The last few months have been a rather peculiar time for anti-aging research. In late December last year, life-extension luminary Aubrey De Grey was quietly reinstated as Chief Science Officer at SENS Research Foundation after being suspended due to allegations of sexual harassment, only to be fired last week for workplace alcoholism and substance abuse.
Over the years, transhumanists enamored by De Grey’s public advocacy of life-extension have formed a vocal personality cult around his many promises of ending age-related death, and so news of his unceremonious sacking has not been well received by these immortality enthusiasts, with many threatening to stop funding SENS and others unironically agonizing about the prospect of imminent mortality now that their Moses figure is not at the helm of anti-aging research.
Despite the lamentations of De Grey’s faithfuls, all hope is not lost in the struggle against aging and Death. The US Patent Office recently approved a patent on “Methods of treating or preventing age related disorders”.
The patent, assigned patent number US11266721B1 was granted 3 weeks ago on March 8 to biotech company BioViva, with its CEO Liz Parrish credited as the inventor. The patent describes a dual-function gene therapy that simultaneously treats age-related muscle loss while improving metabolic health through the reversal of the aging-related genomic instability caused by the shortening of telomeres. Telomeres are protective strands of DNA found at the ends of chromosomes, their shortening is associated with aging and harmful mutations.
According to the patent, a viral vector is used to deliver two genes: follistatin and human Telomerase Reverse Transcriptase (hTERT). The follistatin downregulates a muscle-growth inhibitor known as myostatin, while hTERT upregulates the telomerase enzyme – which repairs and extends telomeres. The patent claims that the gene therapy provides therapeutic rejuvenation benefits in mice, among them, reducing osteoporosis and diabetes while increasing muscle mass.
Although the patent mostly describes the mechanisms of this gene therapy in mice, in 2015 Liz Parrish tested it on herself as Patient Zero, and reported that her telomeres had extended from 6.71kb to 7.33kb, which is equivalent to 20 years of age-reversal.
This historical self-experimentation Jonas Salk moment by Parrish caused a lot of controversy back then, and bioethicists have since referenced it as a Pandora’s Box that inspired a series of publicly broadcasted gene therapy self-injections by do-it-yourself biohackers. Some of the most controversial of these biohacker self-experimentations include the ‘muscle growing’ CRISPR injection by former NASA scientist Josiah Zayner, the supposed herpes vaccine-cure injection by biotech CEO Aaron Traywick, and the Bible verse-encoded DNA sequence that was injected by French teenager Adrien Locatelli.
But not all homemade gene therapies by biohackers after Parrish’s 2015 self-experiment culminated into anticlimactic showmanship. Some seem to have yielded results. Take the case of dog breeder David Ishee, who has successfully used a homemade follistatin gene therapy to delay aging in mice and documented most of the experiment. Ishee has continued to develop this homemade gene therapy for human use, and occasionally tests it on himself.
-biohackinfo
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