In a historic move, the Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday approved a pioneering gene therapy for a rare form of childhood blindness, the first such treatment cleared in the United States for an inherited disease.
The approval signals a new era for gene therapy, a field that struggled for decades to overcome devastating setbacks but now is pushing forward in an effort to develop treatments for haemophilia, sickle-cell anaemia, and an array of other genetic diseases.
Yet the products, should they reach patients, are likely to carry stratospheric prices – a prospect already worrying consumer advocates and economists.
This conference is focused on the cellular and molecular repair of age-related damage as the basis of therapies to bring aging under full medical control, It will mirror the structure of SENS, with sessions devoted to each strand and to the enabling technologies that multiple strands will rely upon. Sessions will cover a wide range of topics across the damage-repair spectrum.
Further details are given below:
Accelerating rejuvenation therapies to repair the damage of aging. Berlin, March, 15 — 17.
The 2017 Project for Awesome (P4A) has ended, and what a weekend it has been! We have had a significant number of videos created in support of our work, and the encouragement from the community has been superb. It is very inspiring to hear what people have to say about the importance of our work and why they appreciate the work we do. Today, we wanted to have a look at some of the great videos created by the LEAF team and our awesome community.
LEAF President Keith Comito led the charge during P4A and talks about our motivations and our vision for a world without age-related diseases. Science is making huge leaps in progress, and we no longer have to accept age-related diseases as inevitable.
NEW YORK (Reuters) — The early hope that stem cell therapy would make the paralyzed walk, the blind see and cure diabetes have given way to a long list of failures, highlighted by early stem cell champion Geron Corp abandoning the field in 2011.
But two small companies, Athersys Inc and Mesoblast Ltd, are beginning final stage trials in hundreds of patients that they — along with loyal investors — say could change the course of devastating stroke and heart failure.
Both have overcome major hurdles to manufacturing stem cell treatments on a large scale that are off-the-shelf products derived from healthy donor bone marrow and do not face immune system rejection issues.
The topic of healthspan is increasingly being raised in the popular media, but what does it really mean? Simply put, healthspan means the period of your life in which you remain healthy and free from age-related diseases. The Roman poet Virgil once said “The greatest wealth is health”, so the concept of healthspan was something valued as far back in time as then.
Today, we are going to take a look at how we have been trying to increase human healthspan in the past and what science is doing now to take us to new frontiers of health through a new approach to medicine called rejuvenation biotechnology.
So, why is healthspan becoming such a popular saying, and why is it appearing frequently in articles and in other media now? Quite simply, the advances in our understanding of the aging processes and our ability to do something about them has reached the point at which taking measures to increase healthspan is now plausible.
The genetic atlas revealed new information about health risks, ancient political borders, and the influence of Vikings.
Learn how your family history is connected to the human journey with National Geographic’sGeno 2.0 DNA ancestry kit.
A new “DNA atlas” of Ireland is revealing some of the surprising ways historic kingdoms have influenced populations on the island—and it offers the first genetic evidence that Vikings intermingled with ancient Irish peoples.
Brendan John Frey FRSC (born 29 August 1968) is a Canadian-born machine learning and genome biology researcher, known mainly for his work on factor graphs, the wake-sleep algorithm for deep learning, and using machine learning to model genome biology and understand genetic disorders. He founded Deep Genomics and is currently its CEO, and he is a Professor of Engineering and Medicine at the University of Toronto. He co-developed a new computational approach to identifying the genetic determinants of disease, was one of the first researchers to successfully train a deep neural network, and was a pioneer in the introduction of iterative message-passing algorithms.
Frey studied computer engineering and physics at the University of Calgary (BSc 1990) and the University of Manitoba (MSc 1993), and then studied neural networks and graphical models as a doctoral candidate at the University of Toronto under the supervision of Geoffrey Hinton (PhD 1997). He was an invited participant of the Machine Learning program at the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Cambridge, UK (1997) and was a Beckman Fellow at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (1999).
Following his undergraduate studies, Frey worked as a Junior Research Scientist at Bell-Northern Research from 1990 to 1991. After completing his postdoctoral studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Frey was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo, from 1999 to 2001.
In 2001, Frey joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto and was cross-appointed to the Department of Computer Science, the Banting and Best Department of Medical Research and the Terrence Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research. From 2008 to 2009, he was a Visiting Researcher at Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK, and a Visiting Professor in the Cavendish Laboratories and Darwin College at Cambridge University. Between 2001 and 2014, Frey consulted for several groups at Microsoft Research and acted as a member of its Technical Advisory Board.
In 2014, Frey co-founded Deep Genomics, a Toronto company that develops machine learning methods to model the deep biological architectures that relate genetic mutations to disease. The company’s goal is to bridge the genotype-phenotype gap, which is a pain point in genetic testing, pharmaceuticals, personalized medicine and health insurance.
