Fight Aging!

Good news! Thanks to the generous pledges of new SENS Patrons, signing up for monthly donations to the SENS Research Foundation over the past two weeks since the fundraiser started, the $24,000 matching fund put up by Josh Triplett and Fight Aging! is nearly met. Just a little more left to reach the target: if you are the next person to sign up, the next year of your donations to the SENS Research Foundation will be matched dollar for dollar. But if you miss out on that, donations made before the end of the year can still be matched. The Forever Healthy Foundation's Michael Greve, who earlier this year pledged $10 million to SENS rejuvenation research and startup companies building rejuvenation therapies, has put up a further $150,000 challenge fund. He will match all donations to the SENS Research Foundation made before the end of 2016, and there is still a way to go in order to meet that target. So help us get this done!

Why support the SENS Research Foundation, and their ally the Methuselah Foundation? Because these organizations have proven capable of using your charitable donations more effectively than any other in order to make significant progress towards an end to aging and age-related disease. For fifteen years now, the principals and their network of advocates and scientists have nudged, debated, and funded researchers to ensure that the broader research community builds the basis for human rejuvenation. Aging is an accumulation of molecular damage, and if that damage is repaired sufficiently well, a goal that modern medicine is only just starting to grapple with despite decades of evidence, then the result will be a halt to the processes of degenerative aging. An end to the disease, dysfunction, and suffering of aging. When you look at near any area where the academic laboratories or biotechnology companies are making good progress towards this end, you'll find the SENS Research Foundation and Methuselah Foundation in the background and the history of that development.

The current brace of senescent cell clearance startup companies, working to bring this treatment to the clinic, after it has been shown to improve health and longevity in mice? SENS Research Foundation funding has for years helped that research progress at the Campisi lab, one of the groups that joined forces to create UNITY Biotechnology, recently funded for $116 million. SENS Research Foundation and Methuselah Foundation provided seed funding for Oisin Biotechnology, where the principals are building a better approach to senescent cell clearance than that fielded by UNITY Biotechnology. Or how about work on allotopic expression of mitochondrial genes, a way to prevent mitochondrial damage from contributing to aging by placing copies of mitochondrial genes in the cell nucleus? The SENS Research Foundation and Methuselah Foundation before it helped to fund the research programs that led to Gensight Biologics, a company now deploying tens of millions of dollars to build a platform to back up mitochondrial genes. Or how about progress towards treatments capable of clearing out the glucosepane cross-links that produce tissue stiffening, such as the loss of elasticity in blood vessels that produces hypertension and tissue damage? The SENS Research Foundation has funded the few interested researchers for years, enabling them to build the toolkit needed to work with glucosepane, and now researchers are at the stage of hunting for the first drug candidate.

I could go on: the advocacy and conferences bringing together academia and industry to build a new development community; the support for thymic rejuvenation and other means of immune system repair; the work on a universal cancer treatment based on blockade of telomere lengthening; the mining of bacterial enzymes to find those capable of removing damaging metabolic waste products that our biology cannot handle. The point is that the SENS Research Foundation and Methuselah Foundation deliver. They take our donations and use them to make a real difference, creating step by step progress towards the therapies that will enable us to live far longer in good health, and effectively treat and prevent age-related disease. If the damage that causes aging can be periodically repaired, even poorly at first, then ultimately aging will be brought under control. As the therapies become better and more comprehensive, no-one will need to suffer. The hundreds of millions with age-related frailty and disease and the more than 100,000 who die from aging every day might be saved. This is the greatest and most important altruistic goal: if we get the job done soon enough, we all win together.

Our community is making this happen: our actions, our donations, our advocacy. We are changing the world, and now that the wheel is beginning to turn, that is no time to slacken in our support. Donate to the SENS Research Foundation in this current fundraiser, and your donations will be matched. The more we raise, the faster that research progresses, and the sooner that real, working rejuvenation therapies will arrive at the clinic.