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Seminar summary: https://foresight.org/summary/bioelectric-networks-taming-th…-medicine/
Program & apply to join: https://foresight.org/biotech-health-extension-program/

Foresight Biotech & Health Extension Meeting sponsored by 100 Plus Capital.

Michael Levin, Tufts Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology.
Bioelectric Networks: Taming the Collective Intelligence of Cells for Regenerative Medicine.

Michael Levin, Distinguished Professor in the Biology department and Vannevar Bush Chair, serves as director of the Tufts Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology. Recent honors include the Scientist of Vision award and the Distinguished Scholar Award. His group’s focus is on understanding the biophysical mechanisms that implement decision-making during complex pattern regulation, and harnessing endogenous bioelectric dynamics toward rational control of growth and form. The lab’s current main directions are:

• Understanding how somatic cells form bioelectrical networks for storing and recalling pattern memories that guide morphogenesis;
• Creating next-generation AI tools for helping scientists understand top-down control of pattern regulation (a new bioinformatics of shape); and.
• Using these insights to enable new capabilities in regenerative medicine and engineering.

Prior to college, Michael Levin worked as a software engineer and independent contractor in the field of scientific computing. He attended Tufts University, interested in artificial intelligence and unconventional computation. To explore the algorithms by which the biological world implemented complex adaptive behavior, he got dual B.S. degrees, in CS and in Biology and then received a PhD from Harvard University. He did post-doctoral training at Harvard Medical School (1996−2000), where he began to uncover a new bioelectric language by which cells coordinate their activity during embryogenesis. His independent laboratory (2000−2007 at Forsyth Institute, Harvard; 2008-present at Tufts University) develops new molecular-genetic and conceptual tools to probe large-scale information processing in regeneration, embryogenesis, and cancer suppression.

Age catches up with us all eventually, but in some people the right genes can make that chase into our twilight years a relatively leisurely one.

A few years ago Italian researchers discovered something special about people who live well into their 90s and beyond: they commonly have a version of a gene called BPIFB4 that protects against cardiovascular damage and keeps the heart in good shape for a longer period of time.

By introducing the mutated gene into older mice, the scientists have now seen how the variant rewinds markers of biological heart aging by the equivalent of more than 10 human years.

Bryan Johnson is 45 years old but, according to a new report, his test results show he has the heart of a 37-year-old and the lungs of a young adult.

Johnson is a biotech entrepreneur who hopes to game nature’s course of aging and have the organs and health of an 18-year-old by going through an intense data-driven experimental program he’s called Project Blueprint.

According to a recent Bloomberg profile of the CEO, Johnson could spend up to $2 million on his body this year and there are early glimpses that show he may be on track to unlocking the secret to age reversal.

Test results from doctors suggest that Johnson has the heart of a 37-year-old, the skin of a 28-year-old, and the lung capacity of an 18-year-old, Bloomberg’s Ashlee Vance reported.


Middle-aged tech centimillionaire Bryan Johnson and his team of 30 doctors say they have a plan to reboot his body.

Advancing Geroscience & Gerotherapeutics — Dr. Nir Barzilai, MD, Albert Einstein College of Medicine.


Dr. Nir Barzilai, MD (https://www.einsteinmed.edu/faculty/484/nir-barzilai/) is the Director of the Institute for Aging Research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and the Director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for the Biology of Human Aging Research and of the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) Nathan Shock Centers of Excellence in the Basic Biology of Aging. He is the Ingeborg and Ira Leon Rennert Chair of Aging Research, professor in the Departments of Medicine and Genetics, and member of the Diabetes Research Center and of the Divisions of Endocrinology & Diabetes and Geriatrics.

Dr. Barzilai’s research interests are in the biology and genetics of aging, with one focus of his team on the genetics of exceptional longevity, where they hypothesize and demonstrate that centenarians (those aged 100 and above) may have novel protective genes, which allow the delay of aging or for the protection against age-related diseases. The second focus of his work, for which Dr. Barzilai holds an NIH Merit award, is on the metabolic decline that occurs during aging, and his team hypothesizes that the brain leads this decline with some very interesting neuro-endocrine connections.

Dr. Barzilai is currently leading an international effort to approve drugs that can target aging (Gerotherapeutics). Targeting Aging with METformin (TAME) is a specific study designed to prove the concept that a basket of diseases (multi-morbidities) of aging can be delayed simultaneously, in this protocol by the drug metformin, working with the FDA to approve this approach which will serve as a template for future efforts to delay aging and its diseases in humans.

Dr. Barzilai has received numerous grants, among them ones from the National Institute on Aging (NIA), American Federation for Aging Research, the Ellison Medical Foundation and The Glenn Medical foundation. He has published over 280 peer-reviewed papers, reviews, and textbook chapters. He is an advisor to the NIH on several projects and serves on several editorial boards and is a reviewer for numerous other journals.

Rejuvenating an older person’s blood may now be within reach, based on recent findings from Passegué’s lab published in Nature Cell Biology(link is external and opens in a new window).

Passegué, with her graduate student Carl Mitchell, found that an anti-inflammatory drug, already approved for use in rheumatoid arthritis, can turn back time in mice and reverse some of the effects of age on the hematopoietic system.

Nature article:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41556-022-01053-0


Young blood may be an elixir for older bodies, rejuvenating aging hearts, muscles, and brains. But how can old blood become young again? Columbia stem cell scientists may have found a way.

Join us on Patreon!
https://www.patreon.com/MichaelLustgartenPhD

Green Tea Discount Link.
https://www.ochaandco.com/?ref=conqueraging.

Bristle Discount Link (Oral Microbiome Quantification):
ConquerAging15
https://www.bmq30trk.com/4FL3LK/GTSC3/

TruDiagnostic Discount Link (Epigenetic Testing)
CONQUERAGING!
https://bit.ly/3Rken0n.

Quantify Discount Link (At-Home Blood Testing):
https://getquantify.io/mlustgarten.

Cronometer Discount Link (Daily Diet Tracking):

How should we live when we know we must die? This question is posed by the first work of world literature, the Gilgamesh epic. More than 4,000 years ago, Gilgamesh set out on a quest for immortality. Like all Babylonian literature, the saga has survived only in fragments. Nevertheless, scholars have managed to bring two-thirds of the text into readable condition since it was rediscovered in the 19th century.

The Babylonians wrote in cuneiform characters on clay tablets, which have survived in the form of countless fragments. Over centuries, scholars transferred the characters imprinted on the pieces of clay onto paper. Then they would painstakingly compare their transcripts and—in the best case—recognize which fragments belong together and fill in the gaps. The texts were written in the languages Sumerian and Akkadian, which have complicated writing systems. This was a Sisyphean task, one that the experts in the Electronic Babylonian Literature project can scarcely imagine today.

Enrique Jiménez, Professor of Ancient Near Eastern Literatures at LMU’s Institute of Assyriology, and his team have been working on the digitization of all surviving cuneiform tablets since 2018. In that time, the project has processed as many as 22,000 text fragments.

This is more about the current landscape but a bit on the future near the beginning.


In this video Dr de Grey talks the future of LEVF and how the longevity field has evolved and some of the main participants.

Dr. Aubrey de Grey is internationally recognised as the visionary biomedical gerontologist who devised the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence: a comprehensive set of methods to rejuvenate the human body, thereby preventing age-related ill health and mortality. He has co-founded multiple non-profit organizations – including Methuselah Foundation, SENS Research Foundation, and LEV Foundation – to enable and accelerate its development and clinical translation.

The Longevity Escape Velocity Foundation.
_https://www.levf.org/_

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