming more attractive to large companies and entrepreneurs alike. Some portions of SENS are presently within striking distance of early commercial products for groups with a long-term view, willing to bet on up to five year development plans to reach a large payoff. Those products would likely not be actual therapies, but rather stepping stone proof of concept technologies that facilitate further development at a lower cost and faster pace.

For example, the SENS Research Foundation currently funds the development of the necessary fundamental technologies for working with glucosepane, the dominant advanced glycation end-product (AGE) in human tissues that causes harm as it accumulates with age. For various historical reasons the biochemistry community has neglected the development of means to work effectively with compounds like glucosepane, and so formalizing and licensing the results of such research forms a product in and of itself, something that will make other developers more able to make progress towards treatments that can break down and remove glucosepane, thus reversing its contribution to age-related degeneration.

The SENS vision and research programs have made more than enough progress within the scientific community for advocates to now also be working on bringing in allies and interested partners from the medical development and pharmaceutical industry. These things progress one step at a time. As is always the case for SENS Research Foundation events, a stellar lineup of leading researchers are scheduled to attend and present at the forthcoming conference:

Rejuvenation Biotechnology Conference 2014

SENS Research Foundation is proud to present the Rejuvenation Biotechnology Conference: Emerging Regenerative Medicine Solutions for the Diseases of Aging. This conference will bring together leaders from the Alzheimer's, cardiovascular, cancer, and other age-related disease communities to discuss preventative and combinatorial strategies to address the diseases of old age.

The Rejuvenation Biotechnology Conference will build upon novel strategies being pioneered by the Alzheimer's and cancer communities by convening the foremost leaders from academia, industry, investment, policy, and advocacy from multiple disease communities to consider the wider potential of these strategies and evaluate the feasibility of preventative and combinatorial medicine applications to treat all aging-related diseases. Through a series of presentations and panel discussion, Alzheimer's disease, cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, macular degeneration, musculoskeletal disease and Parkinson's disease will be examined with scientific, economic, regulatory and other considerations in mind.

Confirmed speakers include:

Richard Barker (CASMI)
Maria Blasco (Spanish National Cancer Research Centre)
Judith Campisi (Buck Institute for Research on Aging)
George Church (Harvard and MIT)
Laura Esserman (University of California, San Francisco)
Caleb Finch (USC Davis School of Gerontology)
W. Gray Jerome (Vanderbilt University Medical Center)
Jeffrey Karp (Harvard Medical School)
Jeanne Loring (Scripps Research Institute)
Stephen Minger (GE Healthcare Life Sciences, UK)
Brock Reeve (Harvard Stem Cell Institute)
David Schaffer (Berkeley Stem Cell Center)
Evan Snyder (Sanford/Burnham Medical Research Institute)
Matthias Steger (Hoffmann-La Roche)
Michael West (Biotime, Inc.)