SENS Foundation on Immune System Rejuvenation
From the SENS Foundation: "The degenerative aging of the immune system is responsible for an enormous burden of disease and disability, from the pain of recurrent Herpes zoster and postherpetic neuralgia, to elevated rates of chronic urinary tract infections, to complications in wounds, pressure sores, ulcers, and surgical incisions. Most prominently, it underlies the meteoric rise in mortality from respiratory infections with age: influenza, pneumonia, and septicemia rise from being negligible causes of death in healthy middle-aged adults in the USA, to emerge amongst the top 10 causes of death in adults over the age of 55, with mortality rates climbing with each successive year of aging. And in addition to increasing the morbidity and mortality specifically attributable to particular infections, the dysregulation of immune function by immunosenescence is widely acknowledged to exacerbate multiple chronic age-related illnesses, and to contribute to functional decline and frailty in aging people. While vaccine manufacturers and public health officials have rightly advocated for expansion of population vaccine coverage as a measure to blunt the burden of infectious disease in the elderly, the effectiveness of this strategy is itself limited by immunosenescence, which progressively diminishes the adaptive immune system's response to vaccination with age ... The solution to age-related suffering and death from specific infections, autoimmunity, and inflammation is the application of rejuvenation biotechnology to the aging immune system itself. The clearest and longest-established contributor to immune senescence is the decline in adaptive immunity mediated by T lymphocytes, the biomedical remediation of which has therefore been the focus of SENS Foundation's investments in immunological rejuvenation research."