The preliminary program already has over two dozen confirmed
speakers, all of them world leaders in their field. As for previous
conferences I have [co-]organised, the emphasis of this meeting is on
“applied biogerontology” — the design and implementation of
biomedical interventions that may, jointly, constitute a
comprehensive panel of rejuvenation therapies, sufficient to restore
middle-aged or older laboratory animals (and, in due course, humans)
to a youthful degree of physiological robustness. The list of
scientific sessions and confirmed speakers is as follows:
DNA damage, telomeres, cancer
Adam Arkin, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; Jan Vijg, Buck
Institute for Age Research; Jerry Shay, U. Texas Southwestern;
Claudia Gravekamp, Pacific Medical Center Research Institute; Zheng
Cui, Wake Forest University School of Medicine; Rita Effros, UCLA
The cell niche
Irina Conboy, U. California Berkeley; Judith Campisi, Lawrence
Berkeley National Laboratory and Buck Institute; Leanne Jones, Salk
Institute; Ken Muneoka, Tulane University; Kevin Healy, Stanford
University
Biotech is the next infotech (or at least the 2 worlds need to be merged) and it is good to detect the signs of the growing biotech interest on part of the general tech crowd. At the Web 2.0 summit (organised by and for the Silicon Valley tech-media establishment) Tim O’ Reilly asked Craig Just Sequenced Venter. I suggest everyone watching the video below. It was not a terrific dialogue though as we’ve seen 2 people with a very different background talking about Venter’s discipline. I loved to hear the words ‘SNPs’ or ‘mitochondria ‘coming from Venter’s mouth in front of the biotechnologically still illiterate IT and web technology elite (my assumption, not tested statistically).
Recently I wrote a meeting report on the SENS3 conference for a very prestigious science journal, but finally it did not go through the filters. I knew that the chance for publication is small as the journal rarely publish such meeting reports and as it was in many respects an unconventional science conference. The standards were really high and the genre itself is strictly restricted: no more than 900 words and only 1-2 conference topic could be covered focusing on new data. On the whole it was a really good science writing experience for me. I finally realized how challenging it is to introduce the concept of robust scientific life extension for the mainstream science audience although it is not impossible at all.
But if a man has an interactive blog with a quality readership even an officially unpublished text could be useful, so please read my draft in its final form and think about it. Links of the video versions of the referred presentations and references are included, a perpetual advantage of the web comparing to offline publication. I’d like to say thanks for the folks who helped me with the draft: Aubrey de Grey, Michael Rae, Mark Hamalainen from within the SENS camp, Matthew Oki O’ Connor and Chris Patil, fellow scientists-bloggers and first of all, Anna.
Subject scrapline: Biotechnology
Title: Translating ageing
Summary: A recent unconventional strategic conference on translational science in ageing related damages helps to put some puzzle pieces together.
Changes in the adult tissue stem cells or in the mitochondria are two main processes under constant investigation amongst researchers curious about the ins and outs of the ageing process. At the SENS3 conference in Cambridge scientists and laymen shared their results and ideas, respectively.＊
Despite its mixed population with a scientist majority, the conference resembled a mainstream life science conference due to its topic sessions focusing on the different types of lifelong, ageing accumulated damages. SENS decodes as Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence, which aims to suggest a panel of interventions on how to robustly extend the mean and maximum human life span and claims to identify the adequately exhaustive list of main age-related pathologies ranging from cell depletion to mitochondrial mutations. SENS is by definition a flexible enough umbrella term to include other coming life extension technologies and concepts under its brand. Also, it is an engineering project compiled by main organizer Aubrey de Grey, a computer scientist turned theoretical biologist with a grand mission and hypotheses yet to be experimentally tested. The presentations were mainly reviewing the progress in the related branches, with enough new data to keep the experts interested.
In order to slow the progress of aging and prevent age-related disease (which is not the same as figuring out a robust engineering plan for unlimited healthy life extension) biological measures (biomarkers) of aging or disease mechanisms are needed that anticipate clinical disease and are sensitive to functional organism aging.
The American Federation for Aging Research is the organizer of a one-day conference on October 2 in Manhattan focusing on current and future status of biomarkers as identifiers of rates of biological aging, predictors of longevity and predictors of susceptibility to disease.
Similarly to the Edmonton Aging Symposium which reportedly “was a WORLD FIRST! in being streamed live onto the internet” (Kevin Perrott) amongst conferences, a selection of the presentations of the SENS3 conference are now available at the personal website of Richard Schueler. Richard is a big mouthed, cowboy hat geek with a serious life extension commitment who orchestrated the Kurzweil distance video talk on his sony tx and logitech webcam at the conference.
Linda Powers is the managing director and co-founder of Toucan Capital Corp, a $120 million venture capital fund (SBIC) focused on seed and early-stage life science and advanced technology investments (the fund markets itself as the The Leading US Investor in Stem Cells and Regenerative Medicine). Out of here insights and facts presented on the SENS3 conference (I caught some of her slides with my iPhone, see below) I’d like to highlight the following ones:
- the anti-aging market today is approx. 42 billion dollars,
- the number of issued and published U.S. stem cell patents has been decreased for the first time since 2000 compared to the earlier year,
- viable business models in regenerative medicine are still missing,
- first-to-trial and -market is not always advantageous in regmed.
If you compare the Nature and the Science front pages (which is not the topic of the current post) you can notice a big difference: there are a lot of “web 2.0″ish fresh features on the Nature site while significantly fewer on the Science counterpart. Now Science came up with a new, less academic and more popculture driven (the name is telling) column, The Gonzo Scientist written and edited by John Bohannon, regular Science contributor. Bohannon writes and even audioslides (illustrations by Katrien Kolenberg) about his experience in IdeaCity.
IdeaCity is Canada’s premier geek summer camp in Toronto, and was modeled after the TED conferences. Now my synonym for the geek camp is SciFoo, but there is a big difference here: IdeaCity is free only for the 50 invited celeb speakers, while it is $3000 for the 3 days for every other visiting Idealists.
A supercentenarian is anyone with the chronological age of 110 years or older. Stephen Coles, M.D., Ph.D., co-founder of the Los Angeles Gerontology Research Group kindly sent me his slides of the presentation he held last week on SENS3 entitled the Secrets of the oldest old and he gave a permission to publish these slides here in the form of a slideshow. The readers can now gain now some scholarly insights on what it is to be a supercentenarian. I cut out the autopsy slides (1 week after death) showing the pretty healthy organs (brain, liver, spinal cord, heart…) of the recently died 106 yo centenarian but all slides can be viewed at the GRG homepage (click Resources). Long live the 75 validated supercentenarians and all the unvalidated ones!
Rutledge Ellis-Behnke from M.I.T. talked on “a nano hemostatic agent that immediately stops bleeding. Hemostasis is a major problem after trauma and during surgery; as much as 50% of surgical time can be spent packing wounds to reduce or control bleeding and there are few effective methods to stop it without causing secondary damage. We show that hemostasis can be achieved in less than 15 seconds, in multiple tissues as well as a variety of different wounds, using a self-assembling peptide, demonstrating the first time that nanotechnology has been used to stop bleeding in a surgical setting for animal models that does not rely on heat, pressure, platelet activation, adhesion, or desiccation to stop bleeding.” The video he showed us was pretty convincing.
Michael Rose had a nice presentation (I’ll cover it in my next post) on SENS3, here is just one slide from that, photo made with iPhone from the first row:
Well, I’ve lost the first part of this MacBook made iSight video as I used the iMovie file’s backup version on my Windows partition but out of this segment of the talk you can form some idea on what was going on during Kurzweil’s talk. The distance talk was orchestrated from a little Sony laptop by Richard Schueler. As Kurzweil’s friend Terry Grossman (they together wrote the book the Fantastic Voyage) informed me, Ray does not really like to leave the United States. Anyway, his talk was not typical, the conference was basically a biology-biotechnology conference with an amazingly broad range of the topics, covered.
Recently I wrote a meeting report on the 
