Aubrey de Gray has done much to promote the idea that aging and death are solvable problems – the damage done over time by metabolic processes can be undone. It is possible that the first 1,000-year-old humans have already been born.
As the founder of the Methuselah Foundation and the SENS Foundation, he convinced billionaires that anti-aging research could give them the only thing they lacked: time and youth. Through decades of patiently and perpetually optimistic media appearances, he has transformed the public consciousness into the idea that aging and death need not be viewed as inevitable, but rather as a series of problems in the process of being resolved. I have tried to change it.
He was long considered a bombastic nuisance by many aging researchers, but was suspended and fired from the SENS Foundation in 2021 after allegations of harassment by two young longevity founders. It is also a compromised billboard for this movement in 2023. De Gray told her it was her responsibility to sleep with wealthy potential donors and bring money to her door.
The Foundation issued a statement in 2022, stating that while De Gray’s behavior “demonstrated a case of poor judgment and cross-border behavior, Dr. de Gray is not a sexual predator,” citing the primary He hinted that the problem was more than he wasn’t participating in a substance abuse program mandated by his Fitness for Duty contract. De Gray claimed that this was a hatchet job, saying SENS was poorly run, moved too slowly, and did not respect the intentions of donors in its decision-making.
Late last year he launched a new foundation. This time it’s the Longevity Escape Velocity (LEV) Foundation, which is entirely under his control. The name derives from de Gray’s belief that if science can outrun death, if he can solve it one problem at a time, it will eventually reach “escape velocity”, at least not by natural causes. is derived from .
And this month, the LEV Foundation will launch its first research program aimed at “robust mouse rejuvenation.”
The program will take four promising anti-aging treatments and apply them in various combinations to a group of middle-aged (18-month-old) mice as a preliminary step to human trials. These mice are typically expected to have an average lifespan of 30 months, with an expected remaining lifespan of approximately 12 months. The LEV team hopes to extend both the life expectancy and life expectancy of these mice by at least 12 months.
Why start with a middle-aged mouse? Also, the time to the goal is shortened.
The four interventions to try are: First, rapamycin, an immunosuppressive drug that has been used to prevent organ rejection, suppresses aging-associated intestinal biomarkers in mice, reduces age-related cognitive decline in mice, It has also been shown to extend the life of both fruit files and worms as part of a combination therapy.
The second is a newly developed drug known to target and eliminate aging “zombie” cells (cells that have stopped dividing but refuse to die) in the mouse brain. It is a “combined” type of Navitoclax. These zombie cells are important targets for longevity and dementia researchers. According to de Gray, the new conjugated formulations should help more precisely target the senolytic effects of navitoclax.
The third is mTERT, or mouse telomerase reverse transcriptase. It is a gene therapy that targets telomeres, protective repetitive ‘junk’ DNA caps at the end of each leg of the chromosome. We lose a little bit of telomeres each time a cell divides, and eventually after about 50 divisions the cell stops dividing. LEV plans to trial an intranasal delivery method that uses cytomegalovirus to introduce therapeutics into the body. A small study published in his PNAS last May found that mTERT significantly extended the median lifespan of mice by as much as 41.4%.
And finally there is hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT), which transplants stem cells into the bone marrow to produce blood and immune cells. It has been used as a treatment for various cancers, as a means of “rebooting the immune system” to stave off early stages of MS and treating Crohn’s disease, and as a highly effective treatment for HIV. rice field.
De Gray told Lifespan that the LEV team has not waited for the results of the first 1,000 mouse experiment to start the next experiment and has no intention of starting the next experiment.
“People donate to Aubrey de Gray not because they want the work they’re supporting to be cowardly,” he says. Yes, our number one priority is to design the next plan as soon as this one launches, raising about $3 million each round…the next round is once a year That’s all I’m hoping to be able to do, probably every 9 months, and we’ve taken in a ton of information from the community and the literature, and already have a good list of things we’d like to try in the next round .”
The overall purpose of this project is two-fold. To identify longevity treatments that work in humans, and produce spectacular results that lead to longevity research on Oprah Winfrey’s shows. Tax remains the same.
“You have to convince people that this is worth doing,” says de Gray. “And many are staunch advocates of aging. They believe nothing should or can be done about aging.”
De Gray, who turns 60 this year, needs to hear the clock tick as much as he invests large sums of cash in the possibility that his donors can hoard their earthly riches a little longer. There is. This energetic public figure may not have reached the speed needed to escape death, but the blossoming field of longevity research makes it seem like the dream of overtaking the Grim Reaper has never come close. .
Source: LEV Foundation by Lifespan
