65 replies to this topic

[Mind]

Rita Effros: "Telomerase-based therapy for retarding immune exhaustion"

Ms. Effros asked for no video-taping of her session so I feel I should not post here either.

So back to Cui. His therapy is called (as you can read on his website) Luekocyte Infusion Therapy (LIFT). It is the process of taking Luekocytes from cancer resistant people and injecting them into cancer patients. As mentioned earlier - this therapy has been approved for phase two trials. This is awesome news.

[Mind]

One thing that has been mentioned a couple of times this morning is that stress significantly inhibits immune function. Happier=healthier, something that has been studied many times in the past.

[Mind]

I.M. Conboy "Aging of signal transduction in stem cells"

She described a process for up-regulating stem cell activity in aged muscle tissue. "We don't lose the capacity to regenerate muscle because of the lack of muscle stem cells, but because of the deregulation/degradation of signaling pathways.

Apparently transplanting young stem cells into old tissue does not lead to rejuvenation. Instead the young stem cells take on characteristics of the aged tissue.

"Aging can be described as a negative force exerted by old differentiated niches on stem cells".

She also mentioned something about ESCs having the ability to resist the "negative force" exerted by old tissue, whereas adult stem do not. (I can't be sure on this point because she has a thick accent and I couldn't follow closely).

She says TGF-beta is one of the main age related inhibitory culprits - one of the main negative forces. TGF-beta

[Mind]

Judith Campisi: "New Tricks for old cells"

Basically, she argues that senescense is an evolved process to suppress cancer activity in old tissue. Senescent cells tend to secrete things like inflammatory cytokines. As senescent cells accumulate, the secretions lead to pathology/aging.

What can we do about senescent cell secretions?

Luekocytes kill senescent cells. Senescent cells send out signals to the immune system saying please come over here and kill me and natural killer (NK) cells oblige. However some senescent cells (about 20%) also secrete high levels of matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) which likely prevent NK cells from doing their hit-man job. MMP inhibitors might help clear out senescent cells.

She also implicated ATM kinase in the inflammatory cytokine secretions.

[Mind]

Leanne Jones: "Age-related changes changes to stem cells and the stem cell niche"

She described the process by which the stem cell niche influences stem cell production and thus tissue repair and homeostasis.

Reduced signaling within the stem cell niche contributes to decreased stem cell function. Forced (unnatural) expression of some signals (specifically unpaired - upd) stops the decrease of stem cell function and the loss of stem cells and niche cells.

She suggests that regenerative medicine based on transplanting stem cells into old tissue will have to consider the signals from the niche as well. In order for young stem cells to work in old tissue you may need to also transplant the stem cell niche.

Is the stem cell niche signalling genetically regulated? A question her team is still investigating.

Do changes in the niche select for self-renewing stem cells that can operate independent of the niche - ie. cancer stem cells? Another open question.

All of her work has been done in flies.

[Mind]

Zipora Yablonka-Reuveni

Another talk about stem cells and the niche - regarding sarcopenia. I apologize for not having a good review. The presentation was quick and hard for me to follow.

[Mind]

David Larocca: "Targeted nanoparticle probes for identifying, tracking, and isolating embryonic stem cell derived progenitor cells".

This relates to the presentation by Michael West last night regarding the scaling and purity issues regarding ESCs. Larocca also works for Advanced Cell Technology (ACT). He discussed the method by which ACT is just starting to develop the tools to track and isolate progenitor cells in vitro and in vivo. Another talk that is too technical to for me to summarize adequately. Suffice it to say, isolating ESCs and progenitor cells is not easy and the tools for this task are primitive but advancing.

[Mind]

I missed a couple of talks because I was meeting with some people regarding partnerships with the Institute.

I caught the end of Mahtab Jafari's presentation about Rhodiola Rosea. She tested a new formulation of R. Rosea and found that it extended the mean lifespan of flies by 43% and the maximum lifespan by 33%. The supplement did not appear to extend lifespan through anti-oxidant activity (even though many people have proposed that it is an anti-oxidant). I thought this might interest all of you supp guru's out there.

[Mind]

Kevin Healy (UC Berkeley) presented on synthetic environments to control embryonic stem cell self renewal and fate determination.

He admitted that his presentation was only tangentially related to aging research - more of a talk on material research - creating an extra cellular matrix that can manipulate the development of ESCs.

At Berkeley they have been successful in creating artificial stem cell niches such as hydrogel (Matrigel) and peptide grafted Interpreting Polymer Network (IPN). He said one limit using these synthetic environments is that they only work for a handful of passes. After 3 or 4 passes (cultures) the ESCs develop their own matrix on top of the synthetic matrix. This has important implications for mass production of differentiated stem cells.

They have shown that simple mechanics can influence the differentiation of ESCs as well.

Healy mentioned once again (as have other speakers) the difficulty of injecting ESCs into the body for tissue rejuvenation. ESCs have a difficult time surviving in the new environment. His research is also focused on injecting the correct matrix into the area where ESCs will be used within the body.

[Mind]

The morning sessions have been interesting so far. Christiaan Leeuwenburgh talked about how iron affects aging. He is theorizes that non-heme iron is the main culprit. He showed a ton of graphs showing how CR rats had less non-heme iron in their body and how CR rats (as we all know) were in much better shape in old age. Even though he was looking at iron and ways to limit accumulation of non-heme iron to delay aging, it was more of an advertisement for CR. The CR rats lived longer, had better muscle strength in old age, had better mito function, and on and on and on.....

Marisol Corral-Debrinski, talked about optimized allotopic expression of mito genes. She works with Imminst member Mark Hamlainan and this is related to the MitoSENS strand of SNES, Hopefully I will be interviewing Mark at 22:00 GMT (6pm EDT, 3pm PDT) this afternoon for the Immortality Update and we can get more details.

Bruce Ames was third of the morning and again presented on the 40 micronutrients. He showed all kinds of data indicating all kinds of nasty things that happen to your body and cells if you are not getting the optimum amount of the micronutrients. Getting all of the micronutrients does not stop aging but, according to AMES, retards the aging process significantly and prevents all kinds of disease.

[Mind]

2nd was Ana Maria Cuervo. She discussed manipulating autophagy in order to enhance the removal of junk from cells. She has been successful in creating transgenic mice that preserve chaperone mediated autophagy (CMA) throughout life. These mice showed dramatically better health in old age. Michael Rae asked Ana whether CR or intermittent fasting increased autophagy more. Even though Ana answered twice, I still was unsure which was better. I could only understand the part where she said restricting calories increases autophagy. She said something about skipping lunch activates macroautophagy and then (later in the same day) skipping dinner activates CMA in conjunction with macroautophagy.

[Mind]

I was able to corner Ana Cuervo for a second about the IF vs. CR question. She claimed that (in mouse models) CR was superior to IF because CR upregulated both macroautophagy and CMA all day long whereas IF upregulated both mechanisms only during a few hours during the end of fasting. So IF is definitely beneficial in the mouse model but CR was superior.

I asked her if studying aging/CR/autophagy has convinced her to become a CRONie. She said she rarely eats anyway, that she didn't need studies to help her out. She said many people in her lab started eating better after seeing the results of some of the studies.

[Mind]

Nason Schooler had a very interesting presentation. "Unfocused pulsed lasers selectively destroy lipofuscin".

He looked at all the different methods in that could possibly get rid of lipofuscin and found that the cosmetic surgery industry already had a solution. It has been known for over forty years that pulsed unfocused lasers can selectively destroy pigmented structures without destroying surrounding tissue. The cosmetic surgery industry has been doing this (on the surface) for years. Schooler has demostrated that these laser pulses can be focused "several centimeters" below the surface. These laser pulses can destroy pigmented organelles without harming the rest of the cell. If lipofuscin is a cause of aging (as Aubrey theorizes) then removing this should result in a health benefit, whether this is accomplished through a process such as LysoSENS or lasers.

Ames (and most of the audience it seemed) was incredulous that lasers could get rid of lipofuscin. Ames was concerned that the lasers would kill the cells directly instead of resulting in apoptosis and this would be a less desirable solution. Schooler said the pulsed laser would not kill the cell. I thought his solution is similar to Zheng Cui's cancer treatment in that it is so simple that it is hard to believe it. Too good to be true.

Here is a webpage that Schooler put together that is basically an outline of his presentation.

www.nasonschooler.com/research

[Mind]

Back to Zheng Cui. In a conversation with him, he told me that many of his colleagues (cancer researchers) told him to not move so quickly into phase II trials because if it failed - his academic career could be ruined. They said he should take a more incremental approach. My eyes grew big. I was incredulous. What the hell?!! Anyway, Cui said if he failed, it would just be one more treatment out of many thousand that have failed in the past. He was more concerned about saving lives. He was a very pleasant and happy person and I felt comforted that he is on the front lines of cancer research. Go Cui!!

[Mind]

We had a little Imminst get together (Jmorgan took pictures). It was nice to see so many new and veteran members (and founders). We had a good time talking about the movement in general, but the most important issue that came up was the name change. Most of the attendees are what you would call "hardcore immortalists" so they were against a complete rebrand. What was promoted is something that has been tossed around here in the forums - that Imminst should change the name of the front page or create subsidiary websites but keep the forum and the government-registered organization named "Immortality Institute".

[Mind]

The only part of the voyage that turned out to be a miserable failure was collecting interviews of the people involved (whether presenters or just VIPs within the longevity movement). It once again taught me to have redundancy built into any plan. Wireless access was limited to the inside of the lecture hall. My laptop recording software was not recording audio. Grrr. Anyway, these type of problems could have been solved by having a cellular internet card or a video camera (I have neither). My sincerest apologies.

The good news is that there will be many interviews and the presentations themselves posted at at least a couple different websites and possibly several (including the MF website). Not sure on the time frame though.

[lunarsolarpower]

Thanks for the great coverage Mind! It was nice meeting you at the conference.

I just noticed slashdot posted a story about Cui's clinical trial. I'm pretty excited about using the immune system to defeat cancer. It seems so much more doable than WILT at this point in time.

[JMorgan]

Quite a few photos from the conference can be found on flickr.

Check out our little ImmInst gathering here: http://www.flickr.co...s/28196422@N05/

 ImmInst_and_Neal.jpg   1.34MB   25 downloads

Other conference photos (not by me) can be found here: http://www.flickr.co...57605900133948/

[eternaltraveler]

I like the one of me where I am profoundly eating

[caston]

One thing that has been mentioned a couple of times this morning is that stress significantly inhibits immune function. Happier=healthier, something that has been studied many times in the past.

What does it mean when someone has a highly stressful life (perhaps even post-traumatic stress related disorders) yet still manages to look younger than their age?

[lunarsolarpower]

What does it mean when someone has a highly stressful life (perhaps even post-traumatic stress related disorders) yet still manages to look younger than their age?

I believe that's called The Picture of Dorian Gray.

[Mark Hamalainen]

Here's one to get people started. I only had a cell phone, but I saw other members taking pictures...

Attached Files

•  DSC01648.jpg   173.04KB   4 downloads

[Ben]

This is a radio interview given by Bruce Ames on micronutrients and nutrition:

http://www.trumix.co...1-03a-forum.mp3

[Mind]

A laptop webcam recording of Aubrey's Friday evening talk.

[Mind]

A video blog of Friday afternoon before the press conference by Enric Teller.

In it you will see all the Methuselah Volunteers in their black t-shirts (doing a great job) and a few other notable faces; Aubrey, Tyler Emmerson, Jason Silva, Bruce Ames, John Schloendorn. I talked with Enric at the conference. He has a few other UABBA videos he will eventually post at his vblog site.

[Mind]

In Enric's video I noticed a link to French TV and the program "Envoye Special". I checked the station's website but did not see anything about UABBA (yet). I don't speak french so I had a hard time navigating the site. If anyone sees a France2 special on the UABBA conference, please let me know or post it here.

[Mind]

One interesting thing I found out while talking with Bruce Ames is that he and someone of his research assistants are creating a meal replacement-type bar with all of the 40 micronutrients. He claimed that several aging bio-markers improved within the people testing the bar out (people in his lab). He said it tastes good but they are not ready to market it as of yet. Anyway, I was excited to hear this since it is so hard to find a real healthy snack/protein/meal replacement bar.

[Mind]

Another video from Enric at techalley, Michael West announcing embryome.com

[Mind]

New video of Michael West answering a question that one audience member asked and to which I piled on. They were making stem cell therapy predictions. I brought up the fact that Geron has been around for 18 years and to this date they only have one product in phase II trials.

[Mind]

found this video of "The Struggle to keep our telomeres long" -Laura Briggs. Shot from a distance, low level audio.