Immortality Institute International Conference: October 2010 in Brussels

Fight Aging!

Do you want to live a longer life in good health? Simple practices can make some difference, such as exercise or calorie restriction. But over the long haul all that really matters is progress in medicine: building new classes of therapy to repair and reverse the known root causes of aging. The sooner these treatments arrive, the more lives will be saved. Find out how to help »

If you'll allow me to direct your attention: registration is now open for the Immortality Institute International Conference, which will be held on the weekend of October 9th in Brussels, Belgium. It's a great chance for Eurozone folk to gather and meet like-minded supporters of longevity science: there are far too few such gatherings held on that side of the pond, so make the most of this one.

Many of the usual suspects from the longevity science community will be speaking or presenting, as well as a fair few faces you might not be so familiar with. Not too many of the European advocates for extended healthy life spans make it out to the US-based conferences on a regular basis, so it should be a different crowd from the circuit of the past few years.

Dr. Aubrey de Grey: Chief Science Officer of the SENS Foundation; he works on the development of what he calls "Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence" (SENS), a tissue-repair strategy intended to rejuvenate the human body and allow an indefinite lifespan. To this end, he has identified seven types of molecular and cellular damage caused by essential metabolic processes. SENS is a proposed panel of therapies designed to repair this damage.
Prof. Dr. Bart Braeckman: Internationally known for his research on aging in C. elegans. His team was the first to succeed in increasing the lifespan of C. elegans by sixfold. He has studied everything from calorie restriction to the free radical theory and the metabolic rate theory in C. elegans.

Dr. Chitty Chen: Discovered that the ratio of sugars in the glycan structures on immunoglobulins are an indication of biological age. In other words, she probably discovered the very first age biomarker. This investigation was done in mice and the biomarker seemed to measure the slowing of aging in CR and ames dwarf mice very well. She's now busy in setting up a human study to investigate this biomarker further. If succesfull then this biomarker can one day be used to establish the anti-aging effects of an intervention in humans (such as supplements, drugs, calorie restriction, etc) in a few years instead of decades.

Mr. Danila Medvedev: Chairman of KrioRus, Chief Planning Officer and a Vice-President of the Science for Life Extension Foundation. Also a politician and a member of coordination council of the Russian Transhumanist Movement.

The program is still being updated, but there are already a range of other interesting folk signed up to attend, such as researchers Leonid Gavrilov, Michael Rose, and Stephen Coles of the Supercentenarian Research Foundation.