A major step towards organ cryopreservation! 🧊 A new preprint reports functional recovery of human-scale pig kidneys after vitrification and storage at −150°C for up to a year. The kidneys showed vascular, metabolic and excretory function, and produced urine after transplantation. Huge progress towards making organ banking (and ultimately human biostasis) a reality! 🚀

A promising new rejuvenation factor discovered by @geochurch et al. 🚀 Using a transcriptomic screen they found SRSF1, an RNA-processing and splicing factor that restores youthful profiles in cells. In a small mouse study, activating SRSF1 extended median lifespan by 14%. nature.com/articles/s43587-0…

Should aging research focus on lifespan or healthspan? What is the ultimate goal of the field? Delighted that our paper, led by David Gems, is finally out @GeroScienceAGE ! We argue that extending healthspan rather than lifespan is a misguided cliché. link.springer.com/article/10…

No, we're not on the brink of ending aging. More clickbait, even from prestigious scientific magazines that should know better. Why not? A short 🧵 1) The strongest lifespan-extending intervention in mice is caloric restriction, discovered nearly a century ago. So even in animals we haven't truly made much progress on how to slow (much less reverse) aging. 2) Our understanding of the aging process and its cellular and molecular drivers is still poor - which helps explain 1). 3) There is no proven intervention that retards human aging itself. Cellular reprogramming is an exciting technology with many companies* and labs now working on it. It may have important clinical applications, including the current clinical trial for glaucoma - fingers crossed! But while reprogramming allows cells to be rejuvenated in vitro, we don't yet understand whether or how it can be used safely and effectively in whole organisms. And rejuvenating cells isn't the same as rejuvenating an organism. Remember that an immortal cell is a cancer cell, so rejuvenating a cell may or may not be beneficial in an organism made of many different types of cells. We know from mouse experiments that reprogramming can induce cancer, so it needs to be carefully controlled and tailored to the tissue and context. *Disclosure: I'm CSO of YouthBio, a company developing rejuvenation gene therapies based on cellular reprogramming.

How much investment will it take to develop a cure for human aging?

Only true until we intervene in the ageing process. Humans cannot fly, but technology has allowed us to overcome our natural limits 🚀