This year's Fight Aging! matching fundraiser has a $125,000 fund provided by generous philanthropists, and we are seeking to raise a further $125,000 from the community to fund progress in longevity science. All charitable donations made before the end of 2015 will be matched dollar for dollar, with the funds going to the SENS Research Foundation to support their work on rejuvenation biotechnology. This includes programs aimed the safe removal of senescent cells and glucosepane cross-links, both of which are counted among the root causes of degenerative aging. I'm pleased to note that we're half way to the goal, with a month a half left to go: more than 390 donors have collectively given $67,000 in the last six weeks. There is another $58,000 left to go to hit the target, and if we manage this before the end of the year then we'll have collectively given a cool quarter of a million dollars this year to speed up the best approaches to human rejuvenation therapies.

With this in mind, remember that Giving Tuesday is coming up on December 1st. If you haven't yet donated - or know people who might be persuaded - then that will be a great time to jump in. Medical science doesn't emerge from nothing: it needs your support, and here is a chance for your donations to be matched by other funds as well. From the latest SENS Research Foundation newsletter:

SENS Research Foundation is getting ready to celebrate #GivingTuesday on December 1st. GivingTuesday is now a global event celebrated by supporters of various charities giving to their favorite causes. If you've been planning on contributing to the fight against age-related disease this year, GivingTuesday is a great opportunity to make a difference. So far, SENS Research Foundation has 3 matching grants set up for GivingTuesday. The first is our FightAging! Challenge which will match every dollar you give us up to $125,000. On GivingTuesday, the first $5,000 we raise will not be doubled or even tripled - it will be quadrupled thanks to the generosity of the Croeni Foundation and Aubrey de Grey. Help us turn $5000 into $20,000 and accelerate the fight against age-related diseases! Donate at http://www.sens.org/donate on December 1st.

If there are any in the audience interested in adding their own $5,000 matching grant to this Giving Tuesday initiative, then by all means contact us with the offer of help, and we'll connect you with the SENS Research Foundation to arrange the details.

It is thanks to philanthropy that SENS research is making progress. Just take a look at the SENS Research Foundation's 2015 annual report: seed funding the US startup Oisin Biotechnology to work on senescent cell clearance; transferring lysosomal aggregate clearance technology to Human Rejuvenation Technologies for development; the French company Gensight is now devoting significant funding to to clinical development of the mitochondrial repair technologies whose early stage research was supported under the SENS banner; progress towards the toolkit needed for glucosepane cross-link clearance was published in the prestigious journal Science. All of these initiatives were funded in part by everyday philanthropists just like you and I, alongside people like Peter Thiel, Jason Hope, and Aubrey de Grey.

The wheel is turning, and meaningful progress towards rejuvenation treatments is taking place. Our donations continue to move SENS research closer to realization, and closer to becoming the mainstream of aging research. The more that we can help to fund the demonstrations of effectiveness at every stage of early research through to early clinical translation, the sooner that therapies to treat and control aging will arrive.