May has been a great month for LEAF; there’s been a lot of exciting news, such as our president’s participation in the XPRIZE Foundation’s most recent meeting, Steve Hill making it among the top 100 journalists covering aging research, and last but not least, the launch of Lifespan.io’s brand-new, life extension-focused show, LifeXtenShow!

LEAF News

Team and activities

Lifespan.io launches LifeXtenShow: If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video—considering an average length of 10 minutes at 30 frames per second—is worth nearly 20,000 words, and that’s one of the reasons why we launched our own YouTube show entirely focused on life extension: LifeXtenShow, or X10 for short. Co-hosted by Giuliano Didio and Nicola Bagalà, X10 is the first show of its kind, aiming to bring life extension closer to the wider public in an entertaining way. Presently on a weekly schedule, X10 has aired two episodes thus far; you can see the promo episode below. If you enjoy the show, subscribe to our YouTube channel for more!







Ending Age-Related Diseases Conference: May Update: More great speakers have been announced as having confirmed their participation in our upcoming conference in New York City: Professor George Church, a leading Harvard geneticist, Deputy Director of the Division of Aging Biology at the National Institute on Aging; Dr. Ronald Kohanski, SENS Research Foundation Group Lead for the MitoSENS program; Dr. Amutha Boominathan; Dr. Pamela Maher from the famous Salk Institute in La Jolla; Michael West from AgeX Therapeutics; and Sree Kant, head of Business Development at Life Biosciences, will all join us for two exciting days in the heart of New York City. Will you be there, too? You can book your tickets here, but act quick! The ticket price will soon raise to $500.

Developing a Biotechnology Startup in the Rejuvenation Field Workshop: Rejuvenation startups need all the help they can get in order to face all the challenges and bottlenecks that might prevent them from successfully taking off; we’re well aware of this necessity, which is why we’ve recently announced our collaboration with Ichor Therapeutics to organize a special workshop aimed at addressing this need. The workshop, led by Ichor’s CEO Dr. Kelsey Moody, will focus on all the key points that a young company in the field of rejuvenation has to consider; the event will take place one day before our NYC conference, on July 10, at the Cooper Union from noon to 3:30 PM. The number of participants is limited, so make sure to secure your ticket! If you’re also attending our conference, the workshop is 40% off for you. All proceeds are generously donated by Ichor Therapeutics to LEAF with the aim of supporting our education and advocacy activities.

Success at the XPRIZE Foundation: Our president, Keith Comito, participated in the recent meeting hosted by the XPRIZE foundation, where the brightest and most audacious visionaries met to brainstorm ways to better boost the development of breakthroughs in the field of healthy longevity. Keith’s proposal for a way to incentivize progress in the field, a prize for demonstrable, significant physiological remediation of dementia by 2030, made it to the final round together with Aubrey de Grey’s proposal of a prize for limited yet specifically measured human rejuvenation by 2032.







New top-100 journalists report published by Aging Analytics: The Aging Analytics Agency, the world’s premier provider of industry analytics on the topics of longevity, precision preventive medicine, and the economics of aging, has recently published an updated list of the top 100 journalists covering these topics, and the LEAF team as a whole was delighted to see that our own Steve Hill figures on the list too. It’s great that Steve’s hard work over these years has earned him such an important recognition, and it makes us proud to have him on board!

Longevity and Health roundtable: Elena Milova was invited to moderate the Longevity and Health at the publishing house MR-Press in Moscow on May 28. The participants discussed the importance of informing people about various evidence-based means of extending healthy life to increase life expectancy in Russia, and they also touched upon the potential of geroscience in creating medical interventions that address the root causes of aging.

Advocacy on LEAF

The Future of Pensions: Sometimes, people think that extending life and the ability to pay pensions are terribly at odds, but a closer look reveals that, in fact, healthy life extension may be the best way to prevent a possible pension crisis.







Research Roundup

The Transcription Factor c-Myb Worsens Atherosclerosis: c-Myb, a transcription factor essential for hematopoiesis, has been found to also have detrimental effects that worsen atherosclerosis.

A Poor Diet May Lead to Dysbiosis and Age-Related Diseases: A low-fiber, energy-dense diet may lead to microbial imbalance in the gut, which, in turn, may speed up inflammaging, the chronic, age-related inflammation that contributes to the development and progression of age-related diseases.

Using Exosomes to Regenerate the Thymus: Sitting behind your collar bone, the thymus is a tiny organ with a big role: producing fresh T cells that will join the ranks of your adaptive immune system. Unfortunately, aging shrinks the thyme, but Hungarian researchers managed to regenerate murine thymi using exosomes.

Senescent Cells and Cataract Development: New research draws a connection between senescent cells and the development of eye-clouding cataracts.







Antibiotics and Vitamin C Halt Cancer Growth: Scientists from the Biomedical Research Centre in the United Kingdom have shown that a combination of two antibiotics and Vitamin C can kill off breast cancer stem cells in vitro by damaging their mitochondria.

Anti-Aging Gene Therapy for Dogs Coming This Fall: The company Rejuvenate Bio, led by Harvard Professor George Church, is taking an anti-aging gene therapy aimed at preventing mitral valve disease in dogs into clinical trials in the autumn of 2019.

Samumed Begins Phase 3 Trial for Knee Osteoarthritis: Samumed, a company based in San Diego, is taking its candidate drug lorecivivint into Phase 3 clinical trials. The drug is an inhibitor of the Wnt pathway and, while not being a rejuvenation treatment, is meant to ease the symptoms of knee osteoarthritis, a condition for which there are currently no approved treatments.

Bone Marrow Transplants Increase Healthy Lifespan in Mice: Researchers successfully extended the maximum lifespan of mice by 28% by performing bone marrow stem cell transplants. This increase is especially significant as the transplant was performed when the mice had already reached advanced ages.

A New Database for Senescent Cells: The Buck Institute for Research on Aging has recently published an open-access publication that lays the foundations for completely categorizing the senescence-associated secretory phenotypes (SASP) of the many types of senescent cells.







Reversal of Two Advanced Glycation End Products Achieved: Spiegel Lab researchers at Yale managed to identify an enzyme family that is capable of cleaving two types of advanced glycation end products that contribute to the development of age-related conditions.

LATE: A Disease That Mimics Alzheimer’s Disease: A new and mostly unknown type of dementia, limbic-predominant age-related TDP-43 encephalopathy, presents similar traits as Alzheimer’s disease and might get in the way of trials for drugs that target AD.

News Nuggets

The Processes and Impact of Aging: In this brief overview, our young volunteer Nina Khera covers some of the hallmarks of aging and their impact on our health as well as, on a grander scale, humanity as a whole.







Is Comprehensive Damage Repair Feasible?: During the Undoing Aging 2019 conference, Drs. Vadim Gladyshev and Aubrey de Grey debated the feasibility of the damage repair approach proposed by SENS Research Foundation. In this article, you’ll find the recording of the debate, recently published by the conference organizers, as well as Steve Hill’s summary of three possible approach categories to treat aging.

Ana Maria Cuervo, M.D., Ph.D., Elected to the National Academy of Sciences: Professor Ana Maria Cuervo, Co-director of the Institute for Aging Studies at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and renowned expert on autophagy, has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

Repair Biotechnologies Raises a $2.15M Seed Round: As announced in the company’s press release, the rejuvenation startup Repair Biotechnologies has raised $2.15 million in seed venture funding for its pipeline of drugs for thymic regeneration, cancer, and atherosclerosis. Further commentary by the company’s co-founder, Reason, can be found here.

UNITY Biotechnology, Inc. Reports First Quarter 2019 Financial Results: San Francisco-based biotechnology company UNITY reported its financial results for the first quarter of 2019 while announcing that it is still on track to report the initial study results for its candidate senolytic drug UBX0101 against knee osteoarthritis during the second quarter of this year.

Breaking the Vascularity Barrier: Methuselah Foundation issued a brief report on microvascularization research conducted by Volumetric Biotechnologies, a startup supported by the Foundation itself.







Human lifespan could soon pass 100 years thanks to medical tech, says BofA: According to Bank of America analysts, the longevity industry will soon be one of the biggest on the globe and worth $600 billion by 2025.

Jim Mellon Interviewed by the German Party for Health Research: Members of the GPHR attended the recent Undoing Aging 2019 conference, where they had a chance to interview well-known investor Jim Mellon, who is heavily involved in the business of healthy life extension.

Women Are Having Kids Later. Longevity Scientists to the Rescue? The Buck Institute for Research on Aging has started a new research center focused exclusively on female reproductive aging in order to figure out why menopause exists and what we can do to safely extend women’s fertility.

“Podemos frenar el envejecimiento, pero la inmortalidad es irreal”: “We can stop aging, but immortality is unreal”) In an interview with the Spanish newspaper El Pais, renowned CNIO Director María Blasco discusses the importance of fighting aging and stresses that there’s a difference between life extension and immortality.

Technology On The Horizon For Aging Research: The Buck Institute for Research on Aging is celebrating 30 years of aging research, and for the occasion, it has launched a series of online conversations with its brightest minds. You can watch the conversation with Professor Judith Campisi here.







The German Party for Health Research Enters Elections: A German party with a focus on aging-related medical research has recently run for the European elections. Despite the party not winning a seat in the European Parliament, it has collected over 71,000 votes (out of 200,000 needed to have a seat), which makes it a strong enough player to win next time.

Coming up next month

3rd Forum of Social Innovations in Moscow (website in Russian): At this forum, taking place on June 19-21, several sessions and lectures will be focused on aging and longevity. Among the speakers will be Dr. Aubrey de Grey from SENS Research Foundation and Dan Buettner, National Geographic Fellow and Explorer and the researcher of Blue Zones.

We will never thank our readers and supporters enough for all they do for us—even just reading and sharing our content helps our cause and our organization—and, of course, a very special thank you goes to the Lifespan Heroes, the people without whose generous donations we’d have a real hard time carrying on our activities. If you wish to join them, you can do so here, and get access to a number of cool perks, too!





