The Longevity Alliance

Our goal is to create the world where every person can obtain healthy longevity and ageing control through innovative technologies.

Our mission is to promote the advancement of healthy longevity for all people through scientific research of ageing biology, development of new drugs and therapies, their fast implementation, improvement of public health policy in the field of ageing control, and education.

More information: International Longevity Alliance (ILA).

Dementia precaution should become as normal as going to the dentist

Early detection of Alzheimer is very difficult using traditional methods, as it is based on insensitive screening measures or reports of cognitive problems by patients or their family members. Such blunt screening tools can be very unreliable, which might explain why cognitive decline has traditionally been viewed as occurring later in the disease process.

I’ve just met Ioannis Tarnanas and Adrian Locher at a nice 1st of August brunch. Their startup, Altoida, is the result of over a decade of research into the neuroscience of brain connection pattern changes, and finding neuromotor biomarkers that can diagnose Alzheimer’s disease 5 years prior to onset using smartphones and augmented reality.

I think this resolves one of the key issues with medical diagnosis, especially in the context of aging. With complex age-related ailments like Alzheimers, collecting a regular stream of data points before and after the onset of any symptoms, will enable discovery and verification of occurrence patterns and causal relationships. Quantified tracking using such tools will also allow accurate assessment of the effectivity of treatments to validate the ones that actually work for specific individuals.

How to die young at a very old age

A delightful introduction to healthy aging by Prof. Nir Barzilai. Watch this!

Aging is a common risk factor for many diseases, including cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and heart disease. Rather than treating each disease separately, the most practical approach is to delay aging altogether. Learn about our efforts to help everyone die young at a very old age.

Nir is a Professor of Medicine and Genetics at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Deputy Scientific Director at the American Federation for Aging Research. He has pioneered breakthrough research on the biology of aging.

Approaching the Second Half: The Latest Research on Longevity and Aging

What choices can help us live long, productive lives? Will science someday identify ways to prevent aging altogether? Hear from genetics professor Anne Brunet, PhD, about how exciting new genetics research could eventually lead to ways of slowing or perhaps even reversing human aging.

Dr. Brunet’s talk was part of the 2015 Community Health Matters Day at Stanford. http://healthmatters.stanford.edu/

Get your body to heal itself

Using the basic principles in regenerative medicine , scaffolds, stem cells and growth factors, in this TEDxIUM talk, Dr Galea shows how our bodies can be used to produce its own medication in healing common sport medicine related injuries.

Dr. Anthony Galea is a renowned sports medicine doctor. He is the Founder and Medical Director of the Institute of Sports Medicine Health & Wellness Center, an internationally recognized sports medicine clinic in Toronto. He has lectured at the University of Toronto and internationally. Dr. Galea has been a sports medicine doctor at the Olympics, team physician for the Toronto Argonauts and a sports medicine doctor and consultant for numerous high profile athletes such as Tie Domi, Jamal Lewis, Alex Rodriguez and Tiger Woods. He is listed as being among the top 2% of sports physicians in the world.

Eternal life, are we there yet? Didier Coeurnelle at TEDxULB

Education of the general audience is one of four main activities of the ILA. This is why the representatives of the organization are using every opportunity to represent the idea at public events, to make people more informed about the present level of longevity technologies development and to help them become more familiar with the philosophy backing longevity research.

Didier Coeurnelle, Co-chair of Heales (Healthy Life Extension Society), the largest non-profit organization in Continental Europe promoting and advocating scientific research into longevity and biogerontology, Vice-president of the French association AFT-Technoprog and a founding member of the International Longevity Alliance was recently invited to speak at TEDxULB. We invite you to enjoy his speech.

Originally published at ILA.

Study: Metformin as a Tool to Target Aging

 

Over the past decades, remarkable progress has occurred in the science of aging in model organisms. Studies have demonstrated that genetic pathways modulate healthy lifespan in diverse species across great evolutionary distance and established that aging-related pathways constitute a target for intervention (Barzilai et al., 2012, Longo et al., 2015). Lifespan has been verifiably modulated by genetic, pharmacologic, and dietary interventions in multiple model systems.

Interventions that target aging pathways are capable of dramatically extending lifespan and, most importantly, health span, the period of life during which an individual is fully functional and free of chronic illness. Continue reading “Study: Metformin as a Tool to Target Aging”

Longevity activists call to support the investigation of drugs against aging

The International Longevity Alliance, a non-profit international organization with its headquarters in Paris, announces the launch of its crowdfunding campaign, in support of The Major Mouse Testing Program (MMTP): an ambitious research project to investigate healthy longevity therapies in mice. The project aims to test a number of compounds and their combinations, that are expected to slow down aging processes and postpone the manifestation of age-related diseases. Each stage of the project will require relatively small funding, from $60 to $100 thousand, but could have a major impact on the development of new therapies to slow down aging in humans. The first stage of fundraising will launch in May 2016, and will be hosted on the Lifespan.io crowdfunding platform, dedicated to helping researchers who study aging and longevity. Continue reading “Longevity activists call to support the investigation of drugs against aging”

Destroying worn-out cells makes mice live longer: Elegant experiment confirms that targeting senescent cells could treat age-related diseases

Eliminating worn-out cells extends the healthy lives of lab mice — an indication that treatments aimed at killing off these cells, or blocking their effects, might also help to combat age-related diseases in humans.

As animals age, cells that are no longer able to divide — called senescent cells — accrue all over their bodies, releasing molecules that can harm nearby tissues. Senescent cells are linked to diseases of old age, such as kidney failure and type 2 diabetes.

To test the cells’ role in ageing, Darren Baker and Jan van Deursen, molecular biologists at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and their colleagues engineered mice so that their senescent cells would die off when the rodents were injected with a drug.

The work involved sophisticated genetic tinkering and extensive physiological testing, but the concept has an elegant simplicity to it. “We think these cells are bad when they accumulate. We remove them and see the consequences,” says Baker. “That’s how I try to explain it to my kids.” Continue reading “Destroying worn-out cells makes mice live longer: Elegant experiment confirms that targeting senescent cells could treat age-related diseases”