Lifeboat Foundation

Elena Milova is at the Interventions to extend healthspan and lifespan 2018 conference in Kazan this week. This is an important conference in the aging research field, and it includes a variety of leading experts giving talks about their research. One of these experts is Andrei Gudkov, and Elena had the opportunity to talk with him about his research.

Dr. Andrei V. Gudkov, Ph.D., D.Sci, is a Scientific Co-Founder of Cleveland Biolabs, Inc. and has been its Chief Scientific Officer since June 2003. Dr. Gudkov serves as Chief Scientific Officer and Founder at Everon Biosciences, Inc. He co-founded Mega Biotech & Electronics Co., Ltd. and serves as its Chief Scientific Officer. Dr. Gudkov serves as Senior Vice President of Basic Science at Roswell Park Cancer Institute. He has over 25 years of experience in biomedical research. Prior to 1990, he worked with the National Cancer Research Center in Moscow (USSR), where he led a broad research program focused on virology and cancer drug resistance.

In 1990, he re-established his lab at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he became a tenured faculty member in the Department of Molecular Genetics. In 1999, he defined p53 as a major determinant of cancer treatment side effects and suggested this protein as a target for therapeutic suppression. In 2001, Dr. Gudkov moved his laboratory to the Lerner Research Institute at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, where he served as Chairman of the Department of Molecular Biology and Professor of Biochemistry at Case Western Reserve University. He has served as a Director of Cleveland Biolabs, Inc. since June 2003.

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Hard to believe but some people are worried that when rejuvenation biotechnology is available they may be forced to use it.

Might rejuvenation become an imposition?

Suppose that, on a nice day not too far into the future, while everything is going reasonably well in your life and you are enjoying yourself, you walk into the doctor’s office for a regular checkup. The doctor finds nothing wrong with you, but in order to minimize your risk of developing diseases that are likely to strike people in your age range, she recommends that you undergo senolytic treatment. The treatment is safe, with no serious adverse effects, it is administered simply through injections, and it is either state-subsidized or otherwise affordable. In your opinion, what are the odds that you would refuse the doctor’s prescription and say that you’d rather take the risk of getting sick?

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Detailed images of the anti-ageing enzyme telomerase are a drug designer’s dream.

A team of researchers, including professor Steve Horvath, the pioneer of the epigenetic clock, report in this new paper about an improved version of that clock [1]. His original epigenetic clock measures the age of a person by looking at DNA methylation patterns; these patterns correlate closely with the actual age of a person, with a margin of error of around two years or so.

Since the original clock was first created, work has continued on refining the process and how aging is measured. In terms of aging biomarkers, it is generally considered the gold standard, given how reliable it is as a way to determine biological age.

While chronological age is linked to the likelihood of us developing age-related diseases and dying, it is important to distinguish the difference between chronological age and biological age. Individuals of the same chronological age may not age in quite the same way or even at the same rate, showing differences in their susceptibility to different age-related diseases.

An interview from the recent Ending Aging conference in Berlin with Keith Comito which we did in collaboration with Anna Dobryukha from Komsomolskaya Pravda.

The Undoing Aging conference, a collaboration between the SENS Research Foundation and Michael Greve’s Forever Healthy Foundation, took place on March 15–17 in Berlin, which saw many researchers, advocates, investors, and other important members of the longevity community gather together to learn about the latest progress in rejuvenation biotechnology.

As we had arranged a travel grant for Anna Dobryukha, one of the best Russian journalists writing about aging, longevity, and rejuvenation research, to join us, it made sense to collaborate with her on the most interesting interviews. Anna works for Komsomolskaya Pravda, one of the largest Russian publishing houses, which has a newspaper, a radio station, and a website with over 40 million readers. Anna has also published an article based on this and other interviews taken during the conference which you can find here.

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Scientists at New York’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine have conducted experiments and found that stem cell implants in the brains of mice can stop aging and help the treated animals remain fitter for longer.

What part of the brain controls aging?

The experiments have helped researchers identify that a part of the brain called the hypothalamus is intimately involved in the aging process. The investigators hope to launch trials in humans to see whether similar treatments with neural stem cells can prolong the life of treated individuals.

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Much mystery surrounds the physiological processes by which humans age, but scientists are learning more all the time. With this knowledge come new possibilities around how we can not only slow them down, but possibly even reverse them. A new breakthrough at the University of Colorado is the latest advance in the area, demonstrating how a chemically altered nutritional supplement may well reverse aging of the blood vessels, in turn giving cardiovascular health a vital boost.

The human body is pretty good at fending off oxidative stress when we’re young, protecting molecules from critical damage caused by rogue molecules known as free radicals. These are molecules that have found themselves with at least one unpaired electron, so they set off in search of a match, often robbing another molecule of theirs and setting off a chain reaction of irreversible molecular damage.

An interview from the recent Ending Aging conference in Berlin with professor Brian Kennedy which we did in collaboration with Anna Dobryukha from Komsomolskaya Pravda.

The Undoing Aging conference, a collaboration between the SENS Research Foundation and Michael Greve’s Forever Healthy Foundation, took place on March 15–17 in Berlin, which saw many researchers, advocates, investors, and other important members of the longevity community gather together to learn about the latest progress in rejuvenation biotechnology.

LEAF arranged a travel grant for Anna Dobryukha, one of the best Russian journalists writing about aging, longevity, and rejuvenation research, to join us, so it made sense to collaborate with her on the most interesting interviews. Anna works for Komsomolskaya Pravda, one of the largest Russian publishing houses, which has a newspaper, a radio station, and a website with over 40 million readers. Anna has also published an article based on this and other interviews taken during the conference which you can find here.

Continue reading “Undoing Aging with Brian Kennedy” »

Some time ago, we discussed the matter of beauty in the context of life extension; in particular, we tried to dispel the belief that the motivation behind life extension might be simply vanity. The article argued that there is nothing wrong with wanting to preserve youthful looks and attempted to explain the evolutionary reasons for our perception of beauty, but it did not discuss a perhaps even more important fact: aesthetics are not the main problem of elderly looks. The main problem, as it always is with age-related decay, is a decline in health and functionality.

What do elderly people look like?

If I ask you to imagine an old person, you’re likely to imagine somebody with grey hair, slack, wrinkled skin, and weak and flaccid muscles. While these features may vary from person to person, this is an accurate enough description of anyone past the age of 70, and it generally gets worse and worse as aging progresses. Exercise might help improve your physical condition, and perhaps a good facial cream might make you look slightly younger than your chronological age, but, after a certain point, the signs of age-related decay are unmistakable and irreversible.