George Church is a giant in genetics and has started many biotech companies. Professor Church helped initiate the Human Genome Project in 1984 and the Personal Genome Project in 2005. He has co-authored 592 papers, 143 patent publications & the book “Regenesis”. He is known as the father of synthetic biology and the CRISPR-CAS9 gene-editing technology, and he is widely recognized as one of the most important geneticists of our age.
Rejuvenate Bio CEO Dan Oliver, co-founded the company alongside George Church, Ph.D., and Noah Davidsohn, Ph.D., a former postdoctoral fellow in Church’s lab at Harvard and the company’s chief scientific officer.
Rejuvenate Bio recently raised more $10 million in its series A round to propel its gene therapy toward the market for the treatment of heart disease in dogs and toward the clinic for the treatment of aging-related conditions in humans, including heart failure, kidney failure, Type 2 diabetes and obesity. Rejuvenate Bio’s treatment is a gene therapy that dials up expression of the genes sTGFbetaR2 and FGF21 to reduce levels of the cytokine TGF-beta1 and boost levels of the hormone FGF21, respectively. Both genes are associated with longevity.
Here is a link to the list of George Church lab papers.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
Known for identifying cutting edge technologies, he is currently a Co-Founder of a startup and fundraiser for high potential early-stage companies. He is the Head of Research for Allocations for deep technology investments and an Angel Investor at Space Angels.
A frequent speaker at corporations, he has been a TEDx speaker, a Singularity University speaker and guest at numerous interviews for radio and podcasts. He is open to public speaking and advising engagements.
By diverting funding and research effort away from anti-aging R&D, then yes.
Well, at least this paper proves that chasing the low reward goals will not bring us far.
I'm also younger than him and I think I don't stand a chance. I've been hearing the same bull at least for 30 years…
He's 66, he's got about 17 years just by statistics. Given his interest and education, I'm sure he's doing at least a few things to take care of himself and has at least 20 years without any novel intervention.
Since I'm younger than him, that bodes well for me. He's got the incentive to move the research along, and hopefully I'll be a beneficiary of that.
Hmm, is his mustache starting to look a bit less gray than it used to?
Wonder if I could convince him I'm a canine with a credit card.
By the way, there is click-bait science article making the rounds now, headlined: "We cannot cheat aging and death, study indicates" https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/06/210616094141.htm
Except that when you read it you realize it was written by statisticians (who can only predict the future by looking at the past) and all they are actually saying is no amount of vitamins, exercise, and healthy environment is going to let us escape death. What a surprise. Danish paper, but international enough that I sure hope none of my tax dollars contributed to this study in any way.
For mRNA vaccines, definitely no.
The Russian, Oxford-AstraZeneca, and J&J vaccines are all vector vaccines, and using these can reduce effectiveness of any future gene therapy which uses the same vector backbone. However, I should note that there are many potential vectors to use, and they often try to choose things like cold viruses so that our immunity to the vector will wane quickly. I wouldn't worry about it and would just get whatever vaccine is available.
Perhaps more topically, vector immunity is something that George Church takes seriously and he has a company addressing it: https://geneonline.news/en/george-churchs-new-startup-engineers-aav-vectors-that-evades-host-immune-responses/
Very unlikely as your body develops imunity to the spike proteins produced by the mRNA – the mRNA breaks down and does not stick around. If the anti-aging therapy depended on a protein close enough to mimic those spike protiens… then maybe. It would be an immune response against that which would supposed to be beneficial. However I do not see how those protiens would relate to any anti-aging therapy.
he'd better hurry up. he hasn't got much time…
I suppose it's possible something interesting might happen if you had an active retrovirus infection when you got the vaccine. Probably not otherwise.
Unlikely. The mRNA vaccines put RNA in your cells, which makes cells produce the spike proteins thus training your immune system to go after them. Then the RNA disappears, because that's what RNA always does in your cells.
This is a dumb question, but could Covid-19 vaccines hamper the effectiveness of future anti-aging therapies?
Not clear if "dial up" means adding more copies or epigenetic manipulation. Primal Therapy does the latter to great health and longevity benefit, for over 50 years now. check it out: primaltherapy dot com.