Lifeboat Foundation

On December 6–7, 2022, the Buck Institute for Research on Aging will be hosting the Longevity Summit 2022. Lifespan.io is pleased to announce that we are an official media partner for this upcoming conference.

The Summit will see many of the leading experts in the field coming together in the grounds of the architecturally distinct Buck Institute. It is being framed as a peer-to-peer learning experience aiming to unite longevity entrepreneurs, pharma and biotech companies, investors, researchers, and government organizations.

Here’s what the organizers had to say about the event:

The lone volunteer in a unique study involving a gene-editing technique has died, and those behind the trial are now trying to figure out what killed him.

Terry Horgan, a 27-year-old who had Duchenne muscular dystrophy, died last month, according to Cure Rare Disease, a Connecticut-based nonprofit founded by his brother, Rich, to try and save him from the fatal condition.

Although little is known about how he died, his death occurred during one of the first studies to test a gene editing treatment built for one person. It’s raising questions about the overall prospect of such therapies, which have buoyed hopes among many families facing rare and devastating diseases.

A major hallmark of Parkinson’s disease is the loss of dopamine-producing neurons in the brain, which in turn causes patients to lose motor control abilities. NYSCF – Robertson Stem Cell Investigator Alumna Malin Parmar, PhD, of Lund University, has spent a decade developing a cell therapy to replace these cells, and this revolutionary treatment (called ‘STEM-PD’) has just received approval for a Phase I/IIa clinical trial in Sweden.

“We are excited and looking forward to this clinical study of STEM-PD, hoping that it could potentially help reduce the significant burden of Parkinson’s disease. This has been a massive team effort for over a decade, and the regulatory approval is a major and important milestone,” said Dr. Parmar, who is a Professor of Developmental and Regenerative Neurobiology at Lund, in a statement.

Dr. Parmar’s innovative work towards a Parkinson’s cell therapy earned her the NYSCF – Robertson Stem Cell Investigator Award in 2016, which provided support for her lab’s research until 2021, including her work on STEM-PD.

The controversial scientist freed this year from jail for illegal medical practices has relocated to Beijing for his proposed US$7.2 million project.

Regenerative medicine company Frequency Therapeutics is developing new drugs that activate our innate abilities to restore function and reverse degenerative diseases. The company is working on small molecules that selectively activate progenitor cells already present within our bodies to create healthy, functional tissues. Frequency’s initial focus is on hearing loss and multiple sclerosis, and the company has just completed enrolment of a Phase 2b trial in adults with acquired sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL).

Longevity. Technology: Frequency is focused on progenitor cells, which are like stem cells but can only make cells that belong to the same tissue or organ. While progenitor cells remain active in some of our organs and tissues, they can become dormant in others. Frequency’s small molecules are designed to selectively target and induce dormant progenitor cells to create specific cell types to restore tissue structure and function. We caught up with Frequency’s Chief Scientific Officer Dr Chris Loose to learn more.

Nasdaq-listed Frequency was founded in 2014, licensing technology developed by professors Robert Langer from MIT and Jeffrey Karp from Harvard Medical School.

Dr talks taking hardcore science to market without biotech approval risk and the catalyst that is translational research.

We were lucky enough to attend the Longevity Investors Conference last month; this key event attracts those interested in learning about longevity investment opportunities and finding out more about the exciting directions in which the field is accelerating. To put it succinctly, as MIT Tech Review did recently, LIC “brings academic scientists and biotech companies together with deep-pocketed investors. We’re talking millionaires and billionaires.”

Continue reading “Tobias Reichmuth — the longevity market starts now” »

A multinational team headed by University College London scientists has discovered a new mechanism that slows down and maybe even prevents the normal aging of immune cells, one of the nine “hallmarks of aging.”

The discovery in-vitro (cells) and validated in mice was “unexpected,” according to the researchers, who believe harnessing the mechanism might extend the life of the immune system, enabling people to live healthier and longer lives, and would also have therapeutic use for diseases such as cancer and dementia. Their findings were recently published in the journal Nature Cell Biology.

Explaining the study, lead author, Dr. Alessio Lanna, Honorary Professor at UCL Division of Medicine, said: Immune cells are on constant high-alert, always ready to fight pathogens. To be effective they also must persist for decades in the body – but the strategies employed to execute this life-long protection are largely unknown.

“It’s like being able to see the mountain all at once—the whole landscape and the individual trees.” That’s how researcher Jun Ye describes direct frequency-comb absorption spectroscopy. Ye and his JILA/National Institute of Standards and Technology colleagues in Boulder, CO, used optical frequency combs to analyze complex gas mixtures for a forthcoming IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science paper on a novel cold-plasma sterilization method.

The system bathes surfaces—agar plates, plastic ID badges (a “major vector for pathogen transmission…currently not subject to any disinfection/sterilization procedures…”), biofilms, and mouse skin (free-radical-rich gases have been shown to disinfect wounds and speed healing)—and mixtures of plasma-derived ozone (O₃), hydrogen peroxide (H₂O₂), nitrous oxide (N₂O), and nitrogen dioxide (NO₂). It appears to work well, deactivating most surface bacteria in 15 to 60 seconds.

A further object of the study, however, was to discover exactly which gas proportions provided the most effective sterilization. The mix of gases, each with its own pattern of absorption transitions, made monitoring the flow a challenge for conventional Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) absorption spectroscopy.

Objects that can transform themselves after they’ve been built could have a host of useful applications in everything from robotics to biomedicine. A new technique that combines 3D printing and an ink with dynamic chemical bonds can create microscale structures of alterable sizes and properties.