The Methuselah Foundation Blog

June 26, 2008

Aging 2008 and Aubrey de Grey at Wired

Wired notes the Methuselah Foundation-organized Aging 2008 conference at UCLA, kicking off tomorrow with a free public symposium:

Gandhi once said, describing his critics, "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."

After declaring, essentially out of nowhere, that he had a program to end the disease of aging, renegade biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey knows how the first three steps of Gandhi's progression feel. Now he's focused on the fourth.

"I've been at Gandhi stage three for maybe a couple of years," de Grey said. "If you're trying to make waves, certainly in science, there's a lot of people who are going to have insufficient vision to bother to understand what you're trying to say."

This weekend, his organization, The Methuselah Foundation, is sponsoring its first U.S. conference on the emerging interdisciplinary field that de Grey has helped kick start. (Its first day, Friday, will be free and open to the public.) The conference, Aging: The Disease - The Cure - The Implications, held at UCLA, is an indication of how far de Grey has come in mainstreaming his ideas.

The Methuselah Foundation has come a long way since things first started moving back in 2004 - congratulations are due to everyone who has helped make this organization the success it is.

Posted by Reason at 06:00 PM |

June 13, 2008

New SENS Research Projects in the Pipeline

As Methuselah Foundation funding grows, thanks to our many generous donors and rising profile, our Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) research programs will expand beyond the presently active LysoSENS and MitoSENS projects. All SENS research seeks to develop biotechnologies that repair, prevent or make irrelevant the biochemical and cellular damage that causes age-related degeneration - here's a look at what we have in the pipeline:

AmyloSENS - cleaning up extracellular junk:

The Methuselah Foundation is presently in discussion with leading researchers in this field with a view to initiating work on a vaccine - similar to that developed by Elan for Alzheimer's disease - to stimulate the aged body to clear the widespread amyloids (particular of transthyretin) responsible for senile systemic amyloidosis.

ApoptoSENS - removing senescent and other "gone bad" cells:

During 2008, the Methuselah Foundation will launch a project to develop a procedure for clearing aged T cells from the blood of mice, and potentially thereafter in primates. This work will be supervised by one of the top professors in the immunosenescence field.

GlycoSENS - breaking down crosslinks and AGEs:

The Methuselah Foundation is currently planning out a project to engineer enzymes capable of cleaving the ubiquitous glucosepane crosslinks, which may comprise as much as 98% of all the long-lived crosslinks in aged human tissue. This work is still in the early planning stages, but we hope to be able to begin full-time research before the end of 2008.

OncoSENS - alter cells to prevent cancer:

The Methuselah Foundation is planning to launch three projects in the OncoSENS strand during 2008.

The first project aims to characterise the enzyme responsible for [alternative lengthening of telomeres], which is still unknown. Recently, however, observations in two different organs have given good reason to consider a hitherto unsuspected gene. A relatively simple series of experiments could test this hypothesis.

The second project addresses a potential problem with the WILT strategy. It’s possible that telomerase activity per se - independent of telomere length - may have roles in maintaining the health of the stem cells themselves, or of their rarely-dividing neighbours in the so-called "stem cell niche". We are arranging a project to address this question, in the blood of mice, with the world’s leading professor in the area.

Finally, the theory that non-cancer-causing mutations are unlikely to be harmful in a normal lifetime - protagonistic pleiotropy - is not yet widely accepted. We are therefore initiating a rigorous study into the effects of such mutations in mouse brains.

Posted by Reason at 11:56 PM |


The Methuselah Foundation is a charitable 501(c)(3) organization; its IRS tax identification number is 54-2040344.