Fight Aging! Matching Fundraiser Update: A Third of the Way
The Fight Aging! matching fundraiser launched a month ago, and is now a third of the way to success: more than $57,000 of the $125,000 goal has been donated, and until the end of the year every further donation is matched dollar for dollar from the matching fund provided by a few generous philanthropists. All of these charitable donations go towards supporting and expanding the ongoing rejuvenation research programs coordinated by the SENS Research Foundation. This work, carried out collaboration with renowned laboratories in the US and Europe, aims to bring aging under medical control by repairing its root causes, the forms of cell and tissue damage that occur as a side-effect of the normal operation of metabolism, and which accumulate with age to cause disease and dysfunction.
The SENS Research Foundation has had a banner year in terms of progress towards the goal of bringing the causes of aging under medical control, as noted in the 2015 annual report: seed funding the US startup Oisin Biotechnology to work on senescent cell clearance; transferring lysosomal aggregate clearance technology to Human Rejuvenation Technologies for development; the French company Gensight is now devoting significant funding to to clinical development of the mitochondrial repair technologies whose early stage research was supported under the SENS banner; progress towards the toolkit needed for glucosepane cross-link clearance was published in the prestigious journal Science; a second Rejuvenation Biotechnology conference continued the work of bringing industry and academia together to smooth the path for future development in this field; a crowdfunding initiative brought in hundreds of donors and tens of thousands of dollars for mitochondrial repair research. The efforts of past years, funded in part by everyday philanthropists just like you and I, alongside people like Peter Thiel, Jason Hope, and Aubrey de Grey, are bearing fruit. Everyone who donated in the past should be feeling pretty good about the foundations of new medicine that they have helped to build right around now. The wheel is turning, the avalanche begun.
The future is still to be constructed, however. Science is a slow business, and the breakthrough progress towards therapies for aging that will occur in the first years of the 2020s must be funded in its earliest stages today if it is ever to see the light of day. The SENS programs, and the staff and allies of the SENS Research Foundation, are collectively a proven vehicle for getting this job done; they are picking the right laboratories, programs, and lines of research to back in order to produce meaningful results. We have $68,000 left to raise in the 2015 Fight Aging! fundraiser, every dollar donated matched by philanthropists who put up the Fight Aging! fund, and all donations used well to create progress in this vital field of medicine. We have two months to do it in, the deadline being the end of the year. Help us to hit this target!