Fight Aging!

The end of year fundraiser for SENS rejuvenation research progresses apace. We are helping to fund the work needed to produce actual, working rejuvenation therapies soon enough to matter, treatments that can target and repair the fundamental causes of aging. Aging is caused by a few forms of molecular damage that accrue in cells and tissues, a sort of slow biological wear and tear that results from the normal operation of metabolism. Given the right lines of research, that damage can be repaired, and thus the clock turned back, age-related disease prevented or effectively treated. Those research programs are outlined in the SENS vision, and have been underway for some years now, making steady progress with the support of everyday philanthropists like you and I.

At the start of November, Josh Triplett and Fight Aging! put up a $24,000 challenge fund for new SENS Patrons: everyone who signs up before the end of the year to make a regular monthly donation to the SENS Research Foundation will have the next year of donations matched dollar for dollar. I'm pleased to announce that this past weekend, Christophe and Dominique Cornuejols stepped up to contribute another $12,000 to the fund. You might recall that they also provided a matching fund to help in the last days of the universal cancer therapy crowdfunding effort earlier this year. It is a privilege to have had the support of these folk over the past few years of Fight Aging! fundraisers.

The SENS Patron challenge fund was $24,000, and is now $36,000. That means we're looking for more SENS Patrons to take the plunge and help to extend and broaden the research success produced by the SENS Research Foundation and their allies in past years. We live in exciting times when it comes to medicine for human rejuvenation, with senescent cell clearance therapies now in well-funded clinical development and other lines of research threatening to follow in the years ahead. The transition is underway from the medicine of the past, that did not in any meaningful way address the molecular damage that causes aging and age-related disease, to the medicine of the future, in which that damage is targeted for repair. We will have longer, healthier lives thanks to the efforts of SENS advocates and researchers, and thanks to the many people whose charitable donations have allowed this work to take place at all.

It has been a tough job to bootstrap a new field of medicine from scratch, in the face of all of those who said it couldn't be done or shouldn't be done. There are certainly fewer naysayers now that the wheel is beginning to turn, however, and now that the first rejuvenation research startup companies are working on bringing therapies to the clinic. Researchers talk openly about targeting the processes of aging, and there is enthusiasm for progress in many parts of the research and development communities. This is the time for advocates and donors to push harder, to build atop present success, to lay the foundations for the next set of treatments to emerge in the years ahead. There are seven classes of cell and tissue damage involved in aging, and only two or three of those could be said to be proceeding at a productive pace today: senescent cell clearance, stem cell research, and some forms of amyloid clearance. The others are just as important, but still languishing, with comparatively little funding, and yet to reach the tipping point that senescent cell clearance reached in the past few years. When that point arrives for a specific line of research it becomes a pretty fast ride from a few groups in the laboratory to multiple venture funded companies working on clinical applications of longevity science, but getting there is up to us.

To a first approximation no-one cares about funding fundamental medical research, and the most important work is near always heavily funded by visionaries and philanthropists, rather the established funding institutions. It is really, really hard to raise funding for radical new approaches in medicine - until the researchers can prove that they work. See what David Spiegel of the noted Spiegel Laboratory at Yale had to say on that topic, for example:

The SENS Research Foundation funding has been critical to our work studying and developing methods to reverse the effects of advanced glycation end-products (AGEs) in aging. AGEs are non-enzymatic modifications that build up on proteins as people age, leading to inflammation and tissue damage. Early on, our lab focused significant effort on developing the first total synthesis of glucosepane - a major AGE cross-link found in human tissues - but we were unable to find funding from any of the traditional sources. The SENS Research Foundation came to our aid, and supported this research for over 5 years. In 2015, our glucosepane synthesis efforts were published in Science, and lay a foundation for developing drugs capable of detecting and reversing tissue damage in aging. We are deeply grateful to the SENS Research Foundation and Fight Aging! for all of their support and look forward to exciting, life-extending work to come!

The work of the Spiegel Laboratory will form the foundation of an approach to treat aging that will be just as important as senescent cell clearance. But like so many vital lines of research related to the future of rejuvenation therapies, and like so many vital lines of research in the broader field of medicine, funding just can't be found through the existing establishment. That is why our fundraisers and our acts of advocacy are so very important. The future is in our hands: we are the ones who raise up the lantern and shine a light on the research and development that must happen; who call for assistance and vote with our wallets; who raise the profile of this work; who provide the funding needed for prototypes and further evidence; and who start the ball rolling. When high net worth individuals join in, when the institutions finally pay attention, when the venture capitalists fund companies, it is because we took action, and because we did our part to show the way. So join in!