|
|
| SPEAKER |
| Dr Aubrey de Grey |
| Chief Science Officer |
|
SENS Foundation
|
|
|
|
MEETING
|
|
June 2009 |
|
| BIOGRAPHY |
Dr de Grey is a biomedical gerontologist based in Cambridge, UK, and is the Chief Science Officer of SENS Foundation, a non-profit charity dedicated to combating the aging process. He has a BA in Computer Science and a PhD in Biology, both from the University of Cambridge, and after a period in industry combined these fields working in a bioinformatics team at the University of Cambridge Genetics Department. His research interests encompass the causes of all the accumulating and eventually pathogenic moleceular and cellular side-effects of metabolism ("damage") that constitute mammalian aging and the design of interventions to repair and/or obviate that damage. He has developed a possibly comprehensive plan for such repair, termed Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS), which breaks aging down into seven major classes of damage and identifies detailed approaches to addressing each one. A key aspect of SENS is that it can potentially extend healthy lifespan without limit but more practically, the aim of treatments should be to prevent damage reaching pathogenic levels. He is Editor-in-Chief of Rejuvenation Research journal.
|
| TALK |
|
Regenerative therapies against aging: can they be comprehensive enough?
|
| DESCRIPTION |
|
The relevance of nearly all biogerontology research to combating aging is restricted to the potential for slowing down the accumulation of molecular and cellular damage that eventually leads to age-related ill-health. Meanwhile, regenerative medicine has been progressing rapidly and is nearing clinical applicability to a wide range of specific conditions. Dr de Grey will argue that we are approaching the point where regenerative medicine can be used against aging. This would entail not retarding but actually reversing the accumulation of damage. If successful, this would obviously be a far more valuable technology than mere slowing of aging. However, in order to be successful it must be comprehensive, and some aspects of aging may seem impossible to address in this way. Dr de Grey will survey the main examples and argue that the ones which contribute to age-related ill-health are, in fact, realistic targets of regenerative interventions.
|
|
