Lifeboat Foundation

As investors await results from the first U.S. clinical trials of the gene-editing system known as Crispr, scientists are focused on finding ways to administer it directly into humans, according to the technology’s co-inventor, Jennifer Doudna.

Right now, in studies using Crispr that have treated patients, researchers have had to extract their cells to be able to make edits to faulty DNA before infusing them back into the body for treatment. Being able to do precise edits directly inside humans, animals or plants could open the door to new applications, Doudna said.

A chance finding 10 years ago led to the creation by researchers of the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO) of the first mice born with much longer telomeres than normal in their species. Telomeres shorten throughout life, so older organisms have shorter telomeres. Given this relationship between telomeres and aging, the scientists launched a study generating mice in which 100 percent of their cells had hyper-long telomeres. The findings are published in Nature Communications and show only positive consequences: The animals with hyper-long telomeres live longer and in better health, free from cancer and obesity. This marks the first time that longevity has been significantly increased without any genetic modification.

“This finding supports the idea that, when it comes to determining longevity, genes are not the only thing to consider,” says Maria Blasco, head of the CNIO Telomeres and Telomerase Group and intellectual author of the paper. “There is margin for extending life without altering the genes.”

Telomeres form the ends of chromosomes in the nucleus of each cell in the body. Their function is to protect the integrity of the genetic information in DNA. Whenever the cells divide the telomeres, they are slightly shortened, so one of the main characteristics of aging is the accumulation of shorter telomeres in cells. “Telomere shortening is considered to be one of the primary causes of aging, given that short telomeres cause aging of the organism and reduce longevity,” the authors write in a paper published in Nature Communications.

Are you ready for the future? A Transhumanist future? One where everyone around you—friends, family, and neighbors—has dipped into the transhumanist punch bowl. A future of contact lenses that see in the dark, endoskeleton attached artificial limbs that lift a half-ton, and brain chip implants that read your thoughts and instantly communicate them to others. Sound crazy? Indeed, it does. Nevertheless, it’s coming soon. Very soon. In fact, much of the technology already exists. Some of it’s being sold commercially at your local superstore or being tested in laboratories right now around the world.

We’ve all heard about driverless test cars on the roads and how doctors in France are replacing people’s hearts with permanent robotic ones, but did you know there’s already a multi-billion dollar market for brain wave reading headsets? Using electroencephalography (EEG) sensors that pick up and monitor brain activity, NeuroSky’s MindWave can attach to Google Glass and allow you to take a picture and post it to Facebook and Twitter just by thinking about it. Other headsets allow you to play video games on your iPhone just with your thoughts too. In fact, well over a year ago now, the first mind-to-mind communication took place. A researcher in India projected a thought to a colleague in France, and using their headsets, they understood each other. Telepathy went from science fiction to reality.

The history of transhumanism—the burgeoning field of science and radical tech used to describe robotic implants, prosthetics, and cyborg-like enhancements in the human being and its experience—has come a long way since scientists began throwing around the term a half century ago. What a difference a generation or two makes. Today a thriving pro-cyborg medical industry is setting the stage for trillion-dollar markets that will remake the human experience. Five million people in America suffer from Alzheimer’s, but a new surgery that involves installing brain implants is showing promise in restoring people’s memory and improving lives. The use of medical and microchip implants, whether in the brain or not, are expected to surge in the coming years. Some experts surmise as many as half of Americans will have implants by 2020. I already have one in my hand. It’s truly a new age for humans.

Engineering biology is already transforming technology and science, and a consortium of researchers across many disciplines in the international Genome Project-write is calling for more discussion among scientists, policy makers and the general public to shepherd future development. In a policy forum article published in the October 18 issue of Science, the authors outline the technological advances needed to secure the transformative future of synthetic biology and express their concerns that the implementation of the relatively new discipline remains safe and responsible.

Two researchers with the University of Tennessee Institute of Agriculture are co-authors on the piece titled “Technological challenges and milestones for writing genomes: synthetic genomics requires improved technologies.” Neal Stewart and Scott Lenaghan with the UTIA departments of Plant Sciences and Food Science, respectively, join Nili Ostrov, a Ph.D. research fellow in genetics at Harvard Medical School, and 18 other leading scientists from a number of institutions and disciplines, in outlining a potential timeline for the development of what they call transformative advances to science and society.

Stewart and Lenaghan are the co-directors of the UT Center for Agricultural Synthetic Biology (CASB). Formed in 2018, Stewart says CASB is the first synthetic biology center in the world aimed specifically at improved agriculture. A professor of plant sciences in the UT Herbert College of Agriculture, Stewart also holds the endowed Racheff Chair of Excellence in Plant Molecular Genetics. Lenaghan is an assistant professor in the Department of Food Science who also holds an adjunct position in the UT Mechanical, Aerospace, and Biomedical Engineering (MABE) Department.

The blind mole rat (Spalax) is a wild, long‐lived rodent that has evolved mechanisms to tolerate hypoxia and resist cancer. Previously, we demonstrated high DNA repair capacity and low DNA damage in Spalax fibroblasts following genotoxic stress compared with rats. Since the acquisition of senescence‐associated secretory phenotype (SASP) is a consequence of persistent DNA damage, we investigated whether cellular senescence in Spalax is accompanied by an inflammatory response. Spalax fibroblasts undergo replicative senescence (RS) and etoposide‐induced senescence (EIS), evidenced by an increased activity of senescence‐associated beta‐galactosidase (SA‐β‐Gal), growth arrest, and overexpression of p21, p16, and p53 mRNAs. Yet, unlike mouse and human fibroblasts, RS and EIS Spalax cells showed undetectable or decreased expression of the well‐known SASP factors: interleukin‐6 (IL6), IL8, IL1α, growth‐related oncogene alpha (GROα), SerpinB2, and intercellular adhesion molecule (ICAM‐1). Apparently, due to the efficient DNA repair in Spalax, senescent cells did not accumulate the DNA damage necessary for SASP activation. Conversely, Spalax can maintain DNA integrity during replicative or moderate genotoxic stress and limit pro‐inflammatory secretion. However, exposure to the conditioned medium of breast cancer cells MDA‐MB‐231 resulted in an increase in DNA damage, activation of the nuclear factor κB (NF‐κB) through nuclear translocation, and expression of inflammatory mediators in RS Spalax cells. Evaluation of SASP in aging Spalax brain and intestine confirmed downregulation of inflammatory‐related genes. These findings suggest a natural mechanism for alleviating the inflammatory response during cellular senescence and aging in Spalax, which can prevent age‐related chronic inflammation supporting healthy aging and longevity.

Short telomeres trigger age-related pathologies and shorter lifespans in mice and humans. In the past, we generated mouse embryonic (ES) cells with longer telomeres than normal (hyper-long telomeres) in the absence of genetic manipulations, which contributed to all mouse tissues. To address whether hyper-long telomeres have deleterious effects, we generated mice in which 100% of their cells are derived from hyper-long telomere ES cells. We observe that these mice have longer telomeres and less DNA damage with aging. Hyper-long telomere mice are lean and show low cholesterol and LDL levels, as well as improved glucose and insulin tolerance. Hyper-long telomere mice also have less incidence of cancer and an increased longevity. These findings demonstrate that longer telomeres than normal in a given species are not deleterious but instead, show beneficial effects.

Mankind’s ability to edit the fabric of human life has led to scientific upheaval, global debate, and at least one international incident. Now, it’s coming to Netflix.

“Unnatural Selection,” a four-part docuseries debuting Friday, dissects the stories, science, and ethics behind genome editing, following academics, biohackers, and patients as they move through a brave new world made possible by technologies like CRISPR.

We recently spoke with co-directors Joe Egender and Leeor Kaufman about how the series came to be and how it frames the sprawling story of human genetic engineering. This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Kelsey Moody of Ichor Therapeutics presented on the LysoClear development program at the Ending Age-Related Diseases conference organized by the Life Extension Advocacy Foundation earlier this year. LysoClear is an example of the commercial development of a rejuvenation therapy, taken all the way from the starting point of the discovery of microbial enzymes capable of breaking down certain forms of harmful age-related molecular waste that contribute to aging and age-related diseases. The actual research is largely done, and the task now is to focus on manufacture, regulatory approval, and entry into the clinic.

Taken end to end, I think that this development program might be able to lay claim to being the first and oldest of the modern rejuvenation research initiatives, starting sometime back in the early 2000s. It began at the Methuselah Foundation as LysoSENS, the first of the SENS programs to get underway with modest philanthropic funding. Some of you may remember gathering dirt from graveyards to send in for analysis, in the hunt for microbial species that consume the molecular waste that our bodies cannot remove. Researches knew that those microbes existed because graveyards do not accumulate this waste — it is being broken down by something in the environment. The program carried forward into the SENS Research Foundation when it spun out from the Methuselah Foundation, and a portion of it was later licensed to Ichor Therapeutics, and became LysoClear.

Continue reading “Kelsey Moody Presenting on the LysoClear Program at Ending Age-Related Diseases 2019” »

Wonderful news, the MitoMouse project has successfully reached its initial $50k goal and is well on the way towards the first stretch goal! This now means the projecct will launch at the lab and the MitoMouse strain will be created.

The next step for this ambitious project is to actually create progency from the SickMice and MitoMice in order to have an effective model to test the mitochondrial repair approach, which has already been shown to work in cells, in living animals. If successful it would be vindication for mitochondrial repair therapy and move the therapy closer to translation to humans. Here is Dr. Amutha Boominathan, the leader of the MitoMouse Project at the SENS Research Foundation, to tell us a little more about the first stretch goal for the project.