Fight Aging! Newsletter, May 8th 2017

This report captures the state of the research community in a nutshell: progress in the sense that ever more scientists are willing to make the treatment of aging the explicit goal of their research, but, unfortunately, there is still a long way to go in improving the nature of that research. It is still near entirely made up of projects that cannot possibly produce a robust and large impact on human life span. The only course of action likely to extend life by decades in the near future is implementation of the SENS vision for rejuvenation therapies - to repair the molecular damage that causes aging. Everything else on the table is some form of tinkering with the operation of metabolism in order to slightly slow down the accumulation of that damage, such as via capturing some of the calorie restriction response or boosting autophagy. In any machinery, repair is a vastly better strategy for improving function and extending working life span, and our biology is no exception.

In March 2017, the Second Interventions in Aging Conference was held in Cancun, Mexico. The meeting, similar to the earlier event in 2015, was focused on interventional strategies. One notable difference was that this year's meeting was much more directed toward potential interventions to target human aging. The field has been very successful over the last decade in identifying interventions that extend lifespan and healthspan in animal models such as yeast, flies, worms, mice and, to some extent,...

Source: Fight Aging! - May 7, 2017 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Newsletters Source Type: blogs