Fight Aging!

The SENS Research Foundation and the Forever Healthy Foundation will be running a new conference on rejuvenation biotechnology in March 2018 in Berlin. This is good news; over the long term, conference series have a high return on investment when it comes to expanding the scope and influence of a field of scientific endeavor. Networking makes the world turn. Over the past few years, the SENS Research Foundation ran the Rejuvenation Biotechnology conferences in the US, bringing together academia and industry to help smooth the path for the transition of rejuvenation therapies from the laboratory to clinical development. Now that same approach will be applied to the European research and development communities.

Given the rapid growth in development of senolytic therapies to clear senescent cells, this is the time to point out that SENS advocates and organizations have been calling for more work on exactly this type of treatment for the past fifteen years - long before the current explosion of interest. It isn't an accident that senolytics are proving effective and very promising in animal studies: it is expected and rational based on (a) the view of aging as an accumulation of molecular damage, and (b) scientific evidence gathered in recent decades. It is of particular importance to broaden the realization that senolytics are not a single fortunate discovery, but one part of a larger scheme, one of numerous potential rejuvenation therapies that are all based on the same concept of damage repair as the best way to treat aging as a medical condition.

Senescent cells are a form of damage, present only in old tissues in any significant number, and removing them is a form of restoration. But beyond that there are a number of other therapies that will be just as important and just as beneficial once developed: cross-link clearance, preventing the consequences of mitochondrial DNA damage, clearance of amyloids and lipofuscin, and so forth. We have the opportunity to educate those newly arriving in our community because they have learned of senescent cell clearance, and show them that this is just one portion of a larger, logical plan for the reversal of aging, most of which still needs greater support and funding in order to progress.

Undoing Aging 2018 is focused on the cellular and molecular repair of age-related damage as the basis of therapies to bring aging under full medical control. The conference, a joint effort of SENS Research Foundation and Forever Healthy Foundation, provides a platform for the existing scientific community that already works on damage repair and, at the same time, offers interested scientists and students a first-hand understanding of the current state of this exciting new field of biomedical research.

Speakers will include leading researchers from around the world focused on topics including stem cells, senescent cells, immunotherapies, biomarkers and drug discovery. Aubrey de Grey, Chief Science Officer of the SENS Research Foundation, will be the scientific organizer for the conference. Undoing Aging 2018 is not only open to the scientific community but also welcomes all interested members of the broader Life Extension movement. The conference will also feature a student poster session showing the work of innovative undergraduate and graduate students in the field of damage repair.

"With the 2018 Undoing Aging Conference, SENS Research Foundation (SRF) resumes its series of conferences previously based in Cambridge. As we did from 2003 to 2013, we will host a scientific conference that will demonstrate the enormous strides currently being made in genuine rejuvenation biotechnologies. The lesson will be clear - the community is broad and deep, and its members see the potential for genuinely comprehensive approaches to the prevention of age-related disease. We're especially pleased that our partnership with Forever Healthy will bring this conference to the heart of the Berlin life sciences community for the first time."

"Forever Healthy is already a vanguard supporter of SRF research programs and rejuvenation biotechnology start-ups. We are now very excited to work with SRF on Undoing Aging 2018, the first conference for our organization. Forever Healthy has two key goals for this conference: To support the remarkable scientific community already working on repair of age related damage and to create an unique opportunity for the broader scientific world to experience that the possibility of bringing aging under complete, genuine medical control is realistic, achievable, and, indeed, beginning to happen."

Link: https://www.undoing-aging.org/news/sens-research-foundation-and-forever-healthy-foundation-announce-2018-undoing-aging-conference