Fight Aging!

The SENS Research Foundation is perhaps the only group in the world to presently focus on organizing, advocating, and carrying out research into the biotechnologies required for treatments capable of reversing degenerative aging. The pains and frailties of aging are the consequence of unrepaired damage to cells and tissues. While it is true that the forms of damage are well understood and there are several clear paths to develop means to repair this damage, it is still the case that someone has to do the initial proof of concept work and persuade the rest of the research community to join in. Without bold steps there will be no progress.

The latest newsletter from the SENS Research Foundation arrived in my in-box today, along with a reminder that we're in at present right in the middle of the Fight Aging! 2014 matching fundraiser to support the Foundation's research programs, and all the help we can get to hit the target will be greatly appreciated:

Everyone at SENS Research Foundation would like to thank all our contributors who have helped us reach $19,159 - well on the way to our $50,000 challenge goal. Fight Aging! has pledged to us that for every $1 you give they will add $2 - tripling your donation. The challenge goal is to reach $50,000 by December 31st. So please join the more than 300 donors who have shown their support for SENS Research Foundation and our work and donate today.

We are also looking for additional challenge grant sponsors. If you are interested in offering up a challenge please contact us.

One of the important activities undertaken by the Foundation is to help build the rejuvenation research community of tomorrow. A generation of well-connected, organized researchers who see the treatment of aging as an exciting, cutting-edge field of science won't come about by accident. The defeat of age-related pain, suffering, and disease is a long-term project, and the people who will in years ahead, at the height of their careers, put the capstone on the first generation of rejuvenation treatments are still in college today, deciding which academic path to pursue:

SENS Research Foundation invites all qualifying students to apply for the 2015 Summer Scholars Program. The online application will be available starting December 1, 2014. Completed applications will be accepted through February 2, 2015. If you are an undergraduate interested in rejuvenation biotech, this is your chance to gain valuable experience in the field.

The first in a series videos profiling the students who participated in the 2014 SRF Summer Scholars Program is now available for viewing on the SRF website. This video features our 2014 scholars in action at the SRF Research Center (SRF-RC). View the video to meet Christine Wu, Summer Wang, and Karina Liker and learn about their experiences in the program.

As is usually the case, the question of the month section makes for interesting reading:

Question of the Month #7: What's Menopause Got To Do With It (Rejuvenation Biotechnology)?

Q: SENS Research Foundation Chief Science Officer Dr. Aubrey De Grey recently made a comment to the media suggesting that "rejuvenation biotechnology could eliminate menopause within twenty years." How does intervening in the process of menopause fit in with SRF's agenda to ameliorate age-related disease?

A: SENS Research Foundation works to catalyze the development of rejuvenation biotechnology: a new class of medicines that will keep us young and healthy and forestall the disease and debility that currently accompany a long life, by targeting the root causes of age-related ill health.

Menopause shares much in common with major age-related health problems, inasmuch as they all result from the accumulation of cellular and molecular damage in our tissues over time. Because this damage takes our tissues' microscopic functional units offline, aging damage gradually degrades each tissue's capacity to carry out its normal function with time. When enough of this damage accumulates in a particular tissue, specific diseases and disorders of aging characteristic of that tissue emerges, whether it's in the brain (Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease), or the heart and circulatory system (atherosclerosis and heart failure), or the machinery controlling cellular growth (cancer) - or the ovaries (menopause). The corollary of this is that by removing and repairing this damage, rejuvenation biotechnology will restore the proper structure of the cellular machinery that keeps our tissues functioning, restoring their ability to keep us alive and with the good health that most of us enjoy at earlier ages.

So maintaining a woman's fertility and postponing or eliminating menopausal symptoms comes down to a mixture of repairing and replacing damaged cells (notably egg cells) and tissues (follicles) whose age-related degradation leads to menopause in the first place, bringing the whole system back to its youthful, functional norm. Today, researchers are pursuing several "damage-repair" approaches to realize this goal, and that's what we'll discuss in an article at the SEN Research Foundation website.