Lifeboat Foundation

The blood-borne signs of aging – and indeed, perhaps the causes of aging – make three big shifts around the ages of 34, 60 and 78, a new Stanford-led study has discovered, potentially leading to new diagnostic tests and avenues of anti-aging research.

The study measured levels of nearly 3,000 individual proteins in the plasma of small blood samples from 4,263 people aged between 18 and 95, and found that 1,379 of these proteins varied significantly with a subject’s age. Indeed, with information about levels of just 373 of these proteins, the researchers found they could predict a subject’s age “with great accuracy,” and an even smaller subset of just nine proteins could do a “passable” job.

Proteins are the body’s workhorses, carrying out instructions from all the body’s cells. Changes in their levels in our blood reflect the starting, stopping and changing of different biological processes. The researchers found that these changes were often quite sudden – levels of a protein would remain stable in the blood for years, and then rapidly plunge or leap, rather than showing a steady increase or decline.

Israeli startup Sight Diagnostics said on Wednesday the US Food and Drug Administration had cleared its device that can process results for the most commonly needed blood test in about ten minutes. The regulator’s nod means that laboratories that run relatively lesser tests on a day to day basis may also be able to conduct the complete blood count (CBC) test with just two drops of blood.

Just before the 14 minute mark: “I believe that most people today have a respectable chance of living to 1,000, or indeed any other number you might think of.”

The Talk Spot is an interview show where we have guests of all backgrounds on. This episode features author and biomedical gerontologist, Aubrey de Grey.

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A type of artificial intelligence technique is now being used to develop new drugs and therapies and could perhaps even help to solve aging.

An urgent need for aging biomarkers

There has long been an urgent need in our field to develop increasingly accurate biomarkers of aging so that the efficacy of interventions can be gauged. Deep learning is one of the more recent techniques being applied in the search for aging biomarkers.

Libella Gene Therapeutics, LLC (“Libella”) announces a clinical trial in Colombia (South America) using telomere-lengthening gene therapy to reverse aging and possibly cure age-related diseases. Libella has chosen bioaccess™ as its CRO for this trial.

UCLA scientists have discovered a link between a protein and the ability of human blood stem cells to self-renew. In a study published today in the journal Nature, the team reports that activating the protein causes blood stem cells to self-renew at least twelvefold in laboratory conditions.

Multiplying blood stem cells in conditions outside the human body could greatly improve treatment options for blood cancers like leukemia and for many inherited blood diseases.

Dr. Hanna Mikkola, a member of the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at UCLA and senior author of the study, has studied blood stem cells for more than 20 years.

The technique promises to eliminate cutting, scarring, pain, and recovery time.

A team of University of Tokyo researchers said Thursday it will begin a clinical study later this month on a vaccine for the Ebola virus, a first in Japan, with the vaccine developed using an artificially produced detoxified virus.

The new vaccine developed by Yoshihiro Kawaoka, a professor at the university’s Institute of Medical Science, and others is believed to have fewer side effects compared to those produced abroad, according to the institute.

The researchers said they aim to develop the Ebola vaccine to prevent further outbreaks of the deadly hemorrhagic fever in Africa.

A much broader array of stakeholders must engage with the problems that DNA databases present. In particular, governments, policymakers and legislators should tighten regulation and reduce the likelihood of corporations aiding potential human-rights abuses by selling DNA-profiling technology to bad actors — knowingly or negligently. Researchers working on biometric identification technologies should consider more deeply how their inventions could be used. And editors, reviewers and publishers must do more to ensure that published research on biometric identification has been done in an ethical way.

Corporations selling DNA-profiling technology are aiding human-rights abuses. Governments, legislators, researchers, reviewers and publishers must act.