Lifeboat Foundation

Humans have been trying to cheat death for thousands of years. Myths about elixirs promising immortality span various cultures, as do real concoctions that often did more harm than good. One of the most misguided attempts at creating a potion for immortality involved the first emperor of China and mercury pills. In his obsession with finding a formula that would grant him eternal life, Qin Shi Huang downed mercury and other toxic substances nearly two millennia ago, believing his alchemists had hit upon the perfect magical tonic. Unsurprisingly, he died prematurely at age 49.

Archeologists have discovered another 2,000-year-old “elixir for immortality” that sheds light on the true cost of chasing down eternal life.

While excavating the tomb of a Western Han noble family in China’s Henan province in 2018, researchers unearthed a bronze pot. At first, the team thought the liquid inside was wine, but more recently determined that it was an alchemist’s formulation: a yellow liquid containing potassium nitrate and alunite. These two ingredients are cited in ancient Taoist texts as ingredients for immortality. Potassium nitrate is an inorganic salt used today as a natural source of nitrate, and is a useful ingredient in food preservatives, fertilizer, and fireworks. Alunite is a mineral that forms in volcanic or sedimentary environments when sulfur-rich minerals oxidize. It has historically been used to make alum, which is important for water purification, tanning, and dyeing.

Growing immature eggs from old mice in the ovarian structures of young mice can reverse signs of ageing in the eggs¹.

“Think of this as a five-star anti-ageing spa for the old egg,” says Rong Li, a cell biologist at the National University of Singapore (NUS), who co-authored a study describing the results.

When the rejuvenated eggs were fertilized, the resulting embryos were almost four times more likely to give rise to healthy pups than the eggs that matured in the old environment. The results are published in Nature Aging today.

It was a career-defining (and perhaps life changing) moment when Dr. Vittorio Sebastiano, a reproductive biologist by training, realized that because we are able to create life, that same body of information could be harnessed to create youth — that is, radically reverse our biological aging process to a younger time point without losing cellular identity.

In 2014, he and his lab began unpacking this epiphany. They made the radical decision to conduct their investigations in human cells and tissue rather than in rodents, with the expectation that such a start would be a better bridge to human clinical trials.

Continue reading “Decoding Aging: The Science Of Cellular Rejuvenation With Dr. Vittorio Sebastiano” »

During aging, the human methylome undergoes both differential and variable shifts, accompanied by increased entropy. The distinction between variably methylated positions (VMPs) and differentially methylated positions (DMPs), their contribution to epigenetic age, and the role of cell type heterogeneity remain unclear.

We conduct a comprehensive analysis of 32,000 human blood methylomes from 56 datasets (age range = 6–101 years). We find a significant proportion of the blood methylome that is differentially methylated with age (48% DMPs; FDR 0.005) and variably methylated with age (37% VMPs; FDR 0.005), with considerable overlap between the two groups (59% of DMPs are VMPs). Bivalent and Polycomb regions become increasingly methylated and divergent between individuals, while quiescent regions lose methylation more uniformly. Both chronological and biological clocks, but not pace-of-aging clocks, show a strong enrichment for CpGs undergoing both mean and variance changes during aging. The accumulation of DMPs shifting towards a methylation fraction of 50% drives the increase in entropy, smoothening the epigenetic landscape. However, approximately a quarter of DMPs exhibit anti-entropic effects, opposing this direction of change.

Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and other neurological disorders can be seen as “dirty brain” diseases, where the brain struggles to clear out harmful waste. Aging is a key risk factor because, as we grow older, our brain’s ability to remove toxic buildup slows down. However, new research in mice demonstrates that it’s possible to reverse age-related effects and restore the brain’s waste-clearing process.

“This research shows that restoring cervical lymph vessel function can substantially rescue the slower removal of waste from the brain associated with age,” says Douglas Kelley, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Rochester. “Moreover, this was accomplished with a drug already being used clinically, offering a potential treatment strategy.”

Kelley is one of the lead authors of the study, which appears in the journal Nature Aging, along with Maiken Nedergaard, codirector the University’s Center for Translational Neuromedicine. The study is one of many collaborations carried out by researchers at Rochester’s Hajim School of Engineering & Applied Sciences and the Medical Center.

“This selection underscores WFIRM’s commitment to pushing the boundaries of scientific research and finding innovative solutions to some of the world’s most challenging health issues,” said Dr. Anthony Atala.

How can microgravity help advance cancer research? This is what an upcoming grant-awarded project sponsored by the International Space Station (ISS) National Lab hopes to address as a team of researchers from the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine (WFIRM) have been selected to send samples to the ISS with the goal of observing how microgravity influences cancer growth and their responses to treatment. This project holds the potential to help scientists and cancer researchers develop new methods for combating cancer here on Earth.

“Being selected for this project is an incredible honor and opportunity for our team at WFIRM,” said Dr. Shay Soker, who is the project lead and a professor in the Wake Forest University School of Medicine. “The microgravity environment of the ISS provides a unique setting to study cancer in ways that are not possible on Earth. This research has the potential to unlock new understandings of cancer behavior and lead to more effective treatments.”

Continue reading “NASA and ISS National Lab Choose WFIRM for Innovative Cancer Study” »

James Earl Jones died Monday at the age of 93. But long before he did, he gave Lucasfilm permission to recreate his iconic Darth Vader voice for shows like “Obi-Wan Kenobi.”

Despite the initial excitement and flashy headlines, all of these early ventures failed or switched focus away from aging. Most of these companies and their backers underestimated the complexity, costs, and time it would take to discover and develop a drug. Recent estimates suggest that developing a new drug takes over https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1359644623002428” rel=“noopener”>10 years and costs upwards of $6.1 billion and the failure rates exceed 90%. This figure reflects the immense difficulty of identifying therapeutic targets, conducting preclinical and clinical trials, and navigating the regulatory landscape. When it comes to developing a drug specifically for aging, the challenges multiply, making it much more difficult to design effective interventions and demonstrate their efficacy in clinical trials.

Fast forward to today, and a new generation of longevity biotechnology companies with a more conservative approach than their predecessors has emerged. Companies like http://www.bioagelabs.com” rel=“noopener”>BioAge Labs and http://www.insilico.com” rel=“noopener”>Insilico Medicine are using artificial intelligence (AI) to discover drugs that target specific chronic diseases or biological processes closely associated with aging. Instead of trying to develop therapies for aging directly, these companies focus on conditions that are closely linked to the aging process like obesity, muscle wasting, fibrosis, anemia, and even cancer… The strategy is to develop drugs for these diseases that could later be repurposed to address aging more broadly. And while in the technology industry we try to focus on moving very fast to win, here we prepare to play a very long game and focus on resilience and novelty rather than putting all eggs in one basket and failing miserably like dozens of companies in the past three decades.

A new study from the University of Copenhagen reveals that a specific gene plays a significant role in determining longevity, potentially opening the door to new treatments.

Sleep, fasting, exercise, green porridge, black coffee, a healthy social life…

There is an abundance of advice out there on how to live a good, long life. Researchers are working hard to determine why some people live longer than others, and how we get the most out of our increasingly long lives.