Borrowed Immune Cells to Fight Cancer
It is an unfortunate fact of life that many promising avenues of medical research languish partially developed and unfunded. It isn't unusual to see potentially transformative medical technologies linger with little further progress for a decade or more after their first triumphant discovery. The innovative antiviral DRACO technology is one such, offering the potential of therapies for persistent infections that cannot currently be treated. Another is the use of immune cell transplants to attack cancer, presented in its initial form of granulocyte infusion therapy (GIFT) with accompanying compelling animal data at the thir...
Source: Fight Aging! - May 27, 2016 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs
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 ther...
Source: Fight Aging! - May 23, 2016 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Healthy Life Extension Community Source Type: blogs
Fight Aging! Newsletter, May 16th 2016
In this study the authors demonstrate that, as in many other cases, the methodology of delivery matters just as much as the details of the cells used:
Retinal and macular degenerative diseases affect millions of people worldwide. Similar to other neurodegenerative diseases, there are no effective treatments that can stop retinal degeneration or restore degenerative retina. Recent advances in stem cell technology led to development of novel cell-based therapies, some are already in phase I/II clinical trials. Studies from our group and others suggest that human bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stem cells (hBM-MSC) m...
Source: Fight Aging! - May 15, 2016 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Newsletters Source Type: blogs
Why Do So Few Wealthy, Sick Individuals Fund Medical Research to Treat Their Conditions?
There are a lot of people who have both a medical condition and a lot of wealth - tens of millions of dollars or more. In this day and age, a fraction of that wealth is enough to produce a prototype treatment from scratch for many classes of condition, if you are willing to wait the decade or two that low-cost basic science takes to run its course. Alternatively, for a faster result in the five year range, that much money is enough to take a couple of promising potential therapies with initial animal studies and move them to prototype status. Not all conditions are amenable to this sort of approach, but many are. When you ...
Source: Fight Aging! - May 13, 2016 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Activism, Advocacy and Education Source Type: blogs
Fight Aging! Newsletter, May 2nd 2016
This study is the first CAR T-cell trial to infuse patients with an even mixture of two types of T cells (helper and killer cells, which work together to kill cancer). With the assurance that each patient gets the same mixture of cells, the researchers were able to come to conclusions about the effects of administering different doses of cells.
In 27 of 29 participants whose responses were evaluated a few weeks after the infusion, a high-sensitivity test could detect no trace of their cancer in their bone marrow. The CAR T cells eliminated cancers anywhere in the body they appeared. Of the two participants who did n...
Source: Fight Aging! - May 1, 2016 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Newsletters Source Type: blogs
The Scientist on BioViva's Initial Test of Human Gene Therapies
The Scientist has published a measured piece on the first results from BioViva's initial test of human gene therapy, telomerase and follistatin overexpression, and the broader context in which this single person test took place. The results indicate that the telomerase gene therapy most likely worked in the sense of delivering telomerase to a significant number of cells, including the immune cells used to measure average telomere length. That is an important thing to validate up front, before thinking about any sort of other outcomes, or expanding to a trial of some sort. Historically, gene therapies have proven to be high...
Source: Fight Aging! - April 25, 2016 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Healthy Life Extension Community Source Type: blogs
Fight Aging! Newsletter, April 25th 2016
This study offers one useful data point, as the authors describe a genetic alteration that can boost the supply of new immune cells in old mice. The decline in that supply with age is one of the factors leading to poor immune function - and that means more than just vulnerability to infections, as the immune system is also responsible for destroying potentially cancerous and senescent cells, as well as clearing out forms of damaged proteins and unwanted metabolic waste. Various possibilities for increasing the number of new immune cells already exist in principle, such as regenerating the thymus, or cell therapies in which...
Source: Fight Aging! - April 24, 2016 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Newsletters Source Type: blogs
Deep Knowledge Ventures to Support BioViva's Human Gene Therapy Development
Fortes fortuna iuvat, as they say. I'm pleased to see that the BioViva principals have attracted the support of Deep Knowledge Life Sciences as they continue to bootstrap their very intentionally disruptive gene therapy startup:
Deep Knowledge Life Sciences and BioViva announce partnership
"BioViva aims to make gene therapy affordable to everyone. Dmitry Kaminskiy, the founding partner of Deep Knowledge Life Sciences, is enthusiastically funding gene therapy, and is himself an early adopter." said BioViva CEO Elizabeth Parrish, adding "We both want to see a world where investors actually live their legacy i...
Source: Fight Aging! - April 19, 2016 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Healthy Life Extension Community Source Type: blogs
High Net Worth Individuals Will Support Medical Research in a Big Way, But Only in Fields Already Mainstream
In this day and age, the biggest difference a billionaire can make to the near future is to fund medical research. The costs of that research are falling rapidly with progress across the board in biotechnology, and the foundation for transformative new medicine can be created with a fraction of one billionaire's net worth, if spent wisely. Perhaps a bigger incentive in some cases than making the world a better place is that research can move from start to finish rapidly enough for those who fund it to benefit. We all age and suffer from age-related disease in the same way, no matter what our net worth, and everyone wins or...
Source: Fight Aging! - April 18, 2016 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Activism, Advocacy and Education Source Type: blogs
Fight Aging! Newsletter, April 4th 2016
This study shows for the first time that increasing arterial stiffness is detrimental to the brain, and that increasing stiffness and brain injury begin in early middle life, before we commonly think of prevalent diseases such as atherosclerosis, coronary artery disease or stroke having an impact."
The study also noted that elevated arterial stiffness is the earliest manifestation of systolic hypertension. The large study involved approximately 1,900 diverse participants in the Framingham Heart Study, who underwent brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), as well as arterial tonometry. The tests measured the force of art...
Source: Fight Aging! - April 3, 2016 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Newsletters Source Type: blogs
Developing the Art of Group Buy Medical Tourism: 100 People Traveling to Pay $10-20,000 for a Rejuvenation Therapy
We stand at a very interesting juncture in the ongoing development of medicine, travel, and communication. The world is becoming a small place, in which geographically dispersed interest groups can find one another, talk, and organize. The cost of either a round trip by air to a different continent or a cruise that covers a dozen countries is considerably less than the cost of many of the new classes of stem cell therapy or gene therapy. These treatments have been or soon will be available via medical tourism. They are not available or are only just starting to become available in countries such as the US due to the incred...
Source: Fight Aging! - March 31, 2016 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Activism, Advocacy and Education Source Type: blogs
Thinking About the Pipeline: Getting Therapies into Clinics
A legitimate, actual human rejuvenation therapy is one that repairs one of the forms of cell and tissue damage that are collectively the root cause of aging. By root cause I mean that this damage occurs as a result of the normal operation of cellular metabolism, and is not itself caused by another form of damage. The present list includes a few classes of persistent metabolic waste, such as misfolded proteins and sugary cross-links, mitochondrial DNA damage, senescent cells, cancerous nuclear DNA mutations, and loss of necessary cell populations, such as active stem cells and long-lived cells in the central nervous system....
Source: Fight Aging! - March 18, 2016 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Of Interest Source Type: blogs
The Global Healthspan Policy Institute Wants Your Support in Lobbying for TAME Metformin Trial Funding
The Global Healthspan Policy Institute (GHPI) is a recently launched group whose principals are focused on much the same goals as the researchers of the Longevity Dividend initiative, which is to say pulling a lot more public funding into aging research aimed at extending healthy human life spans. The chosen methodology is the traditional one of lobbying and political action, aimed at politicians and bureaucrats who influence budgets relevant to the National Institutes of Health, the National Insitute on Aging in particular, and other public sources of medical research funding.
The first public initiative for the GHPI is ...
Source: Fight Aging! - February 24, 2016 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Activism, Advocacy and Education Source Type: blogs
Anti-Myostatin Antibody Treatment Increases Muscle Mass and Strength in Mice
As an alternative to myostatin gene therapy, treatments that temporarily block the action of myostatin have potential as a therapy to build muscle mass and strength. This is of particular interest as a way to compensate for sarcopenia, the characteristic loss of muscle that accompanies aging, and the approach is already in human trials. It is quite likely that such alternatives to gene therapy will reach the clinic first in more regulated regions, if only because they are favored by researchers and regulators for translation of genetic studies into the clinic. There is a tendency to researchers to look for approaches that ...
Source: Fight Aging! - February 16, 2016 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs
