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Tuning the Immune System to Destroy Cancer

October 30, 2009 on 5:52 pm | In Medicine, Biotech, Research | Comments Off Our immune systems can destroy cancer - but the immune system grows less effective with age, and sometimes it fails in this task. That "sometimes" is enough to kill a quarter of humanity, the fraction of us who die from cancer. Researchers are closing in on the mechanisms that separate success from failure, however, and in the years ahead will be able to tune our immune systems to destroy cancer nearly 100% of the time: "A specific type of T helper cell awakens the immune system to the stealthy threat of cancer and triggers an attack of killer T cells custom-made to destroy the tumors ... The role of Th17, one of only four known types of T helper cell, opens a possible avenue for overcoming cancer's ability to suppress or hide from the body's immune system ... While there is much work to be done, these preclinical findings imply the possibility of taking a patient's Th17 cells, expanding them in the lab, and then re-infusing them as treatment ... Development of a vaccine to stimulate Th17 cells would be another possible application."

View the Article Under Discussion: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091029125534.htm
Read More Longevity Meme Commentary: http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/

The Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging

October 30, 2009 on 3:57 pm | In Medicine, Biotech, Research | Comments Off The Baltimore Longitudinal Study on Aging has been running since 1958, but this Canadian study is just getting started - a much larger project planned to run for decades: "Canadians are living longer, and older persons are making up a larger share of the population (14% in 2006, projected to rise to 20% by 2021). The Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging (CLSA) is a national longitudinal study of adult development and aging that will recruit 50,000 Canadians aged 45 to 85 years of age and follow them for at least 20 years. All participants will provide a common set of information concerning many aspects of health and aging, and 30,000 will undergo an additional in-depth examination coupled with the donation of biological specimens (blood and urine). The CLSA will become a rich data source for the study of the complex interrelationship among the biological, physical, psychosocial, and societal factors that affect healthy aging." I suspect that the most important role for these studies in the future will be to more rapidly evaluate the effectiveness of specific longevity therapies as they arrive in the clinic.

View the Article Under Discussion: http://www.clsa-elcv.ca
Read More Longevity Meme Commentary: http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/

TEDMED Day 2 Coverage

October 29, 2009 on 5:04 pm | In Healthy Life Extension Community | Comments Off From MedGadget: "Also before lunch was the science of aging pair up with Aubrey de Grey, CSO of the SENS Foundation, and David Sinclair, professor at Harvard Medical School. If you've not heard of these gentlemen before, both view aging as a disease but both are approaching aging in very different ways. Aubrey spoke first and has a more futuristic view of aging. His mantra is that aging is metabolism caused cellular damage that leads to organism pathology, and the human body, just like cars, can be made to run longer with adequate maintenance and repair. He views age related problems as belonging to seven types and in order to tackle aging, all seven cellular and molecular problems need to be cured. Aubrey also coined the idea of a Longevity Escape Velocity (LEV), which is the point of life span where progress in aging science is occurring faster than the degradation of the body itself. He believes that if someone is able to live to 150 years old, then by that point the progress in the ability to keep them alive will be faster than their rate of death, thus they will live into their 1000s. Still focused on the same target, but shooting from a different angle was David Sinclair, who focuses his research on a set of proteins called sirtuins."

View the Article Under Discussion: http://www.medgadget.com/archives/2009/10/tedmed_2009_day_2.html
Read More Longevity Meme Commentary: http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/

Prospects for Brain Regenerative Medicine

October 29, 2009 on 4:48 pm | In Medicine, Biotech, Research | Comments Off Will it be possible to use patient-derived cell transplants to heal the brain in much the same way as can be done with other organs? From EurekAlert!: researchers have "found that using an animal's own brain cells (autologous transplant) to replace degenerated neurons in select brain areas of donor primates with simulated but asymptomatic Parkinson's disease and previously in a motor cortex lesion model, provides a degree of brain protection and may be useful in repairing brain lesions and restoring function. ... We aimed at determining whether autografted cells derived from cortical gray matter, cultured for one month and re-implanted in the caudate nucleus of dopamine depleted primates, effectively survived and migrated. The autologous, re-implanted cells survived at an impressively high rate of 50 percent for four months post-implantation ... Researchers found that the cultured cells migrated, re-implanted into the right caudate nucleus, and migrated through the corpus callosum to the contralateral striatum. Most of the cells were found in the most dopamine depleted region of the caudate nucleus. This study replicated in primates the success the research team had previously reported using laboratory mice."

View the Article Under Discussion: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-10/ctco-rfb102809.php
Read More Longevity Meme Commentary: http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/

TEDMED Day 1 Coverage

October 28, 2009 on 5:32 pm | In Healthy Life Extension Community | Comments Off From MedGadget: "we heard from a series of speakers involved with regenerative medicine. Daniel Kraft (flashback: MarrowMiner) spoke of the role of stem cells in medicine and how he discovered a better way to harvest them from the pelvis. Damien Bates, the chief medical officer of Organogenesis, the company behind biologic wound healing film Apligraf, passed around a sample of their wound healing tissue for people to feel as well as talked about how the skin heals and how it can be aided by regenerative biology. Anthony Atala, from the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, talked about the various methods his research center is using to grow specific tissues and organs. He described much of the tissue creation process as sort of building the layers of a cake, with each tissue type placed one on top of the other. For linearly organized organs, such as arteries, this isn't so much of a problem, because you can just grow layers upon layers of tissues. However, for the more complicated, highly solid organs with lots of blood vessels, this methodology breaks down, and the scientists have to either use some sort of pre-made matrix or need to harvest tissues from other sources and de-cellularize them, leaving behind only the collagen scaffold that can be populated by cells."

View the Article Under Discussion: http://www.medgadget.com/archives/2009/10/tedmed_2009_day_1.html
Read More Longevity Meme Commentary: http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/