Fight Aging!

As the year draws to a close, more than half of the SENS Patron 2018 challenge fund remains to be claimed. Fight Aging! and the other fund donors challenge you to make a commitment to the SENS Research Foundation and progress towards rejuvenation therapies that can bring an end to the suffering and debility that accompanies aging. Become a SENS Patron by setting up a monthly donation to the SENS Research Foundation, and we will match the next year of your gifts in support of the research programs ongoing in the network of labs and scientists dedicated to aging research.

It has never been as easy as it is today to help ensure that the decline and death of late life ceases to be inevitable. Competent, proven organizations such as the SENS Research Foundation and Methuselah Foundation offer reliable ways to direct funds to this goal, and making a charitable donation takes just a few moments online. Become a SENS Patron to support the SENS Research Foundation with regular donations, or join the Methuselah 300 to do the same for the Methuselah Foundation programs. Thanks to the efforts of the past twenty years, the first rejuvenation therapies are accepted and on their way to the clinic. No longer must we argue over the plausibility of turning back aging; now we only argue over how best to go about it.

As it happens, the best way forward in the matter of treating aging as a medical condition, a condition that can be controlled and minimized, is outlined by the SENS rejuvenation research programs. It involves building new therapies that can repair the well-known and well-cataloged forms of cell and tissue damage that lie at the root of aging. Yet even as easy as it is to make charitable donations to support this work, most of the SENS agenda is still poorly funded and little worked on when compared with the mainstream of medicine, in which tens of thousands of scientists and physicians engage in heroic, futile efforts to stave off aging, failing because they are not focused on repairing its causes. The consistent failures of the past have led to a culture in which failure is expected - but this is only the result of a bad choice of strategy. It can be changed.

The first rejuvenation therapies, involving senolytic drugs to selectively destroy senescent cells, are a going concern, but we are far from where we should be when it comes to the rest of the rejuvenation biotechnology toolkit. The philanthropic research programs that aim to unblock and open up important lines of research into repairing the causes of aging are still very important and very necessary. They still lack sufficient funding and support for meaningful progress. Our bodies are packed with scores of forms of metabolic waste, and few of the approaches needed to clear that waste are close to the point at which clinical development can begin. We have a lot of work to do!

This is how I can, on alternate days, first celebrate our progress (and we should celebrate, as we have achieved a great deal since the days in which rejuvenation therapies based on repair of damage were only a tenuous vision) and then the very next day bemoan the state of funding and limited focus. Collectively, our community has launched the senolytic revolution in medicine, but another dozen revolutions in the treatment of aging must still be brought to the point of readiness. All of the damage must be repaired, not just one thin fraction of it. So please, help us to move faster towards this goal.