SENS Research Foundation is Hiring Scientists to Work on the Foundations of Human Rejuvenation
The SENS Research Foundation is hiring scientists! This is a chance to work at one of the hubs of the field of aging research, with a highly influential group of researchers and patient advocates. The SENS Research Foundation and its network of allies have played an important role in turning investigation of the mechanisms of aging from a toy field, in which intervention was never considered, into a serious field of translational research that has given rise to a growing biotech industry focused on slowing and reversing the processes of aging. In addition to advocacy, the SENS Research Foundation staff work to unblock slow-moving or underfunded areas of research that are nonetheless important to the development of future rejuvenation therapies.
The Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) view of aging is a synthesis of the past century of data, focused on the accumulation of cell and tissue damage that arises as a result of the normal operation of a youthful metabolism. This is the root cause of aging, and periodic repair of this damage should be sufficient to produce meaningful rejuvenation. The first SENS position paper in 2002 included cellular senescence as a plausible contributing cause of aging and target for therapies, and today there are a dozen or more biotech companies working on senolytic therapies to clear senescent cells, while first generation senolytics have been shown to produce rejuvenation in mice, and are undergoing human trials for age-related conditions.
SENS Research Foundation Career Opportunities
Research Associate / Scientist - Boominathan Lab (MitoSENS)
The Boominathan lab at SENS Research Foundation is hiring highly motivated Research Scientists / Associates for a project geared toward translational therapies for mitochondrial dysfunctions. The successful candidate will use in vitro, in vivo, and stem cell models to address diseases due to mitochondrial DNA mutations. This research position is within a small but dynamic group that strives to develop a deep understanding and curative therapies using a gene therapy approach to treat mitochondrial myopathies.
Postdoctoral Research Fellow and Research Associate - Catabody Project
We seek a postdoctoral fellow to join our small but dynamic immunology team led by Dr. Amit Sharma. The project geared towards developing a novel way to remove abnormal tau aggregation. The project is potentially relevant for developing therapeutic mitigation of normal age-dependent cognitive decline, as well as for tauopathies like Alzheimer's disease and related disorders. This project involves utilizing enzymatic antibodies to target toxic tau aggregates. As part of the project we will explore ways of delivering antibodies into cells. We will use human induced pluripotent stem cell derived neuronal cells as a model system to test the catalytic antibodies and confirm tau degradation.
Postdoctoral Research Fellow and Research Associate - Senescence Immunology
We seek a postdoctoral fellow to join our small but dynamic immunology team led by Dr. Amit Sharma for a project geared toward investigating the mechanisms involved in the age-dependent decline in immune surveillance of senescent cells with the aim of finding promising interventions. There are three main projects currently for the postdoctoral fellow. One of the projects involves characterizing age-dependent phenotypes changes in the of Natural Killer cells and its implication on their ability to eliminate senescent cells in cell culture and mice models. The goal of the second project is to characterize the surface antigens on senescent cells and with the goal of developing CAR-NK cells with therapeutic application. The aim of the third project is to develop therapeutic interventions based on removal of these SASP proteins for enhancing immune surveillance of senescent cells.
Given that the SENS Research Foundation are getting back into this area rather than leaving it up to the Covalent Biosciences team, I'd guess that Covalent are struggling to raise funding, which is a real shame as their approach seemed like a great idea. I guess SENS RF still think so and will now pursue this line of research in house. Getting antibodies into cells, and into the right cells is a tricky proposition however.
https://covalentbioscience.com/alzyme/
I hope they have the money lined up for all this work
They are getting into some expensive waters
I read this news today about researchers in Japan being able to use supercomputing to predict the membrane permeability of cyclic peptides. If you could develop one that acts like a catabolic antibody to intracellular misfolded Tau proteins this could overcome the "how to get antibodies into cells" problem.
https://www.genengnews.com/news/supercomputer-predicts-cell-membrane-permeability-of-cyclic-peptides/
"Cyclic peptide drugs have attracted the attention of major pharmaceutical companies around the world as promising alternatives to conventional small molecule-based drugs. Through proper design, cyclic peptides can be tailored to reach specific targets inside cells, such as protein-protein interactions, which are beyond the scope of small molecules. Unfortunately, it has proven notoriously difficult to design cyclic peptides with high cell-membrane permeability, i.e., cyclic peptides that can easily diffuse through the lipid bilayer that delimits the inside and outside of a cell.
To address this bottleneck, scientists at the Middle Molecule IT-based Drug Discovery Laboratory (MIDL) have been working on a computational method for predicting cell-membrane permeability."