Lifeboat Foundation

Your cells teem with small machinery and devices of all kinds, including teeny tiny batteries called mitochondria. Just like real batteries, they can malfunction, but replacing them isn’t that easy. In this episode, Veera explains what happens to our microbatteries with aging and what we can do about it.

Circa 2012

Forget expensive lotions and potions – the key to becoming immortal could be found in flatworms, scientists say.

The worms, which live in lakes and ponds, hold the remarkable ability to regenerate time and time again – effectively living forever.

Continue reading “You CAN live forever… as long as you are a flatworm, say scientists” »

face_with_colon_three could heal body parts in humans.

The generation of human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) from somatic cells using gene transfer opens new areas for precision medicine with personalized cell therapy and encourages the discovery of essential platforms for targeted drug development. iPSCs retain the genome of the donor, may regenerate indefinitely, and undergo differentiation into virtually any cell type of interest using a range of published protocols. There has been enormous interest among researchers regarding the application of iPSC technology to regenerative medicine and human disease modeling, in particular, modeling of neurologic diseases using patient-specific iPSCs. For instance, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, and spinal cord injuries may be treated with iPSC therapy or replacement tissues obtained from iPSCs. In this review, we discuss the work so far on generation and characterization of iPSCs and focus on recent advances in the use of human iPSCs in clinical setting.

Stem cells exhibit the capacity of self-renewal and may undergo differentiation into various tissue types. These are divided into pluripotent stem cells (PSCs; embryonic stem cells [ESCs] and induced pluripotent stem cells [iPSCs]) and multipotent stem cells (adult stem cells [ASCs]) based on their differentiation capacity [⁴⁵]. PSCs, including ESCs derived from embryos and iPSCs derived by gene transfer, may undergo indefinite proliferation and differentiate into different types of tissues depending on the treatment conditions [⁸⁶]. Multipotent stem cells, however, may be obtained from tissue-derived precursors (umbilical cord blood, bone marrow, adipose tissue, placenta, or blood), which are already grown tissues.

Circa 2010 o.o

Futurists have long dreamed of making copies of themselves that will live forever – now researchers are working out how to do it for real.

Is it possible to escape the slow and steady progression of ageing?

“I became Dr. Lu on May.4th.2020 🎓Feel blessed. #HarvardPhD #Sinclairlab #AntiAging #InVivoReprogramming”

A study just released by Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health is reporting a blood-DNA-methylation measure that is sensitive to variation in the pace of biological aging among individuals born the same year. The tool—DunedinPoAm—offers a unique measurement for intervention trials and natural experiment studies investigating how the rate of aging may be changed by behavioral or drug therapy, or by changes to the environment. The study findings are published online in the journal eLife.

“The goal of our study was to distill a measurement of the rate of biological aging based on 12-years of follow-up on 18 different clinical tests into a blood test that can be administered at a single time point.” said lead author Daniel Belsky, Ph.D., assistant professor of epidemiology at Columbia Mailman School and a researcher at the Columbia Aging Center.

Midlife adults measured to be aging faster according to the new measurement showed faster declines in physical and cognitive functioning and looked older in facial photographs. Older adults measured to be aging faster by the tool were at increased risk for chronic disease and mortality. In other analyses, the researchers showed that DunedinPoAm captured new information not measured by proposed measures of biological aging known as epigenetic clocks, that 18-year-olds with histories of childhood poverty and victimization showed faster aging as measured by DunedinPoAm, and that DunedinPoAm predictions were disrupted by a caloric restriction intervention in a randomized trial.

World-first research led by neuroimaging expert Dr. Jiyang Jiang at UNSW’s Centre for Healthy Brain Ageing (CHeBA) has found that those aged 95 and over demonstrated more activation between the left and ride side of their brain than their younger counterparts.

Given the prevalence of dementia increases with age, near-centenarians and centenarians without dementia are generally considered as models of successful aging and resistance against age-related cognitive decline.

“We wanted to see if there was something particularly special about the brain’s functional connectivity of those aged 95 and older that helps them preserve brain function into the 11th decade of their life,” says Dr. Jiang.

In regenerative medicine, an ideal treatment for patients whose muscles are damaged from lack of oxygen would be to invigorate them with an injection of their own stem cells.