Lifeboat Foundation

Alongside our Ending Age-related Diseases 2019 annual conference, we are proud to announce the launch of a special pre-conference biotech workshop led by Dr. Kelsey Moody, CEO of Ichor Therapeutics, a successful and rapidly growing rejuvenation biotechnology company.

This joint event between the Life Extension Advocacy Foundation and Ichor Therapeutics is an essential workshop where you will learn about the fundamentals of launching and growing a successful biotechnology company with an emphasis on the nuances specific to the emerging rejuvenation biotechnology industry.

Snake venom has some amazing medical applications!

A device that converts the heart’s mechanical energy into electrical energy has been successfully tested in pigs.

• By Harini Barath on May 28, 2019

An intriguing new study from researchers at Stockholm University and Karolinska Institutet has described a mechanism by which virus particles can interact with proteins in biological fluids and become more infectious, while also accelerating the formation of plaques often associated with neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s.

It’s comforting to think of the body as a machine we can trick out. It helps us ignore the strange fleshy aches that come with having a meat cage. It makes a fickle system—one we truly don’t understand—feel conquerable. To admit that the body (and mind that sits within it) might be far more complex than our most delicate, intricate inventions endangers all kinds of things: the medical industrial complex, the wellness industry, countless startups. But it might also open up new doors for better relationships with our bodies too: Disability scholars have long argued that the way we see bodies as “fixable” ultimately serves to further marginalize people who will never have the “standard operating system,” no matter how many times their parts are replaced or tinkered with.

Tech gurus are obsessed with treating bodies like machines—something a 30-year-old cartoon about a tricked-out detective suggests won’t work.

Mutations in so-called “junk” DNA have been tied to the development of autism (ASD) in children who do not have parents or siblings with the condition.

For the first time, research links non-coding DNA to disorder development. Andrew Masterson reports.

Helicobacter pylori, a globally distributed gastric bacterium, is genetically highly adaptable. Microbiologists at LMU have now characterized its population structure in individual patients, demonstrating an important role of antibiotics for its within-patient evolution.

The cosmopolitan bacterium Helicobacter pylori is responsible for one of the most prevalent chronic infections found in humans. Although the infection often provokes no definable symptoms, it can result in a range of gastrointestinal tract pathologies, ranging from inflammation of the lining of the stomach to gastric and duodenal tumors. Approximately 1 percent of all those infected eventually develop stomach cancer, and the World Health Organization has classified H. pylori as a carcinogen. One of Helicobacter pylori’s most striking traits is its genetic diversity and adaptability. Researchers led by microbiologist Sebastian Suerbaum (Chair of Medical Microbiology and Hospital Epidemiology at LMU’s Max von Pettenkofer Institute have now examined the genetic diversity of the species in the stomachs of 16 patients, and identified specific adaptations that enable the bacterium to colonize particular regions of the stomach.

Many mutations in DNA that contribute to disease are not in actual genes but instead lie in the 99% of the genome once considered “junk.” Even though scientists have recently come to understand that these vast stretches of DNA do in fact play critical roles, deciphering these effects on a wide scale has been impossible until now.

Using artificial intelligence, a Princeton University-led team has decoded the functional impact of such mutations in people with autism. The researchers believe this powerful method is generally applicable to discovering such genetic contributions to any disease.

Publishing May 27 in the journal Nature Genetics, the researchers analyzed the genomes of 1,790 families in which one child has autism spectrum disorder but other members do not. The method sorted among 120,000 mutations to find those that affect the behavior of genes in people with autism. Although the results do not reveal exact causes of cases of autism, they reveal thousands of possible contributors for researchers to study.

Continue reading “Artificial intelligence detects a new class of mutations behind autism” »

The role that the gut microbiome plays in aging is increasingly being appreciated in the research world as more evidence arrives to support it. A new publication reviews the various supporting evidence and takes a look at the gut microbiome in the context of nutrient-rich diets and how they facilitate the progression of dysbiosis and disease [1].

What is the microbiome?

The microbiome is the varied community of bacteria, archaea, eukarya, and viruses that inhabit our guts. The four bacterial phyla of Firmicutes, Bacteroidetes, Proteobacteria, and Actinobacteria comprise 98% of the intestinal microbiome.

Continue reading “Nutrient-Rich Diets May Lead to Dysbiosis and Age-Related Diseases” »