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…

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…

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…

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…

I recorded a video summarising what is known about longevity, more or less condensing what I have in my FAQ plus my other reviews on immunosenscence or epigenetic clocks. You can access the video here and the slides I used are accessible from there as well.

Senescent cells are one of the hallmarks of aging and their elimination is being pursued for therapeutic purposes. The idea that cellular senescence cannot be reverted has been stated multiple times. Here's a selection of papers that show up in Google Scholar, each of which having being cited over a hundred times. Judith Campisi (2001) Because telomerase, the enzyme that can synthesize telomeric DNA de novo, is not expressed by most human cells, telomeres shorten with each cell cycle. When the telomeres er…