Cryonics and Cryopreservation Research Network @CryonicsNetwork

Wise words from Jennifer Doudna on AI in biology. Biology is hard and complex. No big new ideas have come from AI yet. And while AI can make discovery more efficient, testing will still be required. Above all, we need more and better data to build better models.

Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005

3 days ago

Jennifer Doudna won the Nobel Prize for gene editing and went on Bloomberg to say the chatbots everyone is betting on cannot innovate at all. Every promise Silicon Valley is making about AI curing disease just hit the one person qualified to check it. She has spent her whole

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Bridging the Gap in Cryopreservation: A Review of Cryoprotectant Innovation and Global Market Trends mdpi.com/2306-5354/13/5…

A new study moves cryopreservation beyond preserving structure alone. Researchers report recovery of neuronal firing, synaptic signaling, and other key functions in vitrified brain tissue. Learn more in the latest Science Sessions podcast episode: ow.ly/rmOv50Zfm5F

I want to live indefinitely. Not 90 years, not 120. As long as I choose to. People assume that makes me afraid of dying. It's closer to the opposite. Patients with terminal diseases have run out of time by a few years, sometimes a few months, before the treatment that might have saved them existed. That gap is why I co-founded Tomorrow Bio. What we do is simple to describe and hard to do well. When a person dies, our team keeps the body oxygenated and starts cooling it within minutes. We replace the blood with a cryoprotectant so ice crystals don't form and destroy tissue, above all in the brain. The body is then brought to -196°C and stored in liquid nitrogen. Our scans show that on average around 98% of the brain stays largely free of ice. I won't pretend this is a sure thing. I tell every member the same sentence: there is no guarantee you will ever wake up. What cryopreservation offers is a chance greater than zero. Burial and cremation offer none. For me, that is the whole argument. A few dozen are preserved with us today. More than 1,000 have signed up. They're young and old, scientists and skeptics, but they tend to share one trait: they would rather bet on the future than write it off in advance. On July 3 I'm taking part in an Oxford-style debate at the Deutsches Museum in Munich on whether we should reach for longer life at all. I'd genuinely like to hear where you stand before I get on that stage. So here's the question I get asked more than any other: if the procedure were free and available tomorrow, would you do it? And what's the real reason behind your answer?

New paper on gene therapies in longevity and aging 🧬 Gene therapies have enormous potential to treat age-related diseases, target aging and extend lifespan. We discuss recent advances and remaining challenges in gene therapies for aging, highlighting promising targets, delivery strategies, and approaches to cellular rejuvenation. Could we use gene therapy to reprogram aging and delay age-related decline? sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

Can we use machine learning to predict longevity drugs? 💊 In our updated preprint led by @AlekseyVBelikov we trained ML models on compounds in the DrugAge database that extend lifespan in mice. Features associated with longevity drugs included receptors for neurotransmitters, metabolic hormones and sex hormones. We then used our top-performing models to screen DrugBank for new potential longevity drugs. Identified clusters included compounds targeting IGF1 and insulin receptors, beta adrenergic receptors, carbonic anhydrases, dopamine and serotonin receptors. In collaboration with @scrippsresearch we tested 22 predicted compounds in C. elegans and found that 6 of them extended lifespan: dihydroergotamine, mianserin, bromocriptine, voxtalisib, bms-754807 and solifenacine. With our collaborators @UniKent we also created a public web server with our top models. Feedback welcome. biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

Another book on curing aging promised - in 2000 - that science was on the verge of providing physical immortality thanks to genetic engineering, neuroscience, and cloning. A quarter-century later, we're still waiting. Sadly, the author passed away last year.

Lessons From Drug Discovery for Cryoprotective Agent Design: An AI-Oriented Perspective advanced.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ad…

World-first: therapy to make cells young again given to a person nature.com/articles/d4158…

There is no future for anyone currently reading this if we don’t solve aging. Awesome Vision Weekend in London from @foresightinst discussing what the future may look like and the technologies shaping it.

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How plausible is future revival after cryopreservation? In a survey of US physicians, the median estimated probability that cryopreservation could retain sufficient neural information for future patient revival was 25.5%. journals.plos.org/plosone/articl…

@cremieuxrecueil @danielsil44 Great post! Have you considered biostasis?

Gene expression can be used to predict age and mortality 🚨 Impressive study from @gladyshev_lab @harvardmed using RNA-seq data to develop accurate transcriptomic clocks across mammalian species (inc. humans) and tissues to predict age, lifespan and mortality. A great example of the power of big data in aging research. Major processes changing with age include inflammation, mitochondrial function, epigenetic regulation, cell cycle (inc. markers of cellular senescence) and extracellular matrix remodeling. These clocks will have applications in personalised medicine, drug discovery and clinical trials. They also suggest some degree of coordination of aging changes. However, many questions remains. Are age-related transcriptomic changes drivers of aging or merely passengers? In other words, if we normalized these aging changes back to youthful levels, would this be beneficial, detrimental, or have no effect? And with so many aging clocks now available, how will researchers determine which ones are most biologically meaningful and clinically useful? Link to original paper: nature.com/articles/s4158… My thoughts on the study: nature.com/articles/d4158…

Electric fields for warming cryopreserved tissue sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

This is all solid advice on sleep, diet, exercise and lifestyle. I encourage folks to follow it. But we're not going to sleep our way to 150 years. We need interventions that target the biology of aging to make real progress in longevity.

Bryan Johnson @bryan_johnson

2 months ago

This is it. Everything learned spending millions on longevity. From: Your Immortal Unc and Auntie. To: Our Immortal nieces and nephews. 0. Sleep is the world's most powerful drug. 1. Be in your bed for 8 hours 2. Same bedtime every night, any time before

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Biogerontology will not save most people alive today. Even in an optimistic scenario, it will likely deliver gradual therapies: less inflammation, better immunity, less frailty, some organ improvements, maybe +5–15 years for some people. But not mass rescue from death. There are around 8.2 billion people in the world today. Global life expectancy is around 73 years; as the population ages, the number of deaths will rise. WHO gives global life expectancy as 71.3 years in 2021; the UN gives 73.3 years in 2024. Replacement is hard to scale and will not rejuvenate everything — for example, the blood vessels of the brain. Without a radical change in strategy, several billion people alive today will die before true negligible-senescence medicine arrives. Five billion deaths is my lower estimate. Realistically, it will be more. This leads to an unpleasant conclusion: We need not only biogerontology, but a strategy for survival through death. Without cryonics, immortalism is effectively agreeing to write off almost everyone who will not live long enough to reach radical medicine. Do we want death for our parents and for 80% of everyone we know?

@andreypnfrv 💯

@VraserX He's working on combining interventions, which is interesting but not better than caloric restriction. youtube.com/watch?v=Uz0irx…

@Ausbones youtube.com/watch?v=d1xHpp…