Using Oligodendrocyte Extracellular Vesicles to Induce Tolerance to Myelin as a Treatment for Multiple Sclerosis
In multiple sclerosis, the immune system becomes intolerant towards myelin, the sheathing around nerves that is essential to nervous system function. One class of approach to treating autoimmune diseases of this nature is to produce immune tolerance by delivering more of the problem molecule into the body. The challenge in multiple sclerosis is that it is unclear as to which of the many possible protein sequences is the problem in any given patient, and indeed to build a comprehensive list of such sequences in the first place. Researchers here report on the discovery that the oligodendrocyte cells responsible for building ...
Source: Fight Aging! - November 11, 2020 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs
Fight Aging! Newsletter, November 9th 2020
In this study, young adult mice were submitted to endurance exercise training and the function, differentiation, and metabolic characteristics of satellite cells were investigated in vivo and in vitro.
We found that injured muscles from endurance-exercised mice display improved regenerative capacity, demonstrated through higher densities of newly formed myofibres compared with controls (evidenced by an increase in embryonic myosin heavy chain expression), as well as lower inflammation (evidenced by quantifying CD68-marked macrophages), and reduced fibrosis. Enhanced myogenic function was accompanied by an increased ...
Source: Fight Aging! - November 8, 2020 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Newsletters Source Type: blogs
Towards the Use of High Intensity Focused Ultrasound to More Precisely Destroy Tumor Tissue
Focused ultrasound is one of the many approaches used to directly kill cancer cells once they have grown to the point at which a tumor can be identified. It involves generating sufficient heat to kill cells, a fairly direct transfer of energy. Pruning back cancerous tissue is helpful, as tumors manipulate the signaling environment to subvert the immune system's ability to destroy cancerous cells, and constantly generate new mutations that ultimately lead to metastasis and the spread of a cancer throughout the body.
Removing tumor tissue in this way is not a cure, however. Curing cancer requires not just the removal ...
Source: Fight Aging! - November 3, 2020 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs
Fight Aging! Newsletter, November 2nd 2020
In conclusion, the circulating antibody repertoire has increased binding to thousands of peptides in older donors, which can be represented as an immune age. Increased immune age is associated with autoimmune disease, acute inflammatory disease severity, and may be a broadly relevant biomarker of immune function in health, disease, and therapeutic intervention. The immune age has the potential for wide-spread use in clinical and consumer settings.
In Vivo Reprogramming Improves Cognitive Function in Old Mice
https://www.fightaging.org/archives/2020/10/in-vivo-reprogramming-improves-cognitive-function-in-old-mi...
Source: Fight Aging! - November 1, 2020 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Newsletters Source Type: blogs
Towards a More Sensitive Blood Test for the Earlier Stages of Alzheimer's Disease
The onset of Alzheimer's disease is preceded by years of slowly growing levels of amyloid-β aggregates in the brain. There is an equilibrium between amyloid-β in the brain and amyloid-β in the bloodstream, and so the research community has worked towards blood tests that can determine who is at risk of developing the condition. This goal is complicated by the sensitivity required, given the low levels of amyloid-β in blood samples, but the results here suggest that this problem may be sufficiently well solved to proceed towards an widely used assay. While the failure of clinical trials testing amyloid-clearing immunoth...
Source: Fight Aging! - October 28, 2020 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs
Fight Aging! Newsletter, October 19th 2020
In conclusion, we found that regardless of the presence of multimorbidity, engaging in a healthier lifestyle was associated with up to 6.3 years longer life for men and 7.6 years for women; however, not all lifestyle risk factors equally correlated with life expectancy, with smoking being significantly worse than others.
A Hydrogel Scaffold to Encourage Peripheral Nerve Regeneration
https://www.fightaging.org/archives/2020/10/a-hydrogel-scaffold-to-encourage-peripheral-nerve-regeneration/
The nervous system of mammals is poorly regenerative at best. The use of implantable scaffold materials is one of th...
Source: Fight Aging! - October 18, 2020 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Newsletters Source Type: blogs
Big Pharma Senolytics Programs are Getting Underway
Biotech startups working in a new and credible field of clinical development only have a few years before large pharmaceutical companies take notice and begin to enter the arena. This shift in the competitive landscape is a good thing for patients, as a great deal more funding will be deployed to expand the space of possible therapies. Further, small companies with viable approaches are more likely to be acquired, increasing the odds that specific programs will continue through to clinical trials. It doesn't solve the problem of the burdensome regulatory system that slows all progress, but it does improve the odds of pushi...
Source: Fight Aging! - October 15, 2020 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Longevity Industry Source Type: blogs
Veterinary Vaccines
Laurel J. Gershwin and Amelia R. Woolums present a new book on Veterinary Vaccines: Current Innovations and Future Trends This concise book captures the essence of current and future shifts in vaccine development research that will likely transform our understanding of methods to stimulate specific and protective immune responses to infectious diseases, and to offer improved therapeutic applications for oncology patients. The book opens with a chapter on reverse vaccinology and systems vaccinology approaches that should lead to more effective vaccines with fewer side effects. This is followed by a chapter describing rece...
Source: Microbiology Blog: The weblog for microbiologists. - September 23, 2020 Category: Microbiology Source Type: blogs
Fight Aging! Newsletter, September 21st 2020
Fight Aging! publishes news and commentary relevant to the goal of ending all age-related disease, to be achieved by bringing the mechanisms of aging under the control of modern medicine. This weekly newsletter is sent to thousands of interested subscribers. To subscribe or unsubscribe from the newsletter,
please visit:
https://www.fightaging.org/newsletter/
Longevity Industry Consulting Services
Reason, the founder of Fight Aging! and Repair Biotechnologies, offers strategic consulting services to investors, entrepreneurs, and others interested in the longevity industry and its complexities. To find out m...
Source: Fight Aging! - September 20, 2020 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Newsletters Source Type: blogs
Clearance of Senescent Cells Reverses the Peripheral Neuropathy Caused by Chemotherapy
A primary goal of chemotherapy is to force cancerous cells into programmed cell death or cellular senescence. Cellular senescence is a state of growth arrest that should normally be triggered by exactly the sort of damage and dysfunction exhibited by cancer cells, but cancer is characterized by a mutation-induced ability to bypass those restrictions. Chemotherapy remains the primary approach to cancer therapy, but chemotherapeutic agents are still at best only marginally discriminating. Treating cancer with chemotherapy has always been a fine balance between harming the cancer and harming the patient. Even in the best of o...
Source: Fight Aging! - September 14, 2020 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs
Fight Aging! Newsletter, August 24th 2020
We report that electrical stimulation (ES) stimulation of post-stroke aged rats led to an improved functional recovery of spatial long-term memory (T-maze), but not on the rotating pole or the inclined plane, both tests requiring complex sensorimotor skills. Surprisingly, ES had a detrimental effect on the asymmetric sensorimotor deficit.
Histologically, there was a robust increase in the number of doublecortin-positive cells in the dentate gyrus and SVZ of the infarcted hemisphere and the presence of a considerable number of neurons expressing tubulin beta III in the infarcted area. Among the genes that were unique...
Source: Fight Aging! - August 23, 2020 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Newsletters Source Type: blogs
TREM2 Inhibition as a Potentially Broadly Effective Cancer Therapy
It remains the case that far too much of the extensively funded work on cancer therapies is only relevant to a tiny subset of cancers. This is no way to achieve success in the fight to control cancer: there is only so much funding, only so many researchers, and too many types of cancer for an incremental strategy to make earnest process over the next few decades. The important lines of research into cancer treatments are those that can in principle be applied to many (or preferably all) cancers, and that are in principle highly effective, such as inhibition of telomere lengthening. The ideal cancer therapy is one that can ...
Source: Fight Aging! - August 20, 2020 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs
Fight Aging! Newsletter, June 29th 2020
In conclusion, metabolomics is a promising approach for the assessment of biological age and appears complementary to established epigenetic clocks.
Sedentary Behavior Raises the Risk of Cancer Mortality
https://www.fightaging.org/archives/2020/06/sedentary-behavior-raises-the-risk-of-cancer-mortality/
Living a sedentary lifestyle is known to be harmful to long term health, raising the risk of age-related disease and mortality. Researchers here show that a sedentary life specifically increases cancer mortality, and does so independently of other factors. This is one of many, many reasons to maintain a r...
Source: Fight Aging! - June 28, 2020 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Newsletters Source Type: blogs
T Cells Must Work Harder to Survive in an Old Body
T cells of the adaptive immune system collectively become less functional with age. The immune system as a whole becomes more inflammatory and less effectively, a state described by the terms inflammaging and immunosenescence. Researchers here note that T cells struggle to survive in the aged environment, and are as a consequence metabolically inefficient. Their efforts are going towards survival rather than the activities of immune surveillance. The degree to which this contributes to immunosenesence versus other factors is an open question.
In a recent study, researchers outline that the increased metabolism of ...
Source: Fight Aging! - June 26, 2020 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs
Demonstrating a Senolytic Chimeric Antigen Receptor T Cell Therapy
Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapies target specific surface features on other cells by providing T cells with a way to recognize that feature - the CAR. T cells so equipped will selectively destroy other cells with the target surface feature. To produce a CAR T cell therapy, a patient's T cells are taken, genetically engineered to introduce the CAR, expanded, and then reintroduced. This is presently used as a form of cancer therapy. Given a surface feature sufficiently specific to senescent cells, CAR T cell immunotherapy can be turned into a senolytic treatment, however. Senescent cell accumulation is one of ...
Source: Fight Aging! - June 25, 2020 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs
