Senescent Melanocytes Encourage Hair Growth
Why do moles tend to grow hair, even in older people who are well advanced in loss of hair growth elsewhere on the skin? Researchers here provide evidence for this to be due to signals secreted by senescent melanocyte cells. This may provide a path to encourage a reversal of hair loss in all of the various poorly-understood circumstances that lead to balding. Inducing an additional burden of cellular senescence in skin is not desirable, but a better understanding of exactly how the senescence-associated secretory phenotype (SASP) encourages hair growth could provide a more direct way to provide only the necessary signals t...
Source: Fight Aging! - June 30, 2023 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs

Rat Kidneys Vitrified, Warmed with Magnetic Nanoparticles, then Transplanted Successfully
Another step forward for the magnetic nanoparticle approach to thawing vitrified tissues was recently reported. Vitrification for low-temperature storage is a fairly well established technique, at least for organs. The challenge lies in thawing vitrified organ tissue without causing so much damage that it becomes non-viable for transplantation. Researchers have now managed to make this work for rat kidneys, albeit just barely. The kidneys were damaged, and it remains the case that scaling up to human organs will have its challenges. A greater volume of tissue makes cryopreservation and later thawing much harder, but succes...
Source: Fight Aging! - June 30, 2023 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs

Photobiomodulation as an Approach to Improve the Quality of Transplanted Stem Cells
In this study, cultured adipose-derived stem cells (ASCs) were derived from subcutaneous white adipose tissue isolated from mice fed a normal diet. We performed senescence-associated-β-galactosidase (SA-β-gal) staining, real-time PCR, and Western blot to evaluate the levels related to cellular senescence markers. The mRNA expression levels of senescence markers were significantly increased in the later passages of ASCs. We show that light activation reduced the expression of senescent genes, and SA-β-Gal in all cells at passages. Moreover, the light-activated ASCs-derived exosomes decrease the expression of senes...
Source: Fight Aging! - June 29, 2023 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs

Fight Aging! Newsletter, June 26th 2023
This study explored the association between different cooking fuel types and the risk of cancer and all-cause mortality among seniors constructing Cox regression models. Data were obtained by linking waves of 6, 7, and 8 of the Chinese Longitudinal Healthy Longevity Survey, which included a total of 7,269 participants who were 65 years old and over. Cooking fuels were categorized as either biomass, fossil, or clean fuels. And the effects of switching cooking fuels on death risk were also investigated using Cox regression models. The results indicate that, compared with the users of clean fuels, individuals using bio...
Source: Fight Aging! - June 25, 2023 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Newsletters Source Type: blogs

Lab-Created Mini Lungs to Study Respiratory Infections
Researchers at Rockefeller University have developed a cell culture platform in which to grow ‘lung buds’ from human embryonic stem cells. The tiny structures are similar to the lung buds that form during fetal development, and they contain tiny airways and alveoli. The researchers create the structures in a bio-reactor style device that is furnished with microfluidic chips in which the lung buds grow. The team developed a cocktail of growth factors that can stimulate the embryonic cells to differentiate into the lung buds, and they hope to use the system to test how respiratory infections behave and to discover new tr...
Source: Medgadget - June 19, 2023 Category: Medical Devices Authors: Conn Hastings Tags: Materials Medicine Pathology Public Health RockefellerUniv Source Type: blogs

Somatic Mosaicism in the Aging Brain
Mutations in stem cell populations can spread throughout a tissue, and the occurrence of mutations over time leads to a pattern of mutations known as somatic mosiacism. Most mutations cause little to no functional change in the cells in which they occur, as most of the genome is dormant. Does somatic mosaicism provide a significant contribution to degenerative aging due to the few mutations that do cause functional change and spread throughout tissues? There are only a few definitive correlations to date, but we might expect more to emerge as researchers continue to investigate. The brain is an interesting case, as neurons...
Source: Fight Aging! - June 19, 2023 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs

Fight Aging! Newsletter, June 19th 2023
In conclusion, among Swedish middle-aged subjects, nearly two-thirds showed complete fatty degeneration of thymus on CT. Age-Related Dysfunction of Water Homeostasis https://www.fightaging.org/archives/2023/06/age-related-dysfunction-of-water-homeostasis/ Dehydration can be an issue in older people. As in every complex system in the body, the mechanisms by which hydration is regulated become dysfunctional with advancing age. Researchers here look at the brain region responsible for regulating some of the response to dehydration, cataloging altered gene expression in search of the more important mechan...
Source: Fight Aging! - June 18, 2023 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Newsletters Source Type: blogs

Notes from the 2023 Age-Related Disease Therapeutics Summit
The former Longevity Therapeutics conference series was renamed to the Age-Related Disease Therapeutics Summit and held its fifth event recently in San Francisco. It was a smaller meeting than in past years, perhaps a result of the recent downturn in the global financial and investment environment. Few investors were present. Nonetheless, one can usually learn something interesting from the presenting biotech founders and executives. I took a few notes while I was there to present on progress at Repair Biotechnologies, and they follow in the order of the conference program. Birget Schilling from the Buck Institute f...
Source: Fight Aging! - June 16, 2023 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Longevity Industry Source Type: blogs

Targeting Pro-Inflammatory Cytokine IL-17 to Slow Skin Aging
Researchers here report that a few cell types in aged skin begin to generate large amounts of IL-17, an inflammatory signal molecule. While the obvious suspect here is cellular senescence, as we know that senescent cells accumulate with age and energetically secrete pro-inflammatory signal molecules, this data suggests that this may not be the case, at least for this particular signal molecule in this particular tissue. The researchers show that blocking IL-17 slows the manifestations of skin aging. The challenge in this sort of approach is that inflammatory signal molecules are needed for the normal immune response to fun...
Source: Fight Aging! - June 16, 2023 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs

Retroviral Activation as a Component of Neuronal Aging
In this study, we further found that treatment with abacavir can attenuate the augmented inflammation and protein aggregates in human neurons during prolonged culture and in the neurons of FL from aged mice, indicating ERV targeting as a promising strategy to delay brain aging and extend healthspan. Link: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.celrep.2023.112593 (Source: Fight Aging!)
Source: Fight Aging! - June 13, 2023 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs

“We Are Electric” by Sally Adee: Medgadget Interviews the Author
The human body has a deep connection with electricity. The transmission of electrical impulses is responsible for the movement of our limbs, the functioning of our organs, and the formation and recall of memories. The signatures of the various electrical signals emanating from our body can be telltale signs of our health, and a jolt of electricity can literally bring us back from the brink of death. But while these things have long been known about the electricity constantly coursing through our bodies, what has more recently been discovered is the role that “bioelectricity” plays in the formation of our bod...
Source: Medgadget - June 12, 2023 Category: Medical Devices Authors: Scott Jung Tags: Education etc. Exclusive Source Type: blogs

Fight Aging! Newsletter, June 12th 2023
In this study, we investigated the effect of NXP032 on neurovascular stabilization through the changes of PECAM-1, PDGFR-β, ZO-1, laminin, and glial cells involved in maintaining the integrity of the blood-brain barrier (BBB) in aged mice. NXP032 was orally administered daily for 8 weeks. Compared to young mice and NXP032-treated mice, 20-month-old mice displayed cognitive impairments in Y-maze and passive avoidance tests. NXP032 treatment contributed to reducing the BBB damage by attenuating the fragmentation of microvessels and reducing PDGFR-β, ZO-1, and laminin expression, thereby mitigating astrocytes and microglia ...
Source: Fight Aging! - June 11, 2023 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Newsletters Source Type: blogs

Senescent Cells Appear Involved in Graft-Versus-Host Disease
Now that increasing attention is given to senescent cells in the biology of aging, their involvement in a wide range of conditions has been uncovered. The transient creation of senescent cells is a part of wound healing, a process that is harmed by the growing burden of lingering senescent cells that occurs with advancing age, and the inability of the aged immune system to remove these cells in a timely fashion. Given the role in wound healing, is perhaps not surprising to find senescent cells involved in graft-versus-host disease following surgical transplantation of tissue. Senolytic therapies may prove to be useful here...
Source: Fight Aging! - June 9, 2023 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs

The Promise of Regenerative Medicine
Is is now going on three decades since the first flush of excitement for regenerative medicine in the form of stem cell therapies. Unfortunately, producing meaningful, reliable regeneration with cell therapies turned out to be a great deal harder then hoped. It is still not a solved problem, outside a few narrow applications. In the intervening time, the field of regenerative medicine has expanded considerably beyond cell therapies, now of many varieties, to encompass approaches such as immune modulation and reprogramming native cell behavior. As today's commentary notes, there is still no magic button to turn on regenerat...
Source: Fight Aging! - June 8, 2023 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs

Towards Small Molecules that Induce Expression of Reprogramming Factor OCT4
Reprogramming involves inducing expression of reprogramming factors, canonically OSKM (OCT4, SOX2, KLF4, and MYC), the Yamanaka factors. When expressed for a sufficiently long time, a period of days to weeks, some fraction of OSKM-expressing cells dedifferentiate into induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). Before that happens, however, beneficial epigenetic changes occur, resetting a cell to a more youthful pattern of gene expression, resulting in improvements such as restored mitophagy and mitochondrial function. The present focus of the industry is to find a way to safely apply transient exposure to reprogramming factor...
Source: Fight Aging! - June 7, 2023 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs