Fight Aging!

This year's Fight Aging! matching fundraiser to support the work of the SENS Research Foundation starts on October 1st, just a few weeks away. The SENS Research Foundation is a noted California nonprofit organization that coordinates work in US and European laboratories with the aim of ending frailty and disease in aging. From October 1st until the end of 2015 for every $1 donated to SENS research we will match it with $1 from this year's $125,000 matching fund. We welcome all assistance in meeting our goal, with the aim of speeding the end of aging as a threat to health.

Aging is caused by an accumulation of cell and tissue damage, and these forms of damage are well cataloged and understood. To kickstart meaningful progress in the treatment of aging the research community must focus on therapies capable of repairing this damage. We stand now in the opening years of a process of development: philanthropic fundraising and early stage research coordinated by the SENS Research Foundation over the past decade have led to the first startups and established companies that are today working on new medical technologies that will treat the causes of aging. Senescent cell clearance and preventing the consequences of mitochondrial DNA damage are starting to turn into going concerns, for example, but there is much more left to do.

We want to support and expand this progress, leading the way to human rejuvenation. It is us up to us to shine the lantern and call more attention to this field of research, to fund the prototypes, to speak in public, and call for others to do the same. With this in mind, Fight Aging!, Josh Triplett, Christophe and Dominique Cornuejols, forever-healthy.org, and an anonymous donor have collaborated to create this year's $125,000 matching fund for SENS donations. From October 1st to December 31st 2015 we will match every dollar donated to SENS rejuvenation research with a dollar from the fund. This is our challenge to the community: we came together to raise $60,000 in 2013 and $150,000 in 2014, so let us see if we can hit the target of $250,000 for 2015. You never know the limits of fundraising and support for a worthy cause unless you reach for them.

Much has changed over the past few years in the public view of aging research and the prospects for development of first generation rejuvenation therapies. Researchers are more openly talking about treating aging as a medical condition, and influential backers are also using their soapboxes to discuss this cause. This is the slow tipping point of influence. Ultimately, we want to see the average fellow in the street think of research to treat aging in the same way as he thinks of research to treat cancer today, and that isn't so far away now. To eliminate the suffering, frailty, and death caused by aging is the greatest of goals; aging and its consequences are by far the largest cause of pain in the world. This is in our hands; it is our fundraising and support for organizations like the SENS Research Foundation that enabled the networking and persuasion needed to make rejuvenation research a respected goal, with growing awareness and support.

So, once again, I ask you to join me in helping to speed things along this October 1st. To fund the research, to tell your friends, to put up the posters, and to assist in whatever other way you can. The clock is ticking for all of us, but if the right lines of research are just funded more aggressively, then the widespread availability of therapies that can prevent and cure all age-related disease is just a few decades away now, and the first prototype treatments are considerably closer than that. We have made a difference in the past, we are making a difference now, and the wheel is starting to turn as a result of efforts just like this one.