Methuselah Foundation recently announced a $1 million competition to. encourage innovation that will enable medicine to move away from unreliable. animal testing. The change is long overdue. In the U.S., all our food and. drug research has been guided by the 1938 Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetics. Act, which requires that every drug be tested on animals. While this was. state-of-the-art scientific process 84 years ago, we can do much better today. The reason why is simple: Animal testing is unreliable, ineffective.
Neurodegenerative diseases—like amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease), Alzheimer’s, and Parkinson’s—are complicated, chronic ailments that can present with a variety of symptoms, worsen at different rates, and have many underlying genetic and environmental causes, some of which are unknown. ALS, in particular, affects voluntary muscle movement and is always fatal, but while most people survive for only a few years after diagnosis, others live with the disease for decades. Manifestations of ALS can also vary significantly; often slower disease development correlates with onset in the limbs and affecting fine motor skills, while the more serious, bulbar ALS impacts swallowing, speaking, breathing, and mobility. Therefore, understanding the progression of diseases like ALS is critical to enrollment in clinical trials, analysis of potential interventions, and discovery of root causes.
However, assessing disease evolution is far from straightforward. Current clinical studies typically assume that health declines on a downward linear trajectory on a symptom rating scale, and use these linear models to evaluate whether drugs are slowing disease progression. However, data indicate that ALS often follows nonlinear trajectories, with periods where symptoms are stable alternating with periods when they are rapidly changing. Since data can be sparse, and health assessments often rely on subjective rating metrics measured at uneven time intervals, comparisons across patient populations are difficult. These heterogenous data and progression, in turn, complicate analyses of invention effectiveness and potentially mask disease origin.
So one treated rat made it to 45 months which is 113 for people. A 2nd trial is underway to try and increase these results. Also, the human topical test for E5 is just for skin rejuvenation, not fro full rejuvenation or lifespan increase for people.
In this video we report on the August 2022 update from Dr. Katcher’s experiment with E5 along with some other details about the book launch in other languages, the new experiment and topical E5 for humans!
When we feel lonely or sad, we may tend to retreat to our shelves or surround ourselves with the people we trust just to put a temporary band-aid on the sorrow we experience. However, finding no cure to being actually alone and unhappy for a long time can have devastating effects not only on our mental health but also on our physical health, hence our appearance.
Scientists just confirmed that prolonged loneliness and unhappiness could accelerate the aging process of an individual, according to a study published in the journal Aging-US.
How do single cells know when and where to proliferate, survive, and die during organ morphogenesis? Ender et al. show how self-organized ERK activity pulses and waves spatiotemporally regulate these fate decisions in a prototype 3D mammary epithelial model.
Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science & Technology (DGIST, President Yang Kook) Professor Hongsoo Choi’s team of the Department of Robotics and Mechatronics Engineering collaborated with Professor Sung-Won Kim’s team at Seoul St. Mary’s Hospital, Catholic University of Korea, and Professor Bradley J. Nelson’s team at ETH Zurich to develop a technology that produces more than 100 microrobots per minute that can be disintegrated in the body.
Microrobots aiming at minimal invasive targeted precision therapy can be manufactured in various ways. Among them, ultra-fine 3D printing technology called two-photon polymerization method, a method that triggers polymerization by intersecting two lasers in synthetic resin, is the most used. This technology can produce a structure with nanometer-level precision. However, a disadvantage exists in that producing one microrobot is time consuming because voxels, the pixels realized by 3D printing, must be cured successively. In addition, the magnetic nanoparticles contained in the robot can block the light path during the two-photon polymerization process. This process result may not be uniform when using magnetic nanoparticles with high concentration.
To overcome the limitations of the existing microrobot manufacturing method, DGIST Professor Hongsoo Choi’s research team developed a method to create microrobots at a high speed of 100 per minute by flowing a mixture of magnetic nanoparticles and gelatin methacrylate, which is biodegradable and can be cured by light, into the microfluidic chip. This is more than 10,000 times faster than using the existing two-photon polymerization method to manufacture microrobots.
The joint research team of Professor Choi Hongsoo at Robotics Engineering, DGIST, a senior researcher Jinyoung Kim from DGIST-ETH Microrobotics Research Center, and the research team of Professor Sung Won Kim at Seoul St. Mary’s Hospital of the Catholic University, made a breakthrough for the improvement of the therapeutic efficacy and safety in stem cell-based treatments.
The team developed a magnetically powered human nuclear transfer stem cells (hNTSC)-based microrobot and a method of minimally invasive delivery of therapeutic agents into the brain via the intranasal pathway. And they also accomplished transplanting the developed stem cell-based microrobot into brain tissue through the intranasal pathway that bypasses the blood-brain barrier. The proposed method is superior in efficacy and safety compared to the conventional surgical method and is expected to bring new possibilities of treating various intractable neurological diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and brain tumors, in the future.
The limitation of stem cell therapy is the difficulty in delivering an exact amount of stem cells to an accurate targeted location deep in the body where the treatment is with high risk. Another limitation is that both efficacy and safety of the treatment are low owing to a large amount of the therapeutic agent loss during delivery, while the cost of the treatment is high. In particular, when delivering stem cells into the brain through blood, the efficiency of cell delivery may decrease owing to the “blood-brain barrier,” which is a unique and specific component of the cerebrovascular network.
All eyes are on the Emerald Isle this week as the Longevity Summit Dublin brings together a host of speakers covering the spectrum of this booming sector. Delegates have been hearing from some of the leading entrepreneurs, companies, investors, and researchers in the field as they address many of the hot-button topics affecting longevity. One of those speakers is the so-called “father of genomics” – Harvard professor of genetics, George Church – who closes the conference later today with a keynote on Gene, cell and organ therapies for de-aging.
Longevity. Technology: In addition to his Harvard professorship, Church heads up synthetic biology at the Wyss Institute, where he oversees development of new tools with applications in regenerative medicine. Much of his focus more recently has been on the development of gene therapies targeting age-related disease, a passion that led him to co-found Rejuvenate Bio, with the goal of creating “full age reversal gene therapies.” We caught up with Church ahead of his Dublin presentation for a brief conversation on longevity.
Dr Church’s name is synonymous with genomic science, and he was a key contributor to the Human Genome Project and technologies including next-generation fluorescent and nanopore sequencing, aimed at understanding genetic contributions to human disease. However, he doesn’t feel that those initiatives did a huge amount to move the aging field forward.
Scientist from the National University of Singapore (NUS) have found a novel way of growing cell-based meat by zapping animal cells with a magnet. This new technique simplifies the production process of cell-based meat by reducing reliance on animal products, and it is also greener, cleaner, safer and more cost-effective.
Cultured meat is an alternative to animal farming with advantages such as reducing carbon footprint and the risk of transmitting diseases in animals. However, the current method of producing cultured meat involves using other animal products, which largely defeats the purpose, or drugs to stimulate the growth of the meat.
To cultivate cell-based meat, animal cells are fed animal serum—usually fetal bovine serum (FBS), which is a mixture harvested from the blood of fetuses excised from pregnant cows slaughtered in the dairy or meat industries—to help them grow and proliferate. This is a critical, yet cruel and expensive, step in the current cell-based meat production process. Ironically, many of these molecules come from the muscles within the slaughtered animal, but scientists did not know how to stimulate their release in production scale bioreactors. Other methods to promote cell growth are using drugs or relying on genetic engineering.
