Aging report

FDA is a scientific bureaucracy with police powers. Patients and physicians are free to choose only those drugs and medical devices that it has approved. When FDA approves a therapy that later turns out to be unexpectedly risky, the agency is the subject of front-page headlines and congressional hearings. On the other hand, when FDA delays a badly needed new therapy, patients will suffer but hardly anyone will blame FDA.

Consider, for example, FDA's 10-year delay, in 1967-76, in approving beta-blockers to prevent death following heart attacks, because of the agency's fear that the drugs might be carcinogenic. During those years, the drugs saved lives in Europe and elsewhere, while an estimated 10,000 heart attack victims unnecessarily died in this country each year. When beta blockers were finally approved in the US, to wide acclaim, hardly anyone raised the lethal effects of FDA's slowness.

As it turns out, however, that extra agency caution doesn't actually improve drug safety. Studies conducted by FDA itself show that the rate of drug withdrawals has remained essentially unchanged over the last 25 years, despite rising and falling approval times during that period.

'Curing aging is not an endpoint the federal drug agency would recognize,' Dr. Westphal says dryly. Instead, both men say, they are working to ameliorate the diseases of aging." For so long as unelected government employees can declare, with no accountability and full force of law, what medicine is permitted and what is not, there will be no direct venture funded efforts to cure aging - or even to take the first steps by aiming to repair specific, identified age-related damage in order to intervene in the aging process. There is no lack of companies, research groups and billions of dollars ready to be directed to that end, as any brief survey of the biotechnology marketplace will show you - but the ignorant few who write policy continue to bury all that potential.

LifeStar Project initiative of the Millard Foundation

American Federation for Aging Research

Infoaging

Молекулярная и клеточная биология: Ак. Георгиев Г.П. 242,0

Фундаментальные науки - медицине Ак. Григорьев А.И. 81,0

О программах фундаментальных исследований РАН на 2008 год

Устойчивый рост доли пожилых людей в структуре народонаселения мира обусловил формирование новых представлений о старости, роли пожилых людей в социальном развитии.

Уважение к пожилым людям, забота о них, позитивное отношение к старости, формируемое с детства, наряду с готовностью к ее наступлению признается нормой для каждого человека и общества в целом.

Реальность сегодняшнего дня - постоянное присутствие многих пожилых людей среди нас. Происходит решительный отход от мнения о пожилых людях как бремени для российского общества, дальнейший прогресс которого возможен в контексте общества для людей всех возрастов.

Изучить механизмы старения, роль иммунологических и иммуногенетических факторов развития возрастной патологии и долголетия человека.

Разработать методы профилактики, диагностики и лечения «болезней старости с учетом полиморбидности; комплекса мер реабилитации для возрастных групп пожилого и старческого возраста.

оказанию помощи населения старших

genomics and biotechnology for health;

A JTI focuses on one specific industrial area, has a well defined objective, addresses a market failure and is funded by a combination of private and public investments.

Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI)

This might as well be language lifted from a mythical government release on the Full Employment Act for Gerontologists. It's all so grey and tired - rescue the scientists, pay the scientists, help the scientists. Note the utter absence of any sort of discussion of goals or results. What are these scientists actually doing? What is the value of it? Where are they going? When will they get there? What does it mean to me?

Another thought: the languishing of aging science - in comparison to, say, regenerative medicine, tissue engineering or cancer research - makes $2.8 million a big deal. $10 million from the Glenn Foundation to establish the Paul F. Glenn Laboratories for the Biological Mechanisms of Aging was a big splash in the pond. With those numbers for comparison, note that the Methuselah Foundation has $4.8 million pledged to Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) research.

Arizona State University, December 6-7, 2008

Unlike high-energy particle physics or space science, nanotechnology springs from fields (surface science, materials science, chemistry, biology) that have no tradition of developing conceptual designs for complex systems, debating the knowns, unknowns, costs, benefits, alternative objectives, alternative solutions, and so forth, to eventually converge on objectives that coordinate the work of hundreds or thousands for a decade or more.

Financing Anti-Aging Research

Project LIFE: A Comprehensive Global Approach to Anti-Aging Funding & Research

Financing Anti-Aging Research with Biotech