Healthy Life Extension

Finding Genes in Milliseconds Instead of Years

posted on April 13, 2010

Pop quiz!

What is your key to age-reversal in your lifetime?

If you answered the Law of Accelerating Returns, you get a gold star.

If you’re lost, here’s the answer.

Biotech is rapidly merging with infotech. That means, computers are driving research and are obsoleting trial and error methods of the past.

And computational power doubles every year. That means our research tools will be over 1,000 more powerful in ten years and 1,000,000,000 (that’s a billion) times more powerful in 25 years. Imagine.

But what happened between yesterday and today? Christopher Vaughn gives you a peek in a recent article in TreeHugger.com, a Discovery website. Here are some excerpts:

“Like a magician who says, “Pick a card, any card,” Stanford University computer scientist Debashis Sahoo, PhD, seemed to be offering some kind of trick when he asked researchers at the Stanford Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine to pick any two genes already known to be involved in stem cell development. Finding such genes can take years and hundreds of thousands of dollars, but Sahoo was promising the skeptical stem cell scientists that, in a fraction of a second and for practically zero cost, he could find new genes involved in the same developmental pathway as the two genes provided.

“Sahoo said. “Biologists are really amazed that, with just a computer algorithm, in milliseconds I can find genes that it takes them a really long time to isolate in the lab.”

OK, is that mind-blowing or what? Did you have any idea how sophisticated our tools are getting? And this is just one of many examples.

The Manhattan Beach Project. www.ManhattanBeachProject.com, plans on developing the capability of reversing aging by 2029. Some people think we’re dreaming. But consider the fact that our tools will be a million times more powerful by then.

What do you think?

Long Life,
David Kekich
____________________________

LATEST HEALTHY LIFE EXTENSION HEADLINES

REPROGRAMMING AUTOIMMUNE DISEASE (April 09 2010) http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/vnl.cfm?id=4675
Greater understanding of the immune system means a greater ability to reprogram its components - such as errant immune cells that cause autoimmune diseases. From EurekAlert!: a study "describes a unique therapeutic 'nanovaccine' that successfully reverses [type 1] diabetes (T1D) in a mouse model of the disease. In addition to providing new insight into diabetes, the research also reveals an aspect of the pathogenesis of the autoimmune response that may provide a therapeutic strategy for multiple autoimmune disorders. [Researchers] wanted to find a way to counteract the harmful autoimmune response without compromising general immunity. They discovered that our bodies have a built-in mechanism that tries to stop the progression of autoimmune diseases like T1D. Essentially, there is an internal tug-of-war between aggressive T-cells that want to cause the disease and weaker T cells that want to stop it from occurring. The researchers also developed [a] nanotechnology-based 'vaccine' that selectively boosted the weak white blood T cells, enabling them to effectively counter the damage caused by their overactive T cell relatives. Their nanovaccine blunted T1D progression in prediabetic mice and restored normal blood sugar in diabetic mice. If the paradigm on which this nanovaccine is based holds true in other chronic autoimmune diseases, such as multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, and others, [nanovaccines] might find general applicability in autoimmunity."

PRINTING NEW TISSUE DIRECTLY ONTO THE BODY (April 09 2010) http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/vnl.cfm?id=4674
This seems like a logical next step for tissue printing technologies: "Researchers have rigged up a device that can spray skin cells directly onto burn victims, quickly protecting and healing their wounds as an alternative to skin grafts. They have mounted the device, which has so far only been tested on mice, in a frame that can be wheeled over a patient in a hospital bed. A laser can take a reading of the wound's size and shape so that a layer of healing skin cells can be precisely applied.  We literally print the cells directly onto the wound. We can put specific cells where they need to go. [Researchers] dissolved human skin cells from pieces of skin, separating and purifying the various cell types such as fibroblasts and keratinocytes. They put them in a nutritious solution to make them multiply and then used a system similar to a multicolor office inkjet printer to apply first a layer of fibroblasts and then a layer of keratinocytes, which form the protective outer layer of skin. The sprayed cells also incorporated themselves into surrounding skin, hair follicles and sebaceous glands, probably because immature cells called stem cells were mixed in with the sprayed cells."

LONGEVITY AND THE END OF EMPIRE (April 08 2010) http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/vnl.cfm?id=4673
Empires end when an entrenched elite can spend from the public purse and take on debt without immediate consequence or forethought, destroying the value of their currency in the process. Assuming (perhaps optimistically) that present economic empires survive the next couple of decades, a combination of foolish promises and increasing human longevity will be the rock that sinks them. From Reuters: "Like the subprime crisis faced by banks in 2008, the risk of people living for up to 20 years after retirement seems to have crept up on an industry based on using historical data to calculate people's chances of an early death. Now, pension funds and insurers say the mounting burden of protracted pensions payments is increasingly concentrated on a small group of providers: Nowhere better can the process be seen than in Britain, which is facing a crisis resulting from a combination of pension reforms and increased life expectancy. The many arguments in favor of a sovereign bond linked to longevity rest on one fundamental expectation: If pension providers can't pay, or become insolvent, governments will have to. Longevity bonds could make the process neater, and more politically palatable, than the collapse of a pension provider." The problem is not that some groups made bad bets, or that many people relied upon those bets being good. The problem is that these groups and their supporters can conspire with governments to bail themselves out with public funds and debt heedless of consequences.

A TRIAL OF GIVING STEM CELLS ORDERS (April 06 2010) http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/vnl.cfm?id=4669

One approach to stem cell therapy is to try to order existing stem cells to do more work, accomplished by introducing signaling molecules into the body - a drug, in other words. This methodology has reached the point of early clinical trials, as indicated in this press release: "Clinical-stage regenerative medicine company Juventas Therapeutics Inc. [has] started enrolling patients in a Phase 1 clinical trial to evaluate the safety and efficacy of its leading stem cell factor for treating heart failure. In preclinical studies of heart failure in pigs, JVS-100, as the factor is known, significantly increased cardiac function by promoting cell survival and increasing blood vessel formation in damaged hearts. JVS-100 works by encoding Stromal Cell-derived Factor-1 (SDF-1), a growth factor that in adults recruits stem cells from the bone marrow to create new blood vessels. The JVS-100-treated pigs showed significant improvements in cardiac function. We've led with heart failure because that's where our preliminary data was, and it's a great clinical opportunity. We also have strong data in the area of peripheral vascular disease and cosmetic wound healing. The factor can increase blood flow for patients who have peripheral vascular disease and accelerate wound closure and prevent scarring for patients who have had cosmetic surgery [so] we're looking to move both those toward clinic in the near future."

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