Lifeboat Foundation

Circa 2014

As a seventh grader, I was lucky to land the job of ball boy for the Brooklyn Dodgers during their annual late-March exhibition games in Miami. The experience left me with fond memories — of Roy Campanella smoking a cigar as he stroked line drives in the batting cage, of a young Sandy Koufax throwing harder than seemed humanly possible and of an aging Jackie Robinson struggling to remain in the lineup.

Oddly, however, my most vivid memory is of the Dodgers’ longtime batboy as he sat in the locker room producing autographed baseballs. He’d twist his hand at odd angles as he scrawled replicas of the signatures of Duke Snider, Pee Wee Reese and other Dodger legends. To my untrained eye, the balls he inscribed were indistinguishable from those signed by the players themselves.

Continue reading “When Diamonds Are Dirt Cheap, Will They Still Dazzle?” »

Hey it’s Han from WrySci-HX going over the breakthroughs of scientists rejuvenating skin cells of middle aged donors by several decades, overcoming complete paralysis in just one day, and more! See below ↓↓↓

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Continue reading “Scientists Reverse Aging in Skin up to 40 Years! (May 2022 Science Update)” »

Summary: Supplementing a diet with Ascidiacea, or sea squirts, reversed some of the main signs of aging in mouse models.

Source: Xi’an jiaotong-Liverpool University.

If you have ever looked in the mirror and seen graying hair and wrinkles or forgotten the name of a close friend, you’d be forgiven for wishing for a pill that could slow or even reverse the effects of aging.

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Papers referenced in the video:
A Physiology Clock for Human Aging (preprint)
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.04.14.488358v1

Continue reading “A Physiology Clock for Human Aging: BP and FEV1 As Top Predictors” »

Scientists have momentarily restored a faint twinkle of life to dying cells in the human eye.

In order to better understand the way nerve cells succumb to a lack of oxygen, a team of US researchers measured activity in mouse and human retinal cells soon after their death.

Amazingly, with a few tweaks to the tissue’s environment, they were able to revive the cells’ ability to communicate hours later.

Telomeres are “caps” of non-coding DNA sequences present at both tips of our chromosomes, which are extremely important in the aging process. These caps protect our DNA as cells go through various life cycles of replication, however, each time a cell divides these telomeres are shortened and eventually contribute to disease and cellular aging.

Now, exciting new research published in the Journal PNAS has shown that an experimental gene therapy could be used to halt the shortening of these telomere caps in mice and by doing so increase the life span of these animals by up to 41 percent compared to controls.

Telomere length can be considered a marker of biological age and its shortening is a hallmark of a process called cellular senescence, which limits the replication of DNA in old damaged cells. As we age, telomere caps become shorter and shorter until the cell’s DNA becomes vulnerable to damage by cellular stresses that could lead to diseases such as cancer. Or the cell could ultimately reach senescence where it will no longer be able to replicate and so contribute to the aging process. For scientists looking at how to slow or even reverse aging, telomeres are of great interest.

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Here at Lifespan.io, we publish fact-checked news and deep interviews with aging researchers to help people track the development of treatments targeting aging. These treatments aim at preventing and curing age-related diseases and may improve lives of thousands of people around the globe!

Everyone deserves to know about the emerging opportunities in the field of healthy life extension research. Knowledge is empowering. In our articles and popular science videos, we discuss the progress, pros, cons, and social implications of innovative medicine for controlling aging, and the steps that are needed to accelerate its clinical implementation.

Continue reading “Learn about the Science that could one day overcome age related diseases” »

In a study printed in PNAS, researchers have shown that telomerase reverse transcriptase (TERT) can be given to cells in living mice through a viral vector, taking the idea of life-extending gene therapies from science fiction to reality.

Why a cytomegalovirus?

The human cytomegalovirus (CMV) is widely known as an endemic virus that, while usually asymptomatic, is known to cause with harmful effects in babies and older adults. However, some of its properties make this virus suitable for delivering gene therapies. As cytomegaloviruses can carry large genetic payloads and don’t overwrite the DNA of their host cells [1], replacing the genes of these viruses with beneficial DNA may be safer than approaches with more potential off-target effects; development in this area is ongoing, and a phase 1 human clinical trial has already been conducted [2].

A receptor that was first identified as necessary for insulin action, that also is located on the neural stem cells found deep in the brains of mice, is pivotal for brain stem cell longevity, according to a Rutgers study, a finding that has important implications for brain health and future therapies for brain disorders.

The study 0, appearing in the journal Stem Cell Reports, pinpoints a specific protein known as the insulin receptor (INSR), which is abundant on the neural stem cells that reside in the brain’s subventricular zone. During development, neural stem cells give rise to the entire nervous system, and they persist into adulthood. Over the lifespan these neural stem cells produce new neurons and non-neuronal cells that maintain the infrastructure and functioning of the brain.

Separately, the scientists made another finding when examining brain tumors: INSR plays a crucial role in sustaining and maintaining a population of specialized brain cancer cells known as glioblastoma (GBM) stem cells. When they inactivated the INSR in the GBM stem cells they inhibited the growth of those primitive tumor forming cells.