The latest newsletter from the SENS Research Foundation turned up in my in-box today, and includes some interesting thoughts on advocacy. The SENS Research Foundation remains one of the best and most effective of organizations dedicated to bringing about the creation of therapies capable of greatly extending the healthy human life span - in fact, therapies capable in principle of rejuvenation, turning back the clock by repairing the forms of cell and tissue damage that cause aging. Other organizations, like Calico, are investing vastly more money, but since they aren't funding the right sort of scientific programs, they may as well not exist. Their only value lies in the fact that they may, later, choose to adopt approaches based on repair of cell and tissue damage that SENS-funded and SENS-encouraged research groups demonstrate to be effective, such as senescent cell clearance.

It is frustrating to see such potential sitting right at the sideline, flirting with doing something useful yet not crossing that line, but that is sadly the way things work in longevity science. The overwhelming majority of funding and effort is devoted to metabolic tinkering - such as work on calorie restriction mimetics - that cannot possibly produce meaningful gains in human life span, while programs that can in principle produce indefinite healthy life spans must struggle to gain even a small amount of funding.

The SENS approach of damage repair to reverse aging rather than metabolic manipulation to slow aging is nonetheless slowly gaining ground in this challenge for support and adoption. This is illustrated by, among other things, the fact that there is now more than one venture funded company working on aspects of SENS rejuvenation biotechnology. Nonetheless, there is still a long way to go towards the goal of the mass adoption of SENS research and development goals by a large swathe of the research community, and the goal of the same public support for the defeat of aging as there is for the defeat of cancer. Advocacy for this cause remains very important and very much needed.

SENS Research Foundation Newsletter, February 22, 2016