Lifeboat Foundation

Genflow has announced that its adeno-associated virus (AAV) research and development programme in Estonia has received a non-dilutive grant award of €250,000 from the Applied Research Programme of Enterprise Estonia, an Estonian governmental institution designed to stimulate business growth in the country.

Longevity. Technology: Genflow’s research programme is focused on the development of an antiaging gene therapy platform designed to target nearly 100 million patients worldwide who suffer from Werner’s syndrome, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) and non-alcoholic steatohepatitis, an advanced form of NAFLD, as well as other major clinical disorders.

This R&D is a collaborative project between Genflow and IVEX lab OÜ, an Estonian company specialising in the research and development of biotech therapeutics.

Far-thinking billionaires are funding innovative research aimed at discovering methods to slow and reverse pathological aging processes. The objective is to accelerate scientific advances that will enable humans to enjoy longer and healthier life spans.

Scientifically reviewed by Dr. Gary Gonzalez, MD, in May 2022. Written by: Michael Downey, Health & Wellness Author.

Prior to this, it was assumed that egg cells (oocytes) would contain a complex array of factors needed to reprogram a somatic cell into becoming an embryonic cell. After all, the feat of transforming an aged egg cell and reprogramming it to make a new animal must be controlled by many factors present in the egg cell, or so they thought. Takahashi and Yamanaka turned this idea upside down when they showed that just four of the Yamanaka factors were needed to achieve this transformation.

They used the Yamanaka factors to reprogram adult mouse fibroblasts (connective tissue cells) back to an embryonic state called pluripotency, a state where the cell behaves like an embryonic stem cell and can become any other cell type in the body.

Continue reading “Yamanaka Factors and Partial Cellular Reprogramming” »

Mounting evidence suggests that humans may have the biological hardware to benefit from some aspects of hibernation. Switching on these mechanisms could treat cardiac arrest, boost longevity and help people travel further into space.

“Transhumanism” — The intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the possibility and desirability of fundamentally improving the human condition through applied reason, especially by developing and making widely available technologies to eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities. — whatistranshumanism.org.

“…I suppose I’ve been looking for Eden all my life. I think we all have. And I think that primeval communion between humanity and the rest of life did exist once, and perhaps still does in some pockets. But it is not available to modern people except in memory or longing. And the search can be damaging if it distracts you from the fact that, whatever horrors humanity unleashes, the world is still a wonder if we can just get out of our anxious minds long enough to see it. Which is easier written than done.
Both sides in the argument that runs through Alexandria my latest novel —nature versus culture, body versus mind, human versus machine—find that their worldview has holes in. That’s part of the point, I think. Our world is being eaten by this great, terrible machine, but the machine is a manifestation of us.
If my worldview has changed it is only to reveal to me that any “enemy” we might have is lodged firmly in each of our hearts, and that there is nowhere to escape to that doesn’t lead through it.”

Continue reading “**YOUTUBE Talk with Author PAUL KINGSNORTH about ‘The Coming Transhuman Future’” »

A new study shows which factor plays a bigger role as we age.

There are many elements that determine how we age. This includes our genetics, the environment, and our age itself. But what key component has the most profound impact on aging?

According to a new study by researchers at the University of California — Berkeley, aging and the environment play more of a key role in determining our health in later years, than genetics. The study was published in the journal Nature Communications.

Continue reading “Genetics plays less of a role than age in our health as we get older” »

Maybe the science is finally catching up with BioViva CEO Elizabeth Parrish.

As a therapeutic approach, however, gene therapy suffers somewhat from the undue weight of exuberant expectations. For years people have speculated about applications going beyond restoration of lost body function and into biological enhancement, such as longevity. Some now categorize gene therapy as belonging to the realm of transhumanism—the use of medical and surgical interventions to enhance the body, or give it extra capabilities, as opposed to treating things that go wrong.

Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine (WFIRM) scientists working on CRISPR/Cas9-mediated gene editing technology have developed a method to increase efficiency of editing while minimizing DNA deletion sizes, a key step toward developing gene editing therapies to treat genetic diseases.

CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) technology is used to alter DNA sequences and modify gene function. CRISPR/Cas9 is an enzyme that is used like a pair of scissors to cut two strands of DNA at a specific location to add, remove or repair bits of DNA. By modifying gene function, scientists hope to treat genetic diseases by halting a diseased cell’s ability to continue replicating the defective DNA. CRISPR/Cas9 is the most versatile genetic manipulation available and has a wide range of potential applications. While CRISPR/Cas9 mainly generates short insertions or deletions at the target site, it may also make large DNA deletions around the specific target site. These large deletions cause safety concerns and may decrease functional editing efficiency.

The WFIRM team is looking for ways to reduce the chances of this happening. The research described in their recent paper, published recently in Nucleic Acids Research, sought to address the generation of unpredictable on-target long DNA deletions and find a way to guard against them, said lead author Baisong Lu, Ph.D., of WFIRM.

Amid much speculation and research about how our genetics affect the way we age, a University of California, Berkeley, study now shows that individual differences in our DNA matter less as we get older and become prone to diseases of aging, such as diabetes and cancer.

In a study of the relative effects of genetics, aging and the environment on how some 20,000 human genes are expressed, the researchers found that aging and environment are far more important than genetic variation in affecting the expression profiles of many of our genes as we get older. The level at which genes are expressed — that is, ratcheted up or down in activity — determines everything from our hormone levels and metabolism to the mobilization of enzymes that repair the body.

“How do your genetics — what you got from your sperm donor and your egg donor and your evolutionary history — influence who you are, your phenotype, such as your height, your weight, whether or not you have heart disease?” said Peter Sudmant, UC Berkeley assistant professor of integrative biology and a member of the campus’s Center for Computational Biology. “There’s been a huge amount of work done in human genetics to understand how genes are turned on and off by human genetic variation. Our project came about by asking, ‘How is that influenced by an individual’s age?’ And the first result we found was that your genetics actually matter less the older you get.”