An Update from the CellAge Team
The Life Extension Advocacy Foundation staff note a recent update from the CellAge team. That company was partially funded by a crowdfunding event, held at Lifespan.io, that completed in early 2017. The founders are now moving forward with their work on synthetic promoters as a way to identify senescent cells and quantify the burden of senescence in specific tissues. The senolytics development community has spent the past few years forging ahead with ways to destroy senescent cells, but improvements in the state of assays for senescence has lagged behind.
Staining a tissue sample for simple markers of senescence, such as expression of p16, is the present standard procedure. It is good enough for development, but really not acceptable for either commercial use or more sophisticated research in the years ahead. If someone wants to assess on a month to month or year to year basis just how many senescent cells are in specific tissues, a much better approach will be needed. That demand will arise rapidly enough once human data starts to arrive from trials of early senolytic therapies. The microfluidics approach to counting senescent cells by size that was published last year is a step in the right direction, and hopefully the CellAge work will in the fullness of time lead to still better options.
We have been quiet for a while so we thought it was time for a small update about the Cellage project. We are working with Circularis to screen for new senescent cell promoters using a unique technological platform never used before with human or senescent cells. A promoter is a region of DNA that initiates the expression of a particular gene. Promoters are located near the transcription start sites of genes, on the same strand and upstream on the DNA. In this case, we are searching for gene expression relating to cellular senescence and using p16 and CMV promoters as our positive controls.
If this is successful we will then move onto screening for synthetic promoters from a library of over 100,000 novel synthetic promoters. The objective being to identify suitable promoters so we can develop a highly accurate way to detect the presence of senescent cells that surpasses the current state of the art methods such as p16.
Having an easy and reliable way to measure the senecent cell count and the associate d inflammatory secretion wood be invaluable. With such measures we would be able to get an easy feedback on the various compounds, supplements and lifestyle changes. What if beinging exposed to cold or heat for 1h every day destroys them? We will know the distribution and concentration within different body tissues.
What was striking me is that we measure the effects of the removal of presence of SC but don't have a robust metric in vivo...
@Reason
On unrelated topic.
After the CEO of Unity Bio said that they are confident that they can slow, stop, and , in some cases, reverse the diseases of old age, the stock had jumped 18%. Senecent attend , and anti aging, are becoming mainstream news. That will attract investors attention. And when the money talks the deathtists will be ignored...
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2018/09/13/unity-biotech-we-can-create-drugs-that-halt-or-reverse-aging-diseases.html
We will see exciting times soon. Prepare your popcorn and wait for the frenzy and kerfuffle that will follow when the first treatment hit official human milestones. The first company that makes to put blockchain and senecent /senolitics in their name will increase their stock valuation ;)
We are close, to the turning point of three public opinion. Now anti-aging is either some obscure academic talk or regarded as quacks like new age or antivaxers... But soon it will be a mainstream topic...
In a couple of years the medical tourism for dasatinib plus quercetin injections will be a common practice, even if we don't see any conclusive human results. The Ginnie is getting out of the bottle....
How about an update from lifespan.io on any of the other fundraisers like MMTP? Seems like an age since we had any updates on this.
@Mark I can speak as Project leader of MMTP as well as LEAF. I am currently discussing with our PI about things so far and what to report. I can say we are testing combinations of senolytics as "cocktails" as described by de Keizer in a recent interview. We have our mouse study underway in Germany in a secret location (lots of animal rights protesters in Germany, so we don't say where)and are collecting results currently. A more detailed report will follow on LEAF.
I am also chasing up all our past projects currently for reports. We have a MitoSENS update on Monday for you all which is pretty exciting and some more news on the future of that project. AgeMeter is now in production and shipping and MouseAge has been completed some months ago and is available for free via AppleStore if any researchers would like to use it.
More news soon.
Thanks Steve. Didn't know you'd started actual mouse trials. That's good news. Looking forward to the other updates.
"We have a MitoSENS update on Monday for you all which is pretty exciting and some more news on the future of that project."
Wow, I hope there is some good news, it seems like ages since SENS expressed on mitochondrial gene (ATP8) in the nucleus, and partially expressed ATP6.
I can gather/infer that since Michael Grieve's support the team size has expanded from two researchers to two researches plus a summer scholar or two (so four people on the team at times).
It is still crazy that there are only four people on earth explicitly working on this (well it is not crazy, but it is definitely a bug in our society's operating system software for allocating research funding).