Today, we would like to share with you a talk by Dr. Michael West from AgeX Therapeutics, a company developing therapies to combat age-related diseases by encouraging the body to regenerate cells and tissues.
On July 12th, we hosted our first conference, Ending Age-Related Diseases: Investment Prospects & Advances in Research, at the Frederick P. Rose Auditorium, which is part of the Cooper Union campus in New York City. The packed event saw a range of people from research, investment, and the wider community coming together for a day of science and biotech business presentations and panels.
In his talk, “Hayflick Rewound: Somatic Restriction, Epigenetics, and the Reversibility of Human Aging”, Dr. Michael West, CEO of AgeX Therapeutics, discussed the breakthroughs in our understanding of biological regeneration and in induced tissue regeneration.
During the talk, Dr. West proposed that aging is at least partially due to the inability of the body to regenerate, a trait that has been acquired later in the course of evolution. He discusses how various species can and do regenerate, but, as humans, we have all but lost this ability to regenerate aside from early in our development. He proposes that aging is essentially a loss of the ability to regenerate and repair our tissues.
Dr. West suggests that we might overcome the ill health of aging and disease by spurring our bodies to regenerate as they did when we were children. Young children can rapidly heal and recover from injury compared to older people, and this recovery slows down with each passing year. If we can restore tissue regeneration to this level, then it is plausible that many age-related diseases might be overcome simply via regeneration. This is what AgeX is attempting to do.
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