Lifeboat Foundation

A few hundred of the thousands of proteins circulating in our blood turn out to be a fairly accurate forecaster of a person’s age, scientists reported Thursday — though one’s biological age, which doesn’t always match one’s number of years.

This “proteomic clock,” as the researchers call it, relies on measurements of levels of the proteins, which rise and fall over the years. While it’s a nifty discovery, for now it remains just that. Researchers need to first develop a much better understanding of these proteins; if they can, they said, it might be possible to one day look at their levels to gauge the success of drugs being tested in clinical trials, or even to develop a therapy from a cocktail of proteins that could act like a rejuvenation boost or improve health.

“Why are these proteins so tightly linked to aging?” said Tony Wyss-Coray, professor of neurology and neurological sciences at Stanford and the senior author of the paper⁴, which was published Thursday in the journal Nature Medicine.

“Aging reversal is something that’s been proven about eight different ways in animals,” geneticist George Church says. So when will humans get to turn back the clock? Church tells 60 Minutes it’s not that far away. See the full report, Sunday.

Ethical concerns about new and emerging technologies that could significantly extend human lifespans generally focus on their potential impact on individuals and the permissibility of providing such treatment options. Because these technologies might also prompt us to assess and balance interests of different individuals and groups, given resource and production limitations, life-extension technologies provoke profound conversations about the nature and value of traditional conceptions of humanity.

Life extension requires careful consideration of resource scarcity, justice, and what, if anything, is intrinsic to the experiences we define as human.

The blood-borne signs of aging – and indeed, perhaps the causes of aging – make three big shifts around the ages of 34, 60 and 78, a new Stanford-led study has discovered, potentially leading to new diagnostic tests and avenues of anti-aging research.

The study measured levels of nearly 3,000 individual proteins in the plasma of small blood samples from 4,263 people aged between 18 and 95, and found that 1,379 of these proteins varied significantly with a subject’s age. Indeed, with information about levels of just 373 of these proteins, the researchers found they could predict a subject’s age “with great accuracy,” and an even smaller subset of just nine proteins could do a “passable” job.

Proteins are the body’s workhorses, carrying out instructions from all the body’s cells. Changes in their levels in our blood reflect the starting, stopping and changing of different biological processes. The researchers found that these changes were often quite sudden – levels of a protein would remain stable in the blood for years, and then rapidly plunge or leap, rather than showing a steady increase or decline.

A type of artificial intelligence technique is now being used to develop new drugs and therapies and could perhaps even help to solve aging.

An urgent need for aging biomarkers

There has long been an urgent need in our field to develop increasingly accurate biomarkers of aging so that the efficacy of interventions can be gauged. Deep learning is one of the more recent techniques being applied in the search for aging biomarkers.

Life expectancy rose, and so did the number of years we spend without serious health problems, researchers say.

Libella Gene Therapeutics, LLC (“Libella”) announces a clinical trial in Colombia (South America) using telomere-lengthening gene therapy to reverse aging and possibly cure age-related diseases. Libella has chosen bioaccess™ as its CRO for this trial.

UCLA scientists have discovered a link between a protein and the ability of human blood stem cells to self-renew. In a study published today in the journal Nature, the team reports that activating the protein causes blood stem cells to self-renew at least twelvefold in laboratory conditions.

Multiplying blood stem cells in conditions outside the human body could greatly improve treatment options for blood cancers like leukemia and for many inherited blood diseases.

Dr. Hanna Mikkola, a member of the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at UCLA and senior author of the study, has studied blood stem cells for more than 20 years.

Accelerating rejuvenation therapies to repair the damage of aging. Berlin, May 21 — 23.