Lifeboat Foundation

A team of researchers led by Principal Investigator Dr. Jan Gruber from Yale-NUS College has discovered a combination of pharmaceutical drugs that not only increases healthy lifespan in the microscopic worm Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans), but also delays the rate of ageing in them, a finding that could someday mean longer, healthier lives for humans.

The study, published in the peer-reviewed international journal Developmental Cell on 8 October 2018, lays crucial groundwork for further research into designing drug combinations that produce the same effect in mammals.

“Many countries in the world, including Singapore, are facing problems related to ageing populations,” said Dr. Gruber, whose lab and research team made the discovery. “If we can find a way to extend healthy lifespan and delay ageing in people, we can counteract the detrimental effects of an ageing population, providing countries not only medical and economic benefits, but also a better quality of life for their people.”

Cancer is the poster child of age-related diseases, and a recent study sheds light on why the risk of cancer rises dramatically as we age.

Abstract

For many cancer types, incidence rises rapidly with age as an apparent power law, supporting the idea that cancer is caused by a gradual accumulation of genetic mutations. Similarly, the incidence of many infectious diseases strongly increases with age. Here, combining data from immunology and epidemiology, we show that many of these dramatic age-related increases in incidence can be modeled based on immune system decline, rather than mutation accumulation. In humans, the thymus atrophies from infancy, resulting in an exponential decline in T cell production with a half-life of ∼16 years, which we use as the basis for a minimal mathematical model of disease incidence. Our model outperforms the power law model with the same number of fitting parameters in describing cancer incidence data across a wide spectrum of different cancers, and provides excellent fits to infectious disease data.

Continue reading “Dr. Sam Palmer – Thymic Involution and Cancer Risk” »

In support of the NAD+ Mouse Project over at Lifespan.io, Dr. David Sinclair will be doing an AMA on Reddit Futurology Tuesday, October 23, 2018 from 11:00 – 12:00 AM EDT. Dr. Sinclair will be answering questions from the community about his work with NAD+ biology, Sirtuins, and why the NAD+ Mouse Project is important for aging research. To ask your question please visit the AMA thread on Reddit Futurology here.

For those not familiar with NAD+ biology we did the NAD+ World series recently which explores this area of the biology of aging. We also took a look at why NAD+ appears to decline as we age and what is one of the most likely reasons for this.

Continue reading “Dr. David Sinclair AMA at Reddit Futurology” »

Pharmacist turned Entrepreneur with Ira Pastor? Ep. 241

Congratulations to the Forest Organics team and their awesome new site — https://www.myforestorganics.com/

The Silicon Valley mindset combines biology and engineering: The body is a machine to be hacked and improved.

Futurists at some of the biggest tech firms want to reshape the way we think about death.

New DNA tools can decode your natural lifespan…

Your life span is written in your DNA, and we’re learning to read the code.

Earlier this year, we hosted the Ending Age-Related Diseases 2018 conference at the Cooper Union, New York City. This conference was designed to bring together the best in the aging research and biotech investment worlds and saw a range of industry experts sharing their insights.

Joe Betts Lacroix of Y Combinator and Vium discusses the different ways in which entrepreneurs can focus on overcoming the diseases of aging, namely direct, indirect, and money-first approaches, and the strengths and weakness of each.

Continue reading “Joe Betts Lacroix – Entrepreneurial Focuses on Aging” »

Two of the methods he said humans might use were “body part renewal” and linking bodies with machines so that people are living their lives through an android.

But after Dr Pearson’s predictions, immortality may now be a step nearer following the launch of a new start-up.

Human is hoping to make the immortality dream a reality with an ambitious plan.

Continue reading “Humans beings on the brink of IMMORTALITY, top scientist claims” »