We had the chance to interview Lisa Fabiny-Kiser, CEO of the well-known SENS Research Foundation, on all the various research, education, and advocacy activities that the organization is currently doing along with its plans for the future. Public opinion and the academic landscape have changed considerably since it was founded nearly 15 years ago.
Would you tell us a little bit about SENS Research Foundation?
SENS Research Foundation (SRF) is a one-of-a-kind research foundation. We were founded back in 2009 by a group of five individuals who thought that a damage-repair approach to aging was the best way to address the diseases and disabilities that ravage our aging communities.
We’ve worked since then on shoestring budgets to progress the research of aging as well as work on educating a new generation of scientists about how to approach aging as a medical ailment.
Could you tell us a little more about yourself and what motivated you to get involved with SRF in the first place?
My educational background is in plant biology, not especially useful to this field, but my industry background is in microbiology, stem cell research, and flow cytometry. It was with that background that I started volunteering at SRF in 2010, when we were still a one-room laboratory in Sunnyvale, California.
My significant other at the time was employed at SRF and had provided me with a copy of Ending Aging, the book co-authored by Dr. Aubrey de Grey and Michael Rae. It was fascinating. Technology that I had read about in my favorite Robert Heinlein novels to extend life was being studied in a real-world facility, and I admit I jumped in with both feet, excited by the prospect of making a dent in the diseases of aging.
At the time, my maternal grandmother was suffering deeply from Alzheimer’s disease and would die from it within the next year. My whole family witnessed the degradation of her mind and personality, and I was determined to do my best to put an end to that suffering on a larger scale. Working at SRF allowed me to use my time to support the scientists doing that important work.
What kinds of things do you do at the foundation?
My current role as CEO is a far cry from my prior work in the laboratory, or even operations for that matter, but is bolstered by my experience at the company. I have a hand in guiding all our departments – Research, Outreach, Administration, and Education – and considering that I have worked in all of these departments at some level during my tenure with SRF, I have a unique perspective from our prior CEOs.
My typical day is a lot of meetings. Media interviews, internal management, board meetings, negotiations with outside institutions, and investment opportunities, just to name a few. I also spend as much time as I have available reading up on the current state of the longevity community and seeking out new opportunities for growth and collaboration for SRF.
You have a diverse range of people working at the foundation with all kinds of backgrounds and skill sets. What’s it like working there, and what sort of company culture do you have?
SRF has always been a very tight-knit organization. All of our employees care greatly about our mission, often having a deeply personal story to accompany why joining SRF was a high priority for them.
Even employees who applied with little knowledge of our work quickly became some of our strongest advocates. It’s not hard to see the work we do, feel the excitement and dedication in our staff, and not buy in to our mission.
In the past year, we’ve grown significantly, and we have made significant strides in cultivating a collaborative and equitable workplace. Our employee turnover is low, and I credit that to a culture of intellectual honesty, dedication to our world-changing mission, and genuine care for our employees’ well-being.
What would you say have been the biggest challenges now of running a non-profit research organization focused on aging and rejuvenation?
The biggest challenge we face is expanding our community and setting realistic expectations. We aren’t going to market the best face cream, or give you a one-time injection that will turn you into a 25-year-old in peak health, or make you immortal.
What we will do is provide proven, scientific remedies to the real damage in your body as you age. Damage that when remediated, will help you feel young, and pain free, and yes, will extend your healthy lifespan. Once we truly send out that message, that truth, our community will grow by leaps and bounds and encompass all origins and age groups.
But we also have to temper the idea of “get rich quick”. To get real therapies onto the market takes years, not months, and not just a couple of years either. We require real investment from experienced and non-risk-averse investors and organizations to make the progress we have to make in order to combat aging biomedically.
SRF began its life in 2009, and back then there were certainly plenty of people studying aging, but what kind of interest was there in academia for actually doing something about it?
A shift had only recently started. Scientists had shown that calorie restriction slowed down aging in mice in the 1930s, Cynthia Kenyon and Tom Johnson had shown that gene mutations could extend lifespan in roundworms, and Andrzej Bartke and Holly Brown-Borg had shown that analogous mutations could slow aging in mice.
Scientists were pointing to these examples as a general idea that intervening in aging would be a good thing, but very few were seriously working on developing and testing potential therapies. The few anti-aging startup companies that had been founded in the longevity space had all faded away into nothing or collapsed.
Leading into and following the formal foundation of SRF, we attacked this problem on all fronts: by funding research aimed squarely at developing rejuvenation biotechnologies to directly repair cellular and molecular aging damage; running conferences that brought scientists from many different fields relevant to the damage-repair approach together with biotech investors, company founders, and regulators; and advocating loudly for making a full-court press for the medical conquest of aging.
When SRF proposed its damage repair approach to target aging, how was that received by the academic community?
Initially, it was met with a lot of skepticism — sometimes even hostility. Critics demanded that we first prove that repairing particular kinds of aging damage would extend lifespan before pressing on to develop the very therapies that would prove the principle, while also ignoring that aging was driven by the combined and interacting effects of multiple forms of damage.
We would have to repair many or all of them at once to extend lifespan to assuage the critics. With our funding level and the sheer time it takes to make meaningful scientific research, let alone get new biomedical therapies through the FDA and into the market, that wasn’t feasible in the time frame they were demanding. But we persevered anyway, knowing that our paradigm was the best shot we had at making a meaningful impact on human healthspan and thereby lifespan.
Has that situation changed since then?
It’s been utterly transformed: the damage-repair approach, the idea of actual rejuvenation versus slowing the aging processes, and the strategy of targeting different categories of aging changes have all become very mainstream ideas.
In part, this is because of the breakthrough with a non-damage-repair therapy (rapamycin), which for the first time showed that aging could be targeted with a small molecule rather than genetic engineering or lifelong calorie restriction. In part, it was because of the 2011 proof-of-principle that clearing one kind of aging damage in aging tissues all by itself (senescent cells) could have powerful effects.
In substantial part, it’s because SRF funded solid work in our own Research Center and in well-respected independent academic labs nationally and internationally, showing concretely that the damage-repair approach was a viable alternative to the sick-care that has been our standard. We’ve laid the groundwork for what is now a nascent but distinct rejuvenation biotechnology industry.
During those early years, the media frequently portrayed rejuvenation research as weird or fringe. How did you weather this storm of skepticism and has the media changed its perception of our field much since then?
A lot of that weathering was done by brute force. We had the backing of a few solid investors, and we drove forward educating and advocating where we could. We also managed with our limited funding to make meaningful strides in the research, even spinning out some solid companies in the space. This, and work done by other institutions and individuals in the space, really made our mission of attacking aging damage directly more mainstream.
On a broader note, what is your perception of public attitudes towards doing something about aging, and have they changed at all in say the last five years or so?
They’ve improved dramatically — really starting about 8-10 years ago, not just in the last five. Our inbox used to be flooded weekly with people raising all manner of weak objections to extending healthy human life.
The media treated it as controversial and wrung their hands endlessly over perceived downsides of ending aging while ignoring the enormous benefits of removing suffering and grief caused by aging itself.
We still sometimes get this kind of response in continental Europe, but the response from citizens and media coverage in the US, Canada, the UK, and Eastern Europe are now overwhelmingly supportive of our mission.
On a more personal level, how have your friends and family responded to what you do and the mission and has this changed over time?
When I started, there was definitely some skepticism. I had moved from Ohio, across the entire country to California, and had largely given up my scientific career to do administrative work for an unknown research foundation looking to cure aging. But that didn’t last long.
I was happy to convert anyone who would listen to support the truly revolutionary and scientific approach we are taking. I now have nothing but support from all my friends and family. I would even argue that my biggest supporter is my father – a gentleman who is in his late-70’s, grew up on a farm, and had a long career in the phone company in the heart of the Midwest.
That said, I think I can fairly convince anyone that the work SRF is doing is based on sound research and has the true potential to impact all our lives for the better.
How do you see the foundation’s role in the longevity space, and has that changed since the foundation was created?
Despite the longevity community growing and becoming mainstream, SRF still has a lot of work to do. We are the only organization in the world that focuses exclusively on a damage-repair approach to aging – a mission we have re-evaluated in recent years to ensure is still the best and most likely to succeed path to curing the diseases and disabilities of aging.
While our research has always been, and always will be, our primary mission and where the majority of our annual budget is spent, we have slowly been pivoting to increase our education program. It is not enough to do the work ourselves – we do not have enough money or manpower. We have to ensure that the next generation of scientists view aging as a treatable disease and are empowered to do that work wherever they land in their careers.
This battle will not be won by one man or one organization. It takes an entire community of people and we are striving to help that community grow by educating our young people.
So, onto the science. SRF’s focus takes a divide and conquer approach to aging. Can you tell us a bit about the damage repair approach?
We age because damage accumulates in the cellular and molecular functional units that let our tissues do their job. This damage primarily happens because of side effects and tradeoffs of the metabolic processes that keep us alive: glycation from blood sugar, free radical damage from energy production, senescent cells and cellular suicide that defend us from rogue cells becoming cancerous, and so on.
The traditional path to develop even rejuvenation therapeutics is with drugs that push the metabolic pathways to create less damage. Less damage produced means less damage accumulated, so aging is slowed but it can’t be reversed. In the process, interfering with the normal life-sustaining functions of those metabolic pathways leaves us vulnerable to often unanticipated side-effects, some that need to be remediated with other drugs. Instead of trying to slow down the rate of aging by messing with metabolism, the damage-repair approach leaves our metabolic processes alone and instead directly targets the damage of aging itself, including the damage already in our tissues.
For instance, the main way medicine today combats atherosclerosis is by lowering levels of LDL cholesterol. Instead of trying to push LDL cholesterol levels lower and lower, damage-repair therapies target the toxic byproducts that directly poison our cells and arteries, either with small molecules that capture them and smuggle them harmlessly out of the cell (Cyclarity’s UDP-003) or with enzymes that directly break down the toxic byproducts (Repair Biotechnology’s CDP platform).
Presumably, you haven’t abandoned the idea of people reaching escape velocity? Do you think we are anywhere near reaching that point yet?
Like our technological growth as a society, our medical field has the potential for exponential growth, which, yes, should allow people to hit a critical point of seriously extending lifespan simply from the significant increase in healthspan. It’s questionable whether anyone can give a particular timeline for getting there, considering not only the complexity of the problem but also the variety in the human health experience.
Whether any given estimate is right or wrong doesn’t affect the actual progress we’re making. We’re focused on performing and funding the development of the damage-repair therapies that will get us there as fast as we can. Obviously, the more funding we get and the more we convince outside scientists that the damage-repair approach is the right one, the more such projects we can do.
Thanks to fundraising success last year, you recently expanded the lab space at SRF. How is that going, and what does that mean for the foundation and in particular the science you are doing there?
We have completed the build-out of the expansion, which doubled our lab space and offices. The additional lab space has allowed us to increase the rate of our progress, as we now have much needed additional instrumentation, tissue culture spaces, and sufficient room for our new hires. We have been able to spin-up new projects and still have room to grow.
We are considering using some of our lab space as incubation space for start-ups in the aging space, particularly ones focused on a damage-repair approach. Our goal has never been to be an anti-aging mecca; we are more interested in growing the community of people working on this problem, and having additional space is a great way to invite like-minded organizations in-house for better collaboration efforts.
Quite a number of people in our community claim the FDA not accepting aging is a major barrier to progress and getting therapies approved. What is the real situation here, is the FDA the huge problem some people claim or not?
It’s a much smaller problem than many people make it out to be. There are several different pathways that you can get a therapy to market, and the key is to match the kind of therapy you have to the pathway that gives you the clearest shot to approval. The most common approach is to identify a disease that a therapy is especially likely to be effective in preventing or treating and move the therapy through the pathway as a treatment for that disease.
This will usually be a disease of aging, but not always: for instance, MitoSENS therapies that back up individual mitochondrial protein-encoding genes could be developed as gene therapies for congenital mitochondrial disorders that result from mutations in those genes. Another approach is the “accelerated approval” pathway, which the FDA has been refining for a decade now and is becoming an increasingly attractive option for damage-repair approaches.
Because damage-repair therapies directly remove cellular and molecular damage, and because intervening early is always better than intervening late, the ability to get a longevity therapeutic approved by showing that it removes a defined aging lesion long before severe pathology emerges will be an excellent option for some rejuvenation biotechnologies. The lack of an FDA indication for aging poses the biggest hurdle for traditional geroscience — the “messing with metabolism” approach — because such therapies’ effects are often broad but shallow, affecting many aspects of aging at once but none of them profoundly.
But there is good news for this class of therapies on two fronts. The first is FDA’s acceptance of the composite multimorbidity outcome for the TAME trial, which is better matched to the effects of such drugs in animals. Even if TAME fails, it could act as a precedent for future trials of these more conventional broadly age-retarding approaches. If, however, it doesn’t get off the ground or has a long delay, no concrete precedent will be established and future regulators may not agree to continue with these kinds of trials. (For more on metformin and TAME, see our blog series on these subjects, especially the fifth installment).
The other development that may help licensing pathways for broad-but-shallow longevity therapeutics is the changes in the WHO’s International Classification of Disease (ICD) codes: redefining MG2A to “aging-associated decline in intrinsic capacity” in the “General Symptoms” category and shifting the ICD-11 extension code for “diseases related to aging” out of the “temporality” section to “aetiology” and “causality,” allowing aging to be identified as the causal driver of age-related disease and not just a horizon for collecting diagnoses.
Could you give us an update on the SENS strands and where things are with these damage types?
That’s a book, not an interview question! Some pioneering developments include:
- our MitoSENS team achieving successful allotopic expression in vivo in mice; the clinical success and licensing of the AmyloSENS therapy lecanemab/Leqembi for neurodegenerative aging of the Alzheimer’s type
- Cyclarity Therapeutics, an SRF LysoSENS spinout, getting very close to launching a clinical trial for their modified cyclodextrin with the goal of reversing atherosclerosis
- UNITY Biotechnology having recently announced a successful Phase II trial of their senolytic (ApoptoSENS therapy) in people with diabetic macular edema
- our ApoptoSENS team identifying the lurking danger posed by the invulnerability of one class of senescent cells to senolytic drugs; having for the first time identified and actively pursuing a promising strategy for eliminating abnormal tau aggregates inside cells (LysoSENS)
- Dr. Jean Hébert’s excellent progress with a daring and innovative strategy for replacing and sustaining brain neurons in the neocortex
- Dr. Tilman Grune’s SRF-sponsored research pursuing novel enzymes to degrade lipofuscin
- the startup Elastrin Therapeutics working to turn their GlycoSENS therapy targeting damaged elastin into rejuvenation biotechnology for humans
Can you explain your strategy in creating spinouts like Cyclarity, Repair, Oisin, Ichor, Revel, and Covalent Biosciences, and how does that work from the position of a non-profit looking to move the technology into the commercial sector?
Our focus has always been on the research, but considering that our mission is to treat and cure age-related disease, keeping our research strictly basic and in-house is somewhat useless to that end. We have to have a mechanism to take our research to clinic and eventually to market.
Because we are more interested in seeing our therapies succeed and reach market, when we do spinout a for-profit company – either from internal sources or through the funding of external projects – SRF takes a nominal ownership in the company. While a return on our investment is nice, it’s not our primary goal; getting the therapies into humans in a safe and fast way is top of our priorities.
We’ve also recently started maintaining an observational board seat on our spin-outs as well. This allows us to ensure that the for-profit team still has access to our scientific expertise and that we have at least the ability to give our opinion if it seems like the team is veering away from SRF’s tenets. That includes getting damage-repair therapies to market in a timely fashion and ensuring that when it hits market, it is affordable and accessible to all persons.
As a non-profit, our interests are decidedly not on the side of making more money (although that would be nice); instead, we focus on making sure the science that the community has entrusted us to accomplish is being done in a timely and ethical manner.
You have an educational program at the foundation that is training the scientists of the future. Can you tell us a bit more about this and how it is having an impact on the field?
Our education department’s focus is providing developing scientists with research-intensive experiences that not only transform their careers, but also transform the way they think about aging. Current programs include robust and prestigious summer and postbaccalaureate programs, which support undergraduate and recent graduates at our research center and at partner labs across the country.
We also have a partnership with Dominican University of California to train Master’s students. We are also excited about some developing programs: new this year, we are starting a graduate internship program for MS, PhD, MD, and other graduate students to spend 9-10 months with us to get a taste of industry research before they enter the workforce. Our projects benefit immediately from their creativity and adventurous spirits, but perhaps more important is the long-term impact of training the next generation of scientists.
When we teach young people about aging as a treatable disease, we change the field for decades to come. The challenges we face with the FDA and with the public’s view of aging will become more approachable as this next generation of scientists age into researchers and leaders, and bring that understanding that aging can be cured with them.
If someone is a young aspiring scientist interested in getting into the field, what advice would you give them and how can SRF help?
Developing scientists, across the board, need a heavy dose of passion, and they cannot be afraid of failing. They need to soak up all the knowledge they can from every opportunity: seemingly unrelated classes or research experiences can lend creativity that will inspire research solutions.
Of course, developing scientists should apply for our programs. We would love to train every aspiring scientist, but since that is not possible, I’d recommend taking advantage of any kind of biological research training; research techniques can be applied across different fields. The most important thing students learn during research experiences, though, is the troubleshooting process, which is fraught with repetitive failure, but if a student can learn to stand back up, reframe their viewpoint, tweak a variable and try again, they will make a fantastic researcher.
Research is very important, of course, but there is also the advocacy side of things, which is equally important in our view and frequently overlooked. Can you tell us about your advocacy activities at SRF?
You are right that the advocacy aspect of our organization, and maybe every organization honestly, is overlooked, but without our development department, we would have floundered a long time ago. It is imperative to our mission that we garner support, both financially and in public opinion.
One of our primary activities is our annual virtual conference, where we detail our latest scientific progress and showcase our educational program. I know virtual conferences are falling out of favor a bit these days, but we feel it’s the best option for our community right now. We have a huge community of supporters that are global citizens, from all walks of life. We never want access to our research and staff to exclude those who do not have the means to travel or are medically fragile.
That said, we are considering going back to in-person in the near future and make it a hybrid event. Our department of development also works hard to create content that showcases who we are and the work we do. We recently created interviews with our scientists discussing each of our programs, as well as “Meet the Team” and “Meet the Students” videos allowing our team members and students to introduce themselves and share their personal journeys to SRF.
We believe it is important that our supporters know who’s behind the organization. We also hold a Donors Appreciation Event every year to give the donors the opportunity to meet with all of us and meet each other. We run crowdfunding campaigns; we just launched the first of three on Experiment.com.
We partner with other organizations to spread the word about the longevity field and fundraise together. Our Annual Report serves as a significant medium to promote our work, while our Research Report delves into our scientific progress and publications in detail, we don’t put out the latter every year. Additionally, our online store, the Marketplace, features a range of fun and high-quality branded items, helping us raise awareness about our mission.
One of our most exciting recent advocacy activities was the creation of the Life Noggin video series, which explains the SENS approach in a fun and engaging way.
On our website, we have the SENSible Blog, and also the SENSible question, published in said blog. A monthly newsletter comes out every second Tuesday, our End of Year Campaign, and much more! I encourage you to visit our website and explore our social media channels to discover more about our extensive outreach and advocacy activities.
What are the biggest misconceptions people have about rejuvenation biotechnology?
This is such a loaded question. We come across all kinds of misconceptions about our field on a regular basis. At first, it was a lot of assumptions about this being science fiction, although that’s honestly how I first became interested in the field, so I suppose even misconceptions can be leveraged into support given the right redirection.
Regardless, these days it’s not too hard to point out our peer-reviewed research, our flourishing laboratory, and the many investments and spinouts we have accomplished in our tenure to showcase how very much in reality our work falls.
Another vantage point we come across is one of “this is how it’s always been” with the unstated, or sometimes very stated, sentiment that we shouldn’t mess with the status quo. My response to that has always been “Do you eat bananas? Do you take Tylenol? Is your house powered by electricity?” The point is, technology makes our lives better in a myriad of ways, ways that were utterly unfathomable to our ancestors, but we take for granted.
100 years ago, the life expectancy was around 56 years. Now, it’s about 76 years (at least in the USA) and the idea of someone dying in their mid-fifties is devastating. It’s not hard to imagine that 100 years from now, someone dying in their 70s, or 80s, or 90s is equally as abhorrent. These kinds of sentiments though are often led by lack of information and maybe lack of imagination as well.
How we most effectively combat them is twofold. One, we keep doing what we’re doing and making progress; it’s going to be hard to say this is impossible when we eradicate atherosclerosis. Two, we continue to talk to people – we answer all the questions, no matter how repetitive; we take the time to connect with someone on a personal level and gently challenge their viewpoint with facts; we put out into the world the truth about aging and encourage people to hope that there is a different future than the one they currently know.
I travel a fair bit as a part of my job, and I can tell you that I have yet to sit on a flight and not talk to my neighbor about our mission and eventually hand out my business card. I have also yet to have any person I talk to not agree with me by the end of the flight. It may be hard to get behind extending lifespan, but it is so easy to support curing Alzheimer’s, removing the risk of stroke, or ending cancer. That’s how we reach the people and change their minds. One at a time, with kindness and a smile and facts.
Building a strong community of supporters and advocates is important for our movement as is the willingness to partner with other organizations and work on big projects together. Can you talk about how SRF is collaborating with other organizations and how that is supporting progress?
I can’t agree more: to make real progress requires the efforts of a community, a network of people and organizations all working in concert. We are always willing to engage with organizations who are interested in furthering our mission. The Angel Protocol with Methuselah Foundation and Lifespan.io is a great example of organizations pulling together to raise support. We are also a sponsor and member of the Alliance for Longevity Initiatives, an advocacy group looking to impact legislation for the betterment of longevity research and progress.
We’ve been a long-time member of the Association for Independent Research Institutions, which helps us in all manner of non-profit research foundation issues, including advocacy in D.C., operations, fundraising, and our education department. We have partnered with Dominican University for our Masters program to allow students to study at SRF.
Those are only a few – it’s not hard to make connections in this field. So many related organizations, and even entirely unaffiliated institutions, are thrilled to support our mission and make our path smoother. We all have a common goal: to increase healthspan and improve the lives of the people around us. With that in mind, the willingness to provide support instead of competition should not be much of a surprise.
Speaking of collaboration, you recently teamed up with Angel Protocol, Methuselah Foundation, and Lifespan.io on the Longevity Campaign. This is an initiative to create funds for all three nonprofits and will also build a perpetual endowment that will provide ongoing funds for the work we do. This is a cryptocurrency-based fundraiser, what are your thoughts on utilizing the blockchain as a way of funding research and fueling progress?
In addition to the Angel Protocol, which is a fabulous idea by the way, we have also had partners with VitaDAO, The Fable of the Dragon, and even made a series of NFTs with a digital artist: Soliman Lopez for our last End of Year Campaign. I honestly can’t speak highly enough about the NFTs. We have one for each SENS strand, connected to live cell cultures in our laboratory, and they are absolutely beautiful.
The Fable of the Dragon team sent us the best dragon statue, which is currently residing in our Research Center and continue to be supportive media partners. Our partnership with VitaDAO promises an innovative track for our promising research to spinout into for-profit ventures and their team is comprised of truly remarkable individuals motivated to help our technology flourish for the betterment of all humanity.
SRF was an early adopter of cryptocurrency; we’ve accepted crypto as a form of donation since 2014. We’ve had enormously successful fundraising endeavors with crypto over the years, and I think it’s only going to continue being a source of funding for us. The crypto community is an easy ally to rejuvenation biotechnology: they are forward-thinking, with a strong bent towards innovation and creativity and look at our research as a way of putting that innovation to work in the biomedical field.
The more we interact with that community, the more impressed we are with their intelligence and determination to build a better world, sometimes in spite of the systems of power around them. They are going to be primary drivers going forward, and I’m proud that we can work so well together.
Do you think using fun can be a powerful tool in advocacy for bringing aging under medical control?
Absolutely! No one wants to be bored, and unfortunately, deep science can get boring for the layperson. We constantly work internally on how to properly convey our mission, and the progress we are making in the laboratory, to the common person. The mission of extending healthspan is universal, and if we are going to get everyone on this bandwagon, we have to make learning about our research entertaining and fun and easily digestible.
I had my 8-year-old son watch the Zombie Cells Life Noggin video, and he got it! He understood what we were trying to do. He asked me afterward if we were really doing that, killing zombie cells in our bodies, and when I said yes, he got so very excited.
That’s what those videos were intended for: to reach everyone, of all ages and backgrounds, and introduce them to the reality of our research and get them hopeful and excited about the work we are doing. The more we engage the masses, the more our work becomes mainstream, and the more support we will gain both financially and in policy. We need the sway of public opinion to make faster progress, and incorporating fun is a great way to gain that support.
What does the future hold for SRF, and what exciting projects have you got planned for this year?
Time will tell, I suppose, because we have some big projects in the works that are still undercover at the moment. I can tell you that we are still focused on a damage-repair approach to the diseases of aging. We’re still going to be teaching and influencing the next generation of scientists. We’re getting more involved in the political scene and working on reaching out to more mainstream organizations to increase our reach and support base.
We’re looking to expand our Education program, continue to grow our Research department both internally and externally, expand our investment and for-profit portfolio, and, of course, make sure we are reaching out to our donors all over the world to keep them apprised of our progress. It’s going to be an exciting next couple of years at SRF, so stay tuned.
