Fight Aging! Newsletter, January 1st 2018
Discussion of advocacy for the cause is a usual feature of our community, as we try things and attempt to make progress in persuading the world that rejuvenation research is plausible, practical, and necessary. There are more people engaged in advocacy now than at any time in the past decade, and so discussions of strategy come up often. New ventures kicked off in 2017 include the Geroscience online magazine, and among the existing ventures the LEAF / Lifespan.io volunteers seem to be hitting their stride. The mainstream media continues to be as much a hindrance as a help, and where it is a help you will usually find Aubre...
Source: Fight Aging! - December 31, 2017 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Newsletters Source Type: blogs
Request for Startups in the Rejuvenation Biotechnology Space, 2018 Edition
A shift in the character of rejuvenation research has taken place over the past couple of years. Greater attention is being given to this work, and the most advanced lines have made - or will soon make - the leap from non-profit laboratory and philanthropic funding to for-profit startup company and venture funding. A growing community of angel investors and a fair few venture funds are now interested in supporting startup companies whose founders implement approaches to rejuvenation that follow the SENS model of repairing fundamental damage. A brief selection includes Kizoo Technology Ventures, Methuselah Fund, the Longevi...
Source: Fight Aging! - December 26, 2017 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Investment Source Type: blogs
Program and Speakers Announced for Undoing Aging, March 2018 in Berlin
There is still time to sign up for the Undoing Aging event in Berlin, coming up in March 2018. This scientific conference will focus on rejuvenation research in the same manner as the SENS conference series that ran from 2003 to 2013 under the auspices of the Methuselah Foundation and, later, the SENS Research Foundation. Undoing Aging is a collaboration between the SENS Research Foundation and Forever Healthy Foundation, the latter being the organization founded by SENS patron Michael Greve. You might recall that in 2016 Greve pledged $10 million to fund rejuvenation research and resulting startup companies, becoming the ...
Source: Fight Aging! - December 25, 2017 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Activism, Advocacy and Education Source Type: blogs
Fight Aging! Newsletter, December 25th 2017
Fight Aging! provides a weekly digest of news and commentary for thousands of subscribers interested in the latest longevity science: progress towards the medical control of aging in order to prevent age-related frailty, suffering, and disease, as well as improvements in the present understanding of what works and what doesn't work when it comes to extending healthy life. Expect to see summaries of recent advances in medical research, news from the scientific community, advocacy and fundraising initiatives to help speed work on the repair and reversal of aging, links to online resources, and much more.
This content is...
Source: Fight Aging! - December 24, 2017 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Newsletters Source Type: blogs
The Present Standard Cancer Therapies Increase Biological Age
The current standard treatments for cancer, chemotherapy and radiotherapy, are quite unpleasant and harmful; no-one would voluntarily undergo them given a better alternative. In fact, treatment makes people physically older, accelerating the processes of aging. There is evidence to suggest that this is due to an added burden of senescent cells. Cells become senescent in response to damage or a toxic environment, and there is plenty of that going around in any earnest attempt to treat cancer with radiation or chemical agents; in fact, many cancer therapies are intended to aggressively induce senescence in tumor cells.
...
Source: Fight Aging! - December 20, 2017 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs
A more precise approach to fighting cancer
If you are like me, when you get the flu you head straight to the pharmacy and grab the most powerful over-the-counter medicine you can find. But is that really the best approach? After all, your condition, symptoms, and reaction to the virus may be quite different from someone else’s, so why use the same medicine? Instead, you may benefit more from a treatment specifically designed just for you and your ailment.
That’s the philosophy behind precision medicine (sometimes referred to as personalized medicine), an approach to cancer prevention and treatment that takes into account a person’s genes, environment, and lif...
Source: Harvard Health Blog - December 15, 2017 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Matthew Solan Tags: Cancer Medical Research Source Type: blogs
Cellular Senescence as a Failed Anti-Cancer Strategy
The evolution of multi-cellular life is in essence the story of a tooth and nail struggle with cancer, one that continues even now. Complex structure, regeneration, and growth are all required in higher forms of life, but that combination means that any sort of sustained breakdown in control over cell proliferation tends to be fatal because it disrupts necessary structures. Multiple layered systems, within cells and outside them, have evolved to try to block damaged cells from uncontrolled proliferation, ranging from tumor suppressor genes to the surveillance of the immune system and its destruction of potentially cancerou...
Source: Fight Aging! - December 13, 2017 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs
Fight Aging! Newsletter, December 4th 2017
In this study, we integrated atomic force microscopy (AFM) and molecular approaches to determine whether increased stiffness of aortic VSMCs in hypertensive rats is ROCK-dependent, and whether the anti-hypertensive effect of ROCK inhibitors contributes to the reduction of aortic stiffness via changing VSMC mechanical properties.
Despite a widely held belief that aortic stiffening is associated with changes in extracellular matrix proteins and endothelial dysfunction, our recent studies demonstrated that intrinsic stiffening of aortic VSMCs, independent of VSMC proliferation and migration, is an important contributo...
Source: Fight Aging! - December 3, 2017 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Newsletters Source Type: blogs
An Update on Leukocyte Transfer Cancer Therapy Development
LIFT, or GIFT, is an approach to cancer therapy that involves transplantation of suitably aggressive leukocyte or granulocyte immune cells. While cancers have numerous ways to suppress the native immune response, they can be vulnerable to foreign immune cells from a donor. Not all donors, but perhaps a few in a hundred on average will have immune cells capable of rapidly destroying a patient's cancer. In principle this approach should be able to target many different types of cancer, which is exactly what we need to see from the research community: more of broadly applicable approaches, and less of very specific cancer the...
Source: Fight Aging! - November 27, 2017 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Healthy Life Extension Community Source Type: blogs
Weighing Cancer Cells Can Reveal Their Susceptibility to Chemo
At present, there is no way to predict if multiple myeloma will respond to a particular drug cancer therapy, meaning clinicians often have to take a shot in the dark and hope that something works. Researchers at MIT have developed a new method to measure how well multiple myeloma patients will respond to a specific chemo agent, or combination of them.
The process involves using an incredibly sensitive apparatus that can weigh individual cancer cells. If the cells reduce the rate at which they gain mass when exposed to a chemo drug, then they are susceptible to it, and so should be a good fit for using as therapy. The techn...
Source: Medgadget - November 20, 2017 Category: Medical Devices Authors: Conn Hastings Tags: Oncology Pathology Source Type: blogs
“ Gut bacteria ‘ boost ’ cancer therapy ”
That’s the title of a very interesting BBC News article I read this morning, thanks to my friend Paul: goo.gl/pkXS1J It’s about two recent studies that examined patients with cancer (1. lung or kidney; 2. melanoma), discovering that those who had a lot of “friendly” gut bacteria responded better to immunotherapy.
Excerpt: Dr Jennifer Wargo, from Texas, told the BBC: “If you disrupt a patient’s microbiome you may impair their ability to respond to cancer treatment.”
Okay, so the patients in the two studies didn’t have myeloma. But I would bet anything that those three types o...
Source: Margaret's Corner - November 4, 2017 Category: Cancer & Oncology Authors: Margaret Tags: Blogroll BBC News Clostridium difficile gut bacteria microbiome probiotics SCT Source Type: blogs
Fight Aging! Newsletter, October 23rd 2017
In this study, we demonstrate that irrespective of the derivation of CD8+ CD45RA+CD27- T cells, these primed cells exhibit a unique highly inflammatory secretory profile characteristic of the SASP, and we also provide evidence that ADAM28 can be used as a functional marker of senescence in CD8+ T cells. Furthermore, we show that the secretory phenotype in CD8+ CD45RA+CD27- T cells is controlled through p38 MAPK signalling, which contributes to age-associated inflammation.
Patient Paid Clinical Studies are a Good Plan for Rejuvenation Therapies
https://www.fightaging.org/archives/2017/10/patient-paid-clinical-s...
Source: Fight Aging! - October 22, 2017 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Newsletters Source Type: blogs
The 2017 Winter SENS Rejuvenation Research Fundraiser: Become a SENS Patron, and Your Donations are Matched
This year's SENS Research Foundation winter fundraiser launches today, with a target of $250,000. Donations will support ongoing rejuvenation research programs at the SENS Research Foundation Research Center, as well as in laboratories at Yale, the Buck Institute, the Babraham Institute, and Oxford. The SENS Research Foundation continues to carefully unblock important but neglected fields of research that are relevant to repairing the cell and tissue damage that causes aging - you might take a look at the SENS timeline to see the past and presently ongoing success stories, in which charitable donations were used to move pr...
Source: Fight Aging! - October 16, 2017 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Activism, Advocacy and Education Source Type: blogs
A conversation with a Rigvir flack
Over the last two Mondays, I ' ve beenwriting about an unproven cancer therapy that I hadn ' t really heard much about before. The cancer treatment is called Rigvir; it is manufactured in Latvia and marketed primarily through a Latvian entity called the International Virotherapy Center (IVC). To recap, Rigvir is an unmodified Echovirus, specifically ECHO-7, that, according to the IVC, seeks out cancer cells, replicates in them, and thus lyses the cancer cells (causes their membranes to break, spilling out the cancer cells contents, thus killing the cell), hence the term " oncolytic virus. " Somehow, mysteriously Rigvir was...
Source: Respectful Insolence - October 9, 2017 Category: Surgery Authors: oracknows Source Type: blogs
Time to rethink the debate on PSA testing
For most of us, whether to screen for cancer is a no-brainer. Who wouldn’t want a simple test to prevent cancer or identify it at an earlier, more treatable stage? However, as with many things, the screening decision is more complex than it may appear. For example, the test may not be particularly “simple,” such as undergoing screening colonoscopy. For prostate cancer, even after 30-plus years of using a screening blood test called the prostate specific antigen, or PSA, it still isn’t clear how well it prevents prostate cancer deaths. This has led to conflicting and changing recommendations about whether to screen ...
Source: Harvard Health Blog - September 29, 2017 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Steven J. Atlas, MD, MPH Tags: Cancer Health Men's Health Prostate Health Source Type: blogs
