Lifeboat Foundation

Scientists have discovered that CAR T cells, traditionally used in cancer treatment, can be engineered to fight aging by eliminating senescent cells, offering a promising single-dose, lifelong treatment against aging-related diseases.

The fountain of youth has eluded explorers for ages. It turns out the magic anti-aging elixir might have been inside us all along.

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) Assistant Professor Corina Amor Vegas and colleagues have discovered that T cells can be reprogrammed to fight aging, so to speak. Given the right set of genetic modifications, these white blood cells can attack another group of cells known as senescent cells. These cells are thought to be responsible for many of the diseases we grapple with later in life.

Centenarians, once considered rare, have become commonplace. Indeed, they are the fastest-growing demographic group of the world’s population, with numbers roughly doubling every ten years since the 1970s.

How long humans can live, and what determines a long and healthy life, have been of interest for as long as we know. Plato and Aristotle discussed and wrote about the ageing process over 2,300 years ago.

The pursuit of understanding the secrets behind exceptional longevity isn’t easy, however. It involves unravelling the complex interplay of genetic predisposition and lifestyle factors and how they interact throughout a person’s life.

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Immunizing enormous numbers of wild mice, however, is prohibitively difficult. By using genetic engineering, researchers could create white-footed mice that produced these antibodies from birth and could pass this ability on to their offspring. But did the island residents want to live with genetically engineered mice?

The answer was perhaps, but with caveats. In consulting with communities on this technology development, researchers found that community members preferred a cisgenic approach: They wanted white-footed mice that were engineered with DNA only from other white-footed mice.¹⁸ This would make the project more difficult for the researchers, and meant that a CRISPR-based gene drive, even one with limited spread, could not be used, since no white-footed mouse naturally has this gene-editing system. However, said Esvelt, “It’s their environment, so it’s their call.”

“We’re potentially causing an irreversible change to the environment,” said Telford. “We need to think about informed consent of the community as a proxy for informed consent of the environment. That’s been a real advance and something [that Esvelt] has pioneered—involving the communities from the very start.”

HiDEF-seq advances cancer treatment:

HiDEF-seq technique could further help develop or advance new prevention approaches or develop treatments for genetic diseases and even cancer.

Continue reading “New DNA sequencing technique detects early genetic mutations” »

The DNA a woman is born with may influence how her cells respond to chromosomal abnormalities acquired with aging, according to a new genomic analysis co-led by NCI researchers.

A protocol is described for generating human brain assembloids and performing viral labeling and retrograde tracing, 3D live imaging of axon projection and optogenetics with calcium imaging and electrophysiological recordings to model neural circuits.

The reason targeted treatment for non-small cell lung cancer fails to work for some patients, particularly those who have never smoked, has been discovered by researchers from UCL, the Francis Crick Institute and AstraZeneca.

The study, published in Nature Communications, shows that lung cancer cells with two particular genetic mutations are more likely to double their genome, which helps them to withstand treatment and develop resistance to it.

In the UK, lung cancer is the third most common type of cancer and the leading cause of cancer death. Around 85% of patients with lung cancer have non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), and this is the most common type found in patients who have never smoked. Considered separately, “never smoked” lung cancer is the fifth-most common cause of cancer death in the world.

The gene-editing technique employs prime editors along with advanced enzymes known as recombinases. This method has the potential to lead to universal gene therapies that are effective for conditions like cystic fibrosis.

Researchers at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard have enhanced a gene-editing technology that can now efficiently insert or replace entire genes in human cell genomes, potentially making it suitable for therapeutic uses.

The advance, from the lab of Broad core institute member David Liu, could one day help researchers develop a single gene therapy for diseases such as cystic fibrosis that are caused by one of hundreds or thousands of different mutations in a gene. Using this new approach, they would insert a healthy copy of the gene at its native location in the genome, rather than having to create a different gene therapy to correct each mutation using other gene-editing approaches that make smaller edits.