The NUHS Centre for Healthy Longevity will look for biomarkers of ageing and test ways to slow ageing.
All eyes are on the Emerald Isle this week as the Longevity Summit Dublin brings together a host of speakers covering the spectrum of this booming sector. Delegates have been hearing from some of the leading entrepreneurs, companies, investors, and researchers in the field as they address many of the hot-button topics affecting longevity. One of those speakers is the so-called “father of genomics” – Harvard professor of genetics, George Church – who closes the conference later today with a keynote on Gene, cell and organ therapies for de-aging.
Longevity. Technology: In addition to his Harvard professorship, Church heads up synthetic biology at the Wyss Institute, where he oversees development of new tools with applications in regenerative medicine. Much of his focus more recently has been on the development of gene therapies targeting age-related disease, a passion that led him to co-found Rejuvenate Bio, with the goal of creating “full age reversal gene therapies.” We caught up with Church ahead of his Dublin presentation for a brief conversation on longevity.
Dr Church’s name is synonymous with genomic science, and he was a key contributor to the Human Genome Project and technologies including next-generation fluorescent and nanopore sequencing, aimed at understanding genetic contributions to human disease. However, he doesn’t feel that those initiatives did a huge amount to move the aging field forward.
Physics is not the first scientific discipline that springs to mind at the mention of DNA, but a group of scientists, including John van Noort from the Leiden Institute of Physics (LION) have discovered a new structure of telomeric DNA.
Longevity. Technology: In every cell of our bodies are chromosomes that carry genes that determine our characteristics. At the ends of these chromosomes are telomeres, which protect the genes from damage. Telomeres are rather like aglets, the plastic tips at the end of a shoelace – they protect the DNA from damage and fraying. However, every time a cell divides, the telomeres become shorter, until eventually the Hayflick Limit is reached, the cell can no longer divide and apoptosis – programmed cell death – occurs.
This means that telomeres are sometimes seen as the key to living longer, and the researchers behind this new discovery hope it will help us to better understand aging and age-related diseases.
Set to be one of the largest, if not the largest, investment opportunity in the decades to come, longevity is a rapidly accelerating field; the Longevity Investors Conference targets the global investor community, bringing together institutional investors and top class experts for networking and exploration of relevant insights into the field, as well as expert education and investment opportunities.
Longevity. Technology: It’s not long to wait, now until the Longevity Investors Conference, which takes place later this month in Gstadt, Switzerland. The speaker list is full of longevity pioneers and visionaries, and we have been lucky enough to be given the opportunity to ask them some of our burning longevity questions.
Longevity. Technology readers can get their exclusive invitation to the leading investors-only longevity conference HERE.
Hot on the heels of its €7.4 million raise to accelerate remote medical diagnostics, Certific has announced it is partnering with healthtech startup PocDoc to tackle the world’s biggest killer – cardiovascular disease.
The novel screening will allow patients to remotely monitor blood pressure, BMI and, crucially, quantitative lipid levels through the same user experience. This solution will be rolled out through a number of pilots, in conjunction with the NHS, across the UK, and eventually across Europe and globally.
Longevity. Technology: Heart and circulatory diseases cause a quarter of all deaths in the UK – that’s more than 160,000 deaths each year, or one every three minutes. There are around 7.6 million people living with a heart or circulatory disease in the UK. This costs the country’s National Health Service (NHS) an estimated £7.4 billion per year, with a wider cost to the economy of around £15.8 billion. Early identification of those at highest risk can ensure appropriate treatment, prevent many cases and reduce the strain on the healthcare system.
A new longevity focused venture capital fund is preparing to announce its first investments, as it seeks to accelerate commercialisation in the field. Joining the likes of Maximon, Apollo and Korify, New York’s Life Extension Ventures (LifeX) has put together a $100 million fund specifically for companies developing solutions to extend the longevity of both humans and our planet. In a slight twist, the fund is predominantly looking to invest in companies that are leveraging software and data at the heart of their efforts to hasten the adoption of scientific breakthroughs in longevity.
Longevity. Technology: The longevity field is alive with innovation, and developments in AI and Big Data are just some of the software-led technologies driving progress throughout the sector. Co-founded by scientists-turned-entrepreneurs, Amol Sarva and Inaki Berenguer, LifeX Ventures’ investment philosophy draws on their combined experiences building software-led companies across a wide range of sectors. We caught up with Sarva to learn more.
Between them Sarva, a cognitive scientist by training, and Berenguer have led and/or founded several startups, such as CoverWallet, Virgin Mobile USA and Halo Neuroscience. The two have also invested personally in more than 150 startups before their interest turned more recently to longevity.
The twisty eruption of a dying star has finally been revealed in all its 3D glory.
A team of scientists led by a high school graduate has reconstructed the complicated and mysterious nebulae that make up one of the most famous stellar ghosts in the sky – the Cat’s Eye Nebula.
Their model revealed the mechanisms that carved out some of the previously unexplained aspects of the nebula’s structure.
Impaired reduction/oxidation (redox) metabolism is a key contributor to the etiology of many diseases, including primary mitochondrial disorders, cancer, neurodegeneration, and aging. However, mechanistic studies of redox imbalance remain challenging due to limited strategies which can perturb cellular redox metabolism and model pathology in various cellular, tissue, or organismal backgrounds without creating additional and potentially confounding metabolic perturbations. To date, most studies involving impaired redox metabolism have focused on oxidative stress and reactive oxygen species (ROS) production; consequently, less is known about the settings where there is an overabundance of reducing equivalents, termed reductive stress. NADH reductive stress has been modeled using pharmacologic inhibition of the electron transport chain (ETC) and ethanol supplementation. Still, both these methods have significant drawbacks. Here, we introduce a soluble transhydrogenase from E. coli (Ec STH) as a novel genetically encoded tool to promote NADH overproduction in living cells. When expressed in mammalian cells, Ec STH, and a mitochondrially-targeted version (mito Ec STH), can elevate the NADH/NAD+ ratio in a compartment-specific manner. Using this tool, we determine the metabolic and transcriptomic signatures of NADH reductive stress in mammalian cells. We also find that cellular responses to NADH reductive stress, including blunted proliferation, are dependent on cellular background and identify the metabolic reactions that sense changes in the cellular NADH/NAD+ balance. Collectively, our novel genetically encoded tool represents an orthogonal strategy to perturb redox metabolism and characterize the impact on normal physiology and disease states.
The authors have declared no competing interest.
Mild, persistent inflammation in tissue is considered one of the biological hallmarks of the aging process in humans—and at the same time is a risk factor for diseases such as Alzheimer’s or cancer. Prof. Francesco Neri and Dr. Mahdi Rasa of the Leibniz Institute on Aging—Fritz Lipmann Institute (FLI) in Jena have succeeded for the first time in describing at the molecular level the regulatory network that drives the general, multiple-organ inflammatory response. Moreover, they were able to show that dietary restriction can influence this regulatory circuit, thereby inhibiting inflammation.
Inflammation is an immune response of the body that is, in itself, useful: our immune system uses it to fight pathogens or to remove damaged cells from tissue. Once the immune cells have done their work, the inflammation subsides: the infection is over, the wound is healed. Unlike such acute inflammations, age-related chronic inflammation is not local. The innate immune system ramps up its activity overall, resulting in chronic low-grade inflammation. This aging-related inflammation is also known as inflammaging.
