SENS antiaging progress

Here is the highlights of since 2015.

2015

* The SENS Research Foundation’s yearly budget reaches $5 million.
* The Spiegel Lab at Yale announces a method of creating glucosepane, a vital and to this point missing tool needed to develop glucosepane cross-link breaker drugs. This work was funded by the SENS Research Foundation.
* A research team demonstrates the first senolytic drug candidates capable of selectively destroying senescent cells. The number of candidate drugs increases quite quickly after this point.
* Pentraxin Therapeutics announces positive results in a trial of targeted clearance of transthyretin amyloid. Meanwhile, evidence continues to emerge from other groups for transthyretin amyloid to have more of an impact in age-related disease that previously thought.
* SENS Research Foundation work on sabotaging ALT to suppress cancer receives more attention. Meanwhile progress is reported on the other half of telomere extension blockade, interfering in the operation of telomerase, an area in which a number of groups are participating.
* The Methuselah Foundation makes a founding investment in Leucadia Therapeutics in order to pursue a novel approach to the effective treatment of Alzheimer’s disease.
* The research program producing catabodies capable of breaking down transthyretin amyloid is transferred to Covalent Bioscience for clinical development.

2016

* Ichor Therapeutics begins commercial development of a method of clearing metabolic waste from the retina, based on technology developed in the SENS Research Foundation LysoSENS program.
* Gensight Biologics demonstrates success in a trial of mitochondrial allotopic expression of ND4 as a way to treat inherited mutations of that gene. The underlying technology is proven. SENS Research Foundation scientists, meanwhile, successfully demonstrate allotopic expression of ATP6 and ATP8.
* After more than a decade of high profile failures, amyloid-β is finally cleared from the brain in a small human study using an immunotherapy approach.
* The SENS Research Foundation crowdfunds a drug discovery program to find candidates that can interfere in ALT, and thus suppress the telomere elongation that cancer depends upon.
* Cenexys is reformed as Unity Biotechnology with a focus on senolytic drugs. The researchers involved show that clearance of senescent cells in normal mice produces 25% extension of median life span. Later in 2016, the company raises $116M in venture funding.
* Other work on removal of senescent cells across the year shows restoration of function in aged lung tissue, and improved vascular health. New evidence reinforces the role of senescent cells in osteoarthritis, as well as in atherosclerosis, immunosenescence, and diabetic retinopathy
* The Methuselah Foundation launches a $500,000 research prize for tissue engineering in collaboration with NASA.
* Michael Greve pledges $10M to fund SENS research and startup biotechnology companies that emerge from that research.

2017, so far…

* There are now nearing ten different senolytic drug candidates with openly published evidence, and more in the pipeline.
* Oisin Biotechnologies announces that their senescent cell clearance technology can also be applied to cancerous cells, reporting successful animal studies for tumor ablation.
* Methuselah Foundation launches the Methuselah Fund to shepherd more rejuvenation-related biotechnology startups towards success.