Bill Andrews of Sierra Sciences Announces Collaboration with BioViva

At a recent conference, Bill Andrews of Sierra Sciences announced a forthcoming collaboration with BioViva, currently pushing regulatory boundaries to develop gene therapies as treatments for aging. A new company will be formed, BioViva Fiji, to offer gene therapies that can compensate for some of the aspects of degenerative aging via medical tourism in Fiji. The principle focus, given that this is Sierra Sciences we are talking about here, is telomerase gene therapy, but BioViva is also working on a follistatin gene therapy, and it is worth bearing in mind that in this age of CRISPR rolling out any single target gene therapy that has some background work in the research community isn't the huge technical undertaking it would have been in past years. All of the time and cost goes into a reasonable level of testing, and the only real hurdle left from a technical point of view is proving that a therapy can reliably introduce genes into a large enough number of cells to produce benefits. We're going to see a lot of work on gene therapies in the next few years - this is just the start and the tip of the iceberg. Fiji, like many countries in the Asia-Pacific region, has been taking steps in recent years to make itself attractive as a destination for medical tourism, and thereby encourage the growth of high-end local industries that benefit from the wealth of larger and more prosperous countries. It makes a lot of sense as a long-term plan, and competition between regions fo...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Healthy Life Extension Community Source Type: blogs