Given there is to be a Reddit AMA on December 7th with Dr. Aubrey de Grey in the futurology subreddit, we thought it was a great time to have a look at the progress the SENS Research Foundation has made in tackling the aging processes. What follows is a brief summary of some of the highlights of their research efforts as well as the details of the AMA where you can ask Aubrey anything you like about his work.

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Given that there is to be a Reddit AMA on December 7th with Dr. Aubrey de Grey in the Futurology subreddit, we think it’s a great time to have a look at the progress that the SENS Research Foundation has made in tackling the aging processes. What follows is a brief summary of some of the highlights of their research efforts as well as the details of the AMA, in which you can ask Aubrey anything you like about his work.

Today, there are many drugs and therapies that we take for granted. However, we should not forget that what is common and easily accessible today didn’t just magically appear out of thin air; rather, at some point, it used to be an unclear subject of study on which “more research was needed”, and even earlier, it was just a conjecture in some researcher’s head.

Hopefully, one day not too far into the future, rejuvenation biotechnologies will be as normal and widespread as aspirin is today, but right now, we’re in the R&D phase, so we should be patient and remind ourselves that the fact that we can’t rejuvenate people today doesn’t mean that nothing is being done or has been achieved to that end. On the contrary, we are witnessing exciting progress in basic research—the fundamental building blocks without which rejuvenation, or any new technology at all, would stay a conjecture.

Dr. Aubrey de Grey is the Chief Science Officer, founder of the SENS Research Foundation (SRF) and one of the original proponents of a damage repair-based approach to aging and age-related diseases. His work has inspired many others to think about aging differently and entertain the idea that, perhaps, we do not have to accept the suffering that age-related diseases cause.

Recently, Dr. de Grey published an article in MIT Technology Review; here, we explain why this is a real milestone of progress.

Aubrey de Grey has set himself a simple task. The 54-year-old cofounder of the SENS Research Foundation wants to end biological aging for good. So sure is he of his mission, he proclaims the first human being to live to the age of 1,000 has already been born. De Grey believes that, within the next 20 years or so, scientists will finally solve one of humanity’s greatest problems.

“The fact is, aging kills 110,000 people worldwide every fucking day,” de Grey said at a Virtual Futures event attended by Inverse in London on Wednesday, in a conversation with group director Luke Robert Mason. “It doesn’t just kill them. You have to take into account all the suffering that comes before.”

Through his foundation, de Grey is working to solve seven types of aging damage that he believes are the key to a breakthrough. These are tissue atrophy, cancerous cells, mitochondrial mutations, death -resistant cells, extracellular matrix stiffening, extracellular aggregates, and intracellular aggregates. It may sound like a complex salad of jargon, but de Grey claims that because science has an understanding of how to fix all these damages, aging can end for good.

Summary: Novel resveratrol analogs rejuvenate aging human cells, lengthening their Full Explanation of Telomeres.

Telomeres are a unique segment of DNA that sits at the end of the chromosome. Telomeres have repetitive sequences that are recognized as the end of the chromosome but are only there to keep the chromosome from becoming frazzled or damaged. Moreover, every time the cell divides, the telomeres also divide. But sometimes the telomeres can become shorter. As they grow shorter, they act like a clock that lets the cell know how old it is. The length of the telomere is the molecular clock, predicted by Hayflick. The telomere mechanism limits the number of times a cell can divide without losing DNA. When telomeres become too short, the cells cease multiplying and either become senescent or die.

Moreover, one of the interesting features about telomeres is that in cancer cells stay immortal by keeping their telomeres long. That means that cancer cells can continue dividing, long after they should have reached the end of their lifespan. This is one of the tactics that cancer cells use to trick the body into letting them keep replicating. [Source – NHGRI and Wikipedia.].

When taken daily, rapamycin causes side effects, the most serious of which include an increased risk of infection due to immune suppression, elevated blood sugar, and an increased risk of type 2 diabetes. Some of the side effects of daily rapamycin therapy are extremely serious, occasionally causing death due to infections. The complete list of side effects reported by daily rapamycin users includes high cholesterol, high triglycerides, glucose intolerance, insulin resistance, new-onset diabetes, anemia, thrombocytopenia, gastrointestinal disorders, sinusitis, respiratory and urinary infections, testicular dysfunction, and skin problems.

Daily vs. Intermittent Rapamycin Therapy

Rapamycin therapy is promising. However, researchers still need to determine the dosage that provides health benefits while eliminating harmful side effects. Scientists think they have already found the answer because rapamycin behaves differently when taken daily, as opposed to intermittently.