A Dr. Future Show Report from the Rejuvenation Biotech Conference in Silicon Valley by MIHAI

The SENS Research Foundation’s flagship Rejuvenation Biotechnology Conference: Emerging Regenerative Medicine Solutions for the Diseases of Aging took place Aug. 21 – 23 in Santa Clara, bringing together leaders from the Alzheimer’s, cardiovascular, cancer, and other age-related disease communities to discuss preventative and combinatorial strategies to address the diseases of old age (the SENS acronym stands for Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence; senescence is the progressive slide into sickness and frailty with age). The goal is to expedite the development of truly effective therapies to postpone and treat human aging by tackling it as an engineering problem.

One of the highlights was Saturday’s rousing keynote speech by Peter Diamandis, MD, founder of the X-Prize (http://www.xprize.org/) and co-founder of Singularity University, along with Ray Kurzweil. Even diehard skeptics would have to agree with Dr. Future that Dr. Diamandis’ grand ambitions to make the impossible possible are worthy of support. His strong commitment to anti-aging science led to the recent launch of Human Longevity, Inc. - his joint venture with human genome pioneer Craig Ventner, Ph.D. and Robert Hariri, MD, Ph.D. The San Diego-based company is using its initial 70 million in capitalization to build the largest human sequencing operation in the world to compile the most comprehensive and complete human genotype, microbiome, and phenotype database available to tackle the diseases associated with aging-related human biological decline. They are also leading the development of cell-based therapeutics to address age-related decline (http://www.humanlongevity.com/). 

The San Francisco Bay area’s vital contributions to the field were represented by researchers associated with UC Berkeley, UCSF, Singularity University, and the Buck Institute for Research on Aging. UC Berkeley Professor David Schaffer’s presentation on his group’s work with gene therapy for regeneration conveyed the profoundly transformative potential of these approaches.

Also in attendance were iconic figures Aubrey De Grey, Ph.D. founder and Chief Science Officer of SENS, and George Church, Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical Schooland Director of PersonalGenomes.org. SENS has previously organized six biennial conferences in Cambridge, UK, and this was their first US conference. Truly an inspiring launch, and we are already looking forward to next year’s journey into the future of regenerative medicine, a science likely to impact most of us in significant ways. We also plan on inviting one or more of this year’s participants to visit us on this show, so stay tuned.

Visit http://www.sens.org/ to find out more about their mission and explore the extensive video archives of past conference presentations.