How Aging Research Is Changing Our Lives
aging.nautil.us
How Aging Research Is Changing Our Lives
1–10 of 63 posts
Re: How Aging Research Is Changing Our Lives
#2I've seen some people in this field, I don't know how mature is their research but they're not joking. Funny that they still encounter resistance based on superficial argument and lack of renown.
Re: How Aging Research Is Changing Our Lives
#3The Buck Institute [0], featured in this article, is a pretty outstanding organization -- they're unique in being a sizable research center devoted to researching aging. I'm excited to see their idea of age-related diseases as biological maintenance problems gaining some traction.
I'm not entirely sure where the interviewer was going with this statement, though.
> There’s a lot of Silicon-Valley buzz about longevity and many startups working to develop immortality pills.
I've yet to hear of a startup working on an "immortality pill."
Re: How Aging Research Is Changing Our Lives
#4Great interview. I thought his comments about the upper limits of human lifespan were especially interesting:
> There currently is an upper limit, and the upper limit is probably around 115, 120. You have a very large number—100 billion people to choose the number of people that have ever lived—and you have only one who has made it through to 122, Jeanne Calment. The second oldest was 119. It does seem there is an upper limit. Some people have shown that in the last hundred years, even though we have progressively increased the average lifespan, the number of people who live above 115 has not increased.
I also couldn't help but think that his remarks about immortality being the naughty "I-word" is a roundabout way of addressing some of the excitement stirred by a certain slightly sensationalistic wizardly chap in the aging field.
Re: How Aging Research Is Changing Our Lives
#5Great interview. I thought his comments about the upper limits of human lifespan were especially interesting: > There currently is an upper limit, and the upper limit is probably around 115, 120. You have a very large number—100 billion people to choose the number of people that have ever lived—and you have only one who has made it through to 122, Jeanne Calment. The second oldest was 119. It does seem there is an up…
While immorality might be a stretch, CRISPR is certainly going to change how we think about longevity in a sensationally magical way.
Re: How Aging Research Is Changing Our Lives
#6The Buck Institute [0], featured in this article, is a pretty outstanding organization -- they're unique in being a sizable research center devoted to researching aging. I'm excited to see their idea of age-related diseases as biological maintenance problems gaining some traction. I'm not entirely sure where the interviewer was going with this statement, though. > There’s a lot of Silicon-Valley buzz about longevity…
https://www.elysiumhealth.com/
Also see Peter Thiel's work on blood change.
Re: How Aging Research Is Changing Our Lives
#7The Buck Institute [0], featured in this article, is a pretty outstanding organization -- they're unique in being a sizable research center devoted to researching aging. I'm excited to see their idea of age-related diseases as biological maintenance problems gaining some traction. I'm not entirely sure where the interviewer was going with this statement, though. > There’s a lot of Silicon-Valley buzz about longevity…
There are certainly startups / small companies working on rejuvenation therapies, however, ways to repair the forms of damage that cause aging rather than merely slowing down that damage a little as is the case for calorie restriction mimetic drug development.
See for example these entities working on means to selectively remove senescent cells, with Unity Biotechnolgy being the one connected to Buck Institute researchers:
http://unitybiotechnology.com/
http://www.siwatherapeutics.com/
The presence of senescent cells have been shown to directly cause failure of regeneration, fibrosis, fibrotic lung diseases, loss of tissue elasticity, blood vessel calcification, faster progression of atherosclerosic lesions, arthritis, chronic inflammation, immune system dysfunction, and retinal degeneration, just to name a few items from papers published in the past two years. More links are being established in research papers with each passing year. The removal of these cells has been shown in mouse studies to quickly reverse the age-related progression of many of these items.
Re: How Aging Research Is Changing Our Lives
#8Great interview. I thought his comments about the upper limits of human lifespan were especially interesting: > There currently is an upper limit, and the upper limit is probably around 115, 120. You have a very large number—100 billion people to choose the number of people that have ever lived—and you have only one who has made it through to 122, Jeanne Calment. The second oldest was 119. It does seem there is an up…
The interaction between medical technology and specific biological mechanisms determines limits to human life span. Given the sparse nature of demographic data for extreme old age, there is plenty of room to debate whether or not there exists one or more mechanisms of aging that have not been impacted in any meaningful way by improvements in medical technology over the past century, and which, on their own, can produce a very high rate of mortality in late life. That circumstance would look a lot like a limit to human life span, one that doesn't appear to be affected by medicine - but that is only because the right medicine hasn't been created yet.
One mechanism that springs to mind here is the accumulation of transthyretin amyloid, found in one small study to be the majority cause of death in supercentenarians, but which appears to have only a smaller impact on mortality in younger old age - it is implicated in something like 10% of heart failure cases, for example. Can we argue that advances in medicine and public health over the past century have had little to no impact on the accumulation of misfolded transthyretin deposits in tissues, and thus this mechanism acts as a limit on life span? Or do some of these improvements in fact produce an small, incidental reduction in amyloid burden in later life? The evidence to support any of the possible positions on these questions is presently lacking.
Whatever the state of effective limits on life span today, however, the limits on life span tomorrow are determined by progress towards rejuvenation therapies. There are treatments under development that can clear transthyretin amyloid from tissues, for example, such as the work of Pentraxin Therapeutics, or the catalytic antibody development funded by the SENS Research Foundation.
Re: How Aging Research Is Changing Our Lives
#9There's the sens foundation, working on a "repair the damage we understand as aging" approach.
Re: How Aging Research Is Changing Our Lives
#10The Buck Institute [0], featured in this article, is a pretty outstanding organization -- they're unique in being a sizable research center devoted to researching aging. I'm excited to see their idea of age-related diseases as biological maintenance problems gaining some traction. I'm not entirely sure where the interviewer was going with this statement, though. > There’s a lot of Silicon-Valley buzz about longevity…
There are certainly startups / small companies working on rejuvenation therapies, however, ways to repair the forms of damage that cause aging rather than merely slowing down that damage a little as is the case for calorie restriction mimetic drug development. See for example these entities working on means to selectively remove senescent cells, with Unity Biotechnolgy being the one connected to Buck Institute resear…
Any human trials yet?