A Longevity Industry Feature in Biopharma Dealmakers: Repair Biotechnologies, Deciduous Therapeutics, and More
In this study, a single treatment at the peak of disease resulted in the ablation of senescent cells in the lung and attenuation of key fibrotic and inflammatory markers, which ultimately resolved fibrosis. Deciduous Therapeutics has used computational assisted design to synthesise a suite of proprietary therapies that could be used in the clinic to re-activate tissue-resident iNKT cells. To date, the company's lead program has shown single-dose efficacy in resolving both metabolic and fibrotic diseases along with a favorable safety profile at doses significantly higher than the efficacious dose. (Source: Fight Aging!)
Source: Fight Aging! - December 4, 2023 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Longevity Industry Source Type: blogs
In Alzheimer's Patients, Neuropsychiatric Symptoms Correlate with Neuroinflammation
Chronic, unresolved inflammation is a feature of aging. It emerges from mitochondrial dysfunction and mislocalization of mitochondrial DNA, from visceral fat tissue, from senescent cells, and from a range of other maladaptive processes. Sustained inflammatory signaling is disruptive of cell and tissue function. In recent years, researchers have come to put a greater emphasis on the role of chronic inflammation in the onset and progression of Alzheimer's disease. While it remains the case that protein aggregation (of altered amyloid-β and tau) is the primary point of focus in Alzheimer's research and the development of tre...
Source: Fight Aging! - December 4, 2023 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs
The Pace of Epigenetic Drift is Slower in Long-Lived Species
Epigenetic drift is a measure of age-related change in epigenetic marks that alter the structure of packaged DNA in the cell nucleus, and thus control gene expression by making regions accessible or inaccessible to the translation machinery that produces RNA from gene sequences. Regardless of whether epigenetic drift is a form of damage contributing to aging, or a reflection of stochastic molecular damage within cells and consequent disarray in signaling and environment, one would in either case expect it to scale with species life span. Longer-lived species must show a slower pace of change in measures of aging, it would ...
Source: Fight Aging! - December 4, 2023 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs
Fight Aging! Newsletter, December 4th 2023
This study produced a great deal of data that continues to be mined for insights into human aging and effects of calorie restriction in a long-lived species such as our own, to contrast with the sizable effects on health and longevity in short-lived species such as mice.
In particular, and the topic for today, cellular senescence and its role in degenerative aging has garnered far greater interest in the research community in the years since the CALERIE study took place. Thus in today's open access paper, scientists examine CALERIE study data to find evidence for calorie restriction to reduce the burden of cellular ...
Source: Fight Aging! - December 3, 2023 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Newsletters Source Type: blogs
The Effects of Diet on Life Expectancy
It is somewhat interesting to see a careful analysis of diet and life expectancy, using the sizable UK Biobank population, that does not contain any of the words "calorie", "weight", or "obesity". The effects of calorie intake on health over the long-term are sizable, even if we focus only on mechanisms associated with the gain of weight. Visceral fat is metabolically active, generates an increased burden of senescent cells, and contributes to the chronic inflammation of aging via a range of different mechanisms.
Thus one would assume that buried underneath this set of data on what it is that people eat is a more re...
Source: Fight Aging! - December 1, 2023 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs
IsoDGR as a Form of Molecular Damage Contributing to Degenerative Aging
Proteins can become modified in a wide range of ways via addition or removal of various motifs. This is a necessary part of our biochemistry, but some modifications are harmful rather than useful. The pattern of protein modifications present in cells changes with age, and some pathological modifications begin to appear more often. The underlying reasons for these changes are usually poorly understood, at least once stepping beyond the immediate causal chemical reactions, as cellular biochemistry is very complex. As researchers here demonstrate, given a problematic modified protein that exists outside cells, it is possible ...
Source: Fight Aging! - December 1, 2023 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs
Inflammatory Mid-Old Cells in Tissues are Restored to More Youthful Function by Recombinant SLIT2
Researchers here note the existence of what they call "mid-old" cells, cells in tissue stroma that are on the path to becoming senescent, are not yet entered into the senescent state, but nonetheless produce constant inflammatory signaling that is disruptive to tissue structure and function. The researchers find that these cells respond positively to delivery of recombinant SLIT2, diminishing their bad behavior. In very old mice, this treatment resulted in improved muscle mass and function and greater animal activity. This is an interesting finding, and will need further investigation and replication to rule out other mech...
Source: Fight Aging! - December 1, 2023 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs
XPRIZE Healthspan, $101 Million to Incentivize Rejuvenation in Old People
Prizes for success in research and development can work well, if coupled with suitable publicity and activism. Such efforts have a long history, going back to the well-documented longitude rewards offered by the British government in the 1700s. More recently, the original Ansari X Prize for suborbital flight was a very successful example of this sort of initiative, and was launched around the same time as the Methuselah Mouse Prize to spur greater efforts to extend life in animal models. The Palo Alto Longevity Prize followed later with similar goals. Unfortunately for the ability of longevity-focused prizes to generate on...
Source: Fight Aging! - November 30, 2023 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Activism, Advocacy and Education Source Type: blogs
Mild Mitochondrial Inhibition Slows Aging in Nematode Worms
Researchers here demonstrate that means of mildly inhibiting the production of some of the protein machinery used to generate chemical energy store molecules, adenosine triphosphate, in mitochondria can extend life by 50-70% in nematode worms - a species in which much larger life extension is possible, so this might be viewed as a moderate effect size. Many different approaches to adjusting mitochondrial function can slow aging and extend life in short-lived species. In some cases this works by provoking mitochondria into an alternative pathway for ATP generation that produces a little more oxidative stress than usual, tri...
Source: Fight Aging! - November 30, 2023 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs
Frailty Correlates with Hearing Loss in Later Life
Many seemingly unrelated aspects of aging correlate with one another in incidence and progression. All of the myriad manifestations of degeneration aging arise from the same small set of underlying processes of cell and tissue damage, so such correlations are perhaps unsurprising. There are cases in which a direct causal connection is found, as in the case of hearing loss contributing to dementia, but in the case of hearing loss and frailty we might expect correlation to arise from shared underlying mechanisms, such as the chronic inflammation that is characteristic of later life.
In a nationally representative sa...
Source: Fight Aging! - November 30, 2023 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs
Intestinal Inflammation Increases with Age, and is Greater Still in Patients with Alzheimer's Disease
16s rRNA sequencing allows the microbial populations resident in the gut to be catalogued in detail: which species are present, and relative numbers by species. In the years since this assay became cheap, reliable, and readily available, researchers have built increasingly large human gut microbiome databases from samples obtained over the course of epidemiological studies. The research community has found that the gut microbiome exhibits characteristic differences in older people, marked by a growth in populations of inflammatory microbes and a loss of those species that produce beneficial metabolites. Further, some age-r...
Source: Fight Aging! - November 29, 2023 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs
Age-Related Hearing Loss Correlates with Microstructural Change in the Brain
Researchers here note correlations between hearing loss and specific microstructural changes in the brain indicative of loss of function. Evidence from studies involving patients with and without hearing aids suggests that hearing loss accelerates age-related neurodegeneration. Depriving the brain of sensory processing activity may produce maladaptive compensatory changes, or may simply be a case of "use it or lose it", as is the case for muscle tissue. The mechanisms involved are not yet fully understood, and the situation is complicated by underlying processes of aging that contribute separately to dysfunction in both th...
Source: Fight Aging! - November 29, 2023 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs
Arguing for SGLT2 Inhibitors to be Senomorphic Drugs
The incentives placed upon medical development ensure that far too much attention is given to ways in which established, existing drugs can be reused in other contexts, even given marginal effect sizes. It is much cheaper to repurpose an existing drug to a marginal new use than it is to build an actually effective new drug. To the extent that aging becomes a popular target for drug development, and one might argue that this is in the process of happening, every existing drug is going to be scrutinized in this context. Anti-diabetic drugs in particular seem to receive a lot of attention for potential marginal ability to slo...
Source: Fight Aging! - November 29, 2023 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs
Assessing Markers of Cellular Senescence in the CALERIE Study of Calorie Restriction
This study produced a great deal of data that continues to be mined for insights into human aging and effects of calorie restriction in a long-lived species such as our own, to contrast with the sizable effects on health and longevity in short-lived species such as mice. (Source: Fight Aging!)
Source: Fight Aging! - November 28, 2023 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs
Using Explainable AI in the Production of Biological Age Measures
Standard approaches to generating aging clocks from biological data produce algorithmic combinations of factors that are opaque. It is entirely unclear as to how they relate to underlying mechanisms of damage and dysfunction that produce degenerative aging, and thus hard to use them as a tool to assess ways to modify those mechanisms. Explainable artificial intelligence is a term of art used to describe approaches to machine learning that produce more insight into how the final product actually works, what factors went into its construction, how it relates to underlying processes. Given that the primary challenge in the fi...
Source: Fight Aging! - November 28, 2023 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs
