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How Ichor Therapeutics (a sort of meta-company that incubates biotech startups) is run, and how it was built from scratch (They don't use external labs) A brief history of the last 50 years of aging research; mostly focused on what one might call "classic" aging research (That is focused around IGF-1, rapamycin, caloric restriction etc) Speculation on how to increase antimatter production by a factor of 10 billion. Seems doable. This would be useful chiefly for spaceships I can imagine. It is rare…

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Gene editing powered by retrotransposons, coming soon to a chromosome near you at some point In my immunosenescence post I hinted at the possibility of the nervous system playing a role in the aging of hematopoietic stem cells. Well, shortly after a brief review about exactly that came out! And the same goes for the broader topic, neuronal regulation of immunity, and rejuvenation of neural stem cells. What happens if you give old animals young stem cells (in the form of bone marrow transplants)? Not much. N…

Why Unity Biotechnology's UBX0101 failed

EDIT 2021-01-17: I had mistakenly said here that UBX0101 is the same as Navitoclax. Though there are some papers that report this, it's actually not the case. Unity Biotechnology recently announced that their drug under development, UBX0101 failed a Phase II trial. Lots of people in the longevity space were hoping that it would succeed: it would be the first drug built on top of work on senolytics, and be also a therapy that does not merely slow down the progression of a disease, in this case osteoarthritis…

Tools for knowledge

Nintil posts these days are born in a fairly traditional way. Papers are stashed and read, following citations to find more things to add to the stash. The stash is worked through, meaning being read and having sections and figures copy pasted for later search and use. No note-taking takes place; when getting into new domains I don't know what's relevant so I may try to keep track of too many things. Instead, I rely on volume to figure out what's relevant, and that same volume of reading leads to a built-in…

Darwin-level insights

Laura Deming recently tweeted on the matter of this post, and I replied: Would say that no one.But would also say that progress of science tends to be from the high level and vague to the low level and concrete (and useful). Evolution doesn't cure disease, but the lats 20 years of discoveries in bio do.— José Luis Ricón Fernández de la Puente (@ArtirKel) August 13, 2020 To expand on my tweet, I wanted to think here about what would it mean for something to be a "Darwin-level insight". M…