214 replies to this topic

[Inkstersco]

lunarsolarpower, on Sep 11 2009, 12:30 AM, said:

Any idea when things will get started? Actually, more specifically, any idea when we'll start getting updates on the process? Even a few words posted once a week would be great for helping us feel like we're "in the loop" on what's happening.

Just spoke to Nason last week.  He's starting nowish. I don't think there's any midway newsfeed lined up on that particular project, but you can check the upcoming SENS website. Nason has an account at ImmInst so you can PM him directly(I assume).


Inkstersco
SENS Foundation

[Mind]

Lunar:

I talked to Nason at SENS4. He might have already started the research except for the fact that SENSF just moved their research center to Sunnyvale and Nason has to move his family there. He told me he would be getting started right around October 1st. I also spoke with SENSF personnel and Nason about regular updates. They are all for it. A lot of ideas are rolling around in my head about short video updates. Twitter feeds. What-not. We would ideally like to create a new forum or web page specifically for this purpose. We have about 2 weeks to work on it. Lunar, I know you have an artistic side, perhaps you can lend a hand or at least comment here in the to-do list.

[orlando]

I've not read every post on this topic, and perhaps it was explained somewhere, but how is this therapy meant to work in practice? Would you have to have every inch of your body zapped with a laser? And how would it get to internal parts? I have had some body hair removed with laser treatment before and that was lengthy and pretty uncomfortable. Just curious as to the practicality

[orlando]

orlando, on Oct 4 2009, 12:45 AM, said:

I've not read every post on this topic, and perhaps it was explained somewhere, but how is this therapy meant to work in practice? Would you have to have every inch of your body zapped with a laser? And how would it get to internal parts? I have had some body hair removed with laser treatment before and that was lengthy and pretty uncomfortable. Just curious as to the practicality

So.. does no one know how this is supposed to translate from zapping some cells in a petri dish to treating a human?

[kismet]

Right off the bat I'd guess: it doesn't, it's a proof of concept which might be limited to (mostly) external use - that would be an incredible advancement in and of itself. I assume you wouldn't have a problem with getting that "lengthy" and "unpleasant" treatment once every 20 years, would you?

[Mind]

According to Nason (if my memory serves me right, don't have time right now to listen to the interview)  the depth to which the laser can penetrate is 3 cm (might be 3mm). If the laser treatment is safe (lasers are already approved for many human treatments), and if it works, the a whole body removal of lipofuscin to a depth of 3 cm (or even 3mm), would be pretty dramatic. Lot of "ifs" here. I am unsure if it would be painful because the assumption here is that the laser pulse is selectively absorbed by lipofuscin because it is the most dense component of our cells. Other structures are mostly untouched.

[orlando]

kismet, on Oct 4 2009, 03:42 PM, said:

Right off the bat I'd guess: it doesn't, it's a proof of concept which might be limited to (mostly) external use - that would be an incredible advancement in and of itself. I assume you wouldn't have a problem with getting that "lengthy" and "unpleasant" treatment once every 20 years, would you?

No, OK, so from what you and Mind said it seems it would involve a laser treatment over the whole skin. OK, just curious. And obviously we are talking some special kind of laser calibrated for this particular task. However if it only affects cells 3mm deep that leaves a lot of other cells in the body with this kind of intracellular-cellular junk not treated it seems. But it must be better than nothing

[orlando]

I am sure it is worthwhile research, but I was just listening to some of the interview, and I noticed how he was talking about the older worms being badly danaged by the laser, which he saw as something good, because a reaction was happenning... - obviously it is going to be important to see if it is possible only to affect the lipofuscin, not destroy cells generally! Also at one point he also mentioned how melanin might be affected too - I know that, eg. laser hair removal is not recommended for balck people as the melanin in their skin absorbs too much heat.

Ah, I am still listening - and it is being said maybe the idea would be to use this procedure on younger organisms which have not accumulated much yet, so as to avoid it building up.

PS, yes, he said by using certain parts of the light spectrum you could get down to about 2 - 3cm deep, but at that depth it is only 10% power

It would be interesting to know more about what this substances does as well - in layman's terms we are told it causes age spots in skin, but presumably it causes a lot of other problems as well (the interview mentioned in passing about involvement in macular degeneration and Alzeimer's  I think)

Edited by orlando, 04 October 2009 - 04:58 PM.

[brokenportal]

orlando, on Oct 4 2009, 11:45 AM, said:

PS, yes, he said by using certain parts of the light spectrum you could get down to about 2 - 3cm deep, but at that depth it is only 10% power

I wonder if this is successful if the scenerio might become that we have to open up to the organs 1 by 1 and remove the lipofuscin from them and then put them back in to place. I wonder how the center of say, the leg muscles could be gotten too, and of course, especially the brain.

[Mind]

And let us not get ahead of ourselves here. This is HIGHLY speculative research. However, even if there is no safe way to make this treatment available to humans we are likely to learn some critical new information about how lipofuscin breaks down and how our cells deal might deal with it.

[eternaltraveler]

brokenportal, on Oct 4 2009, 03:19 PM, said:

orlando, on Oct 4 2009, 11:45 AM, said:

PS, yes, he said by using certain parts of the light spectrum you could get down to about 2 - 3cm deep, but at that depth it is only 10% power

I wonder if this is successful if the scenerio might become that we have to open up to the organs 1 by 1 and remove the lipofuscin from them and then put them back in to place. I wonder how the center of say, the leg muscles could be gotten too, and of course, especially the brain.

we can replace everything except the brain (and hopefully also the brain eventually )

Edited by eternaltraveler, 04 October 2009 - 07:31 PM.

[lunarsolarpower]

eternaltraveler, on Oct 4 2009, 08:30 PM, said:

we can replace everything except the brain (and hopefully also the brain eventually )

I suspect neural plasticity will someday allow piecewise replacement of the brain - a slice at a time.

[orlando]

Mind, on Oct 4 2009, 09:29 PM, said:

And let us not get ahead of ourselves here. This is HIGHLY speculative research. However, even if there is no safe way to make this treatment available to humans we are likely to learn some critical new information about how lipofuscin breaks down and how our cells deal might deal with it.

Sure, I understand that. At any rate it should add to our knowledge of what can be done about one aspect of aging, as you say, whether or not it leads directly to a specific therapy using lasers on people. The "war on aging" is only going to be won bit by bit, I guess, and it all helps

[Nason]

This is just a brief update to let everyone know where I am at on the project.  I am currently busy constructing a new laser optics setup at our new Sunnyvale, CA lab.  My goal is to have a worm experiment underway by the end of next week.

Nason

[Elus]

Quote

Right off the bat I'd guess: it doesn't, it's a proof of concept which might be limited to (mostly) external use - that would be an incredible advancement in and of itself. I assume you wouldn't have a problem with getting that "lengthy" and "unpleasant" treatment once every 20 years, would you?

Allow me to address this question with a little bit of creative conjecture. A nanolaser could potential be used to generate laser beams at the nanoscale level, allowing us to perform laser abalation of lipofuscin therapies throughout the entire body using NEMS (Nano-electro-mechanical-systems or nanobots). Here is an interesting article of a nanolaser that has already been developed:

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Nanoscale laser promises faster communications

Tempe, Arizona – The creation of the world's thinnest semiconductor laser has opened up the possibility of significant improvements in computing performance.

Smaller lasers can be more effectively integrated with small electronics components, with applications in computing and medical imaging.

The size of lasers in any one dimension has been thought to be limited to one-half of the wavelength involved. Current theory says you can't make a laser smaller than this diffraction limit – smaller than 250 nanometers for a semiconductor laser for communications devices.

But researchers at Arizona State University and the Technical University of Eindhoven in the Netherlands are showing there are ways around this supposed limit. One is to use a combination of semiconductors and metals such as gold and silver.

"It turns out that the electrons excited in metals can help you confine a light in a laser to sizes smaller than that required by the diffraction limit," ASU team leader Cun-Zheng Ning explains. "Eventually, we were able to make a laser as thin as about one quarter of the wavelength or smaller."

Ning and colleagues have achieved this by using a "metal-semiconductor-metal sandwich structure," in which the semiconductor is as thin as 80 nanometers and is sandwiched between 20-nanometer dielectric layers before putting metal layers on each side.

They have demonstrated that such a semiconductor/dielectric layer can actually emit laser light – a laser with the smallest thickness of any ever produced. So far, though, it's worked only at low temperature, and the next step is to achieve the same laser light emission at room temperature.

"This is the first time that anyone has shown that this limit to the size of nanolasers can be broken," Ning says. "Beating this limit is significant. It opens up diverse possibilities for improving integrated communications devices, single molecule detection and medical imaging."

Nanoscale lasers can also be integrated with other biomedical diagnostic tools, making them work faster and more efficiently, he says.

"Nanolasers can be used for many applications, but the most exciting possibilities are for communications on a central processing unit(CPU) of a computer chip," Ning says.

The teams' findings are reported in Optics Express.

Link to article: Here
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By the way, having HTML enabled is great. Can everyone see my sweet marquee html text effect ?

Edited by Elusefelier, 14 October 2009 - 02:13 AM.

[Ben Simon]

orlando, on Oct 4 2009, 11:45 AM, said:

It would be interesting to know more about what this substances does as well - in layman's terms we are told it causes age spots in skin, but presumably it causes a lot of other problems as well (the interview mentioned in passing about involvement in macular degeneration and Alzeimer's  I think)

This is what I want to know too.

[lunarsolarpower]

Nason, on Oct 14 2009, 01:05 AM, said:

This is just a brief update to let everyone know where I am at on the project.  I am currently busy constructing a new laser optics setup at our new Sunnyvale, CA lab.  My goal is to have a worm experiment underway by the end of next week.

Nason

Thanks for the update. It would be cool to see some pictures of it once Mind gets the blog up and you have things arranged.

[Mind]

Created a new splash page for updates on the research which is starting soon.

http://www.imminst.o...ablation-update

Any comments, suggestions. Nason is planning periodic blog updates. I will work with him to organize and publicize the updates. Right now he is planning on posting them on his homepage, perhaps we can post excerpts in the forum, on the splash page, or somewhere around here.

[Florin Clapa]

It'd be nice if the thumbnail pics were clickable.

[Mind]

Florin Clapa, on Oct 20 2009, 04:36 PM, said:

It'd be nice if the thumbnail pics were clickable.

Done.

[Mind]

Nason has created a blog for the research.

I will try to incorporate some of the blog highlights in the splash page, in order to keep all the important info in one place. I think this is important especially for new people coming to the Institute and reading about this research.

[Mind]

In the blog, Nason posted a nice little video about the optics set-up in the lab. He is just about ready to start the life extension tests on the worms.

[Mind]

Quote

(Nason) November 14th: I've officially begun experiment number 1.  One group of worms is getting a single dose of my pulse train, and another group is getting 3 exposures.  This will be a full lifespan experiment comparing longevity of treated groups to sham-treated controls.

Laser Ablation Update.

Time to start a poll.

[Mind]

Poll to estimate the lifespan extension or reduction of the first worms treated.

[royanderson]

bio123, on Jun 27 2009, 09:11 PM, said:

This sounds quite promising, so why is only one guy working on it?

I hope to help out with the laser ablation approach. I'm currently working on a physics degree. I'd like to do some experiments with lasers and lipofuscin, in order to develop a comprehensive quantitative model of the physics involved. Then we could predict the optimum parameters and, hopefully, confirm that prediction in the lab. I think this would get things going more quickly.

[AgeVivo]

Mind, on Oct 23 2009, 04:10 PM, said:

Nason has created a blog for the research.

I will try to incorporate some of the blog highlights in the splash page, in order to keep all the important info in one place. I think this is important especially for new people coming to the Institute and reading about this research.

You could now add his latest results from January, 5th 2010.
http://www.nasonscho...h/docs/exp1.pdf

Would Nason need to be in contact with some researcher already working with C elegans, in order to solve the "bad plate" issues?

[s123]

I just watched the movie from dr. Furber's lecture at SENS4 and he proposed the idea of using lasers to destroy protein cross-links.

[Florin Clapa]

Imminst's Laser Research Grant and Laser Ablation Update page are no longer accessible. Both pages display an "Access Denied" message. Why are these pages no longer accessible?

[Mind]

Sorry for not mentioning this earlier. The pages are not active right now because, due to unforeseen events the research had to be temporarily paused. I'll post more soon.

[werry111]

Mind, on Jun 26 2009, 05:06 PM, said:

In case you have not yet heard or read, the Immortality Institute is providing a matching grant for research into laser ablation of lipofuscin.

Read all about it here: http://www.imminst.o...-research-grant]

Listen to Nason Schooler describe the proposed research here (2008), or here (2009)

I am particularly interested to see the results of the worm lifespan studies to confirm whether or not lipofuscin is one of the key pieces of cellular junk affecting the aging process.

The funding drive will continue through August 17th. Please consider saving up a couple dollars to donate to this research project. Donate here:

Use this forum for discussion and/or questions about the proposed research or matching fund.

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