An interview with Aubrey de Grey of the SENS Foundation: "I'm interested in making sure that none of [the forms of biological damage that cause aging] are left behind. ... the main reason why we prioritize certain things over others is simply if they are not being prioritized by the rest of the world. At the moment, [in] our Research Center in Mountain View, we are working on LysoSENS, as you said, but we are also working on MitoSENS, the elimination of mitochondrial mutations in aging, and ways to make those mitochondrial mutations harmless essentially by putting copies of the mitochondrial genome into the nuclear genome. And in projects that we are funding in university labs around the country, we are doing a number of other things relating to other aspects of SENS. So yes, we are interested in focusing on all of these things in parallel. ... So at the moment, there are just a few areas within SENS that we are de-prioritizing because they are being funded quite well elsewhere. One of them is the elimination of amyloids [that] occurs in Alzheimer's disease. And even there, it's only sort of that one subset of that one deadly thing that we are not working on. So we are working on something very similar, the accumulation of a similar type of garbage outside cells that occurs predominantly in the heart. It just turns out that even though Alzheimer's work is well-funded and well respected and everything, nevertheless during the same sort of approach for other types of amyloids, other types of extracellular garbage, it is not being particularly enthusiastically pursued by other people, so we are doing our bit. Similarly, in the case of lost cells where cells die and they are not automatically replaced by other cells or by the division of other cells - that is what stem cells are for. Stem cell therapy is very real - people are working in lots of areas in that field, so of course we are not trying to duplicate that effort. But even there, we are doing one of two things. For example, we're interested in a particular type of cell loss which is the shrinkage of an organ called the thymus, which is responsible for the creation of certain types of immune cells. It turns out that restoration of the thymus to its useful size is something that not many people work on. The approaches that have been tried have not been very successful. We are looking at some more ambitious but we think more promising approaches that have not been looked at by other people."

Link: http://hplusmagazine.com/2012/01/17/progress-in-therapies-for-rejuvenation-and-their-delivery/

Source:
http://www.longevitymeme.org/newsletter/latest_rss_feed.cfm