• Home
• About Us
  • Mission
  • Who is Who
  • Sponsors
  • Contact Us
• FAQ & Media
  • Video FAQ
  • SENS FAQ
    • Overview
    • Time Frame
    • Credibility
    • Realizing SENS
  • Concerns
  • Multimedia
  • Press Releases
  • In The News
• The Mprize
  • Competitors
  • Scientific Advisors
  • Sponsors & Advisors
  • Structure
  • How to Compete
  • Record Holders
• SENS Research
  • SENS Overview
  • SENS FAQ
    • Overview
    • Time Frame
    • Credibility
    • Realizing SENS
  • SENS Resources
    • Publications
    • de Grey Bio
    • Institute Proposal
  • Current Projects
    • LysoSENS
    • MitoSENS
  • Future Directions
    • AmyloSENS
    • ApoptoSENS
    • GlycoSENS
    • OncoSENS
    • RepleniSENS
  • For Students
  • Delivery Options
• Funding
  • Progress
  • Donors List
  • The 300
• You Can Help
  • Donate
  • Volunteer
  • For Students
  • Other Ways
• Store
  • "Ending Aging" Book
  • Other Items
• Resources
  • Links
  • Other Items
• Meetings
  • Conferences
    • UABBA (2008)
    • ADCI (2008)
    • SENS3 (2007)
    • SENS2 (2005)
    • IABG10 (2003)
  • Roundtables
    • LysoSENS (2004)
    • WILT (2002)
    • Implications (2001)
    • Feasibility (2000)
  • Upcoming Talks

Rejuvenation Research
Impact Factor 8.353
More...

The SENS Platform An Engineering Approach to Curing Aging

Why do We Age?

Biological aging is a progressive, degenerative process of decay, in which the healthy cellular and molecular order laid down in our youth slowly falls apart in the face of accumulating aging damage to its functional structures. This damage is a series of unintended biochemical side-effects of normal metabolism. As more and more of our cellular and molecular structures suffer this damage, functionality is lost, and health, resilience, and vitality are slowly taken away from us, leading to increasing age-related pathology. Thus, as laid out in the Flowchart: metabolism ongoingly causes aging damage, and accumulating damage eventually reaches a critical mass at which it causes age-related frailty, disability, disease, and ultimately, death.

What Can We Do About it?

Medicine today allows us to alleviate some of the suffering of biological aging by treating age-related pathology as it emerges from the ongoing accumulation of aging damage to the structures of our bodies (see the Flowchart). However, this “geriatric” approach is ultimately a futile struggle against an ongoing metabolic damage that makes eventual pathology more and more inescapable.

An alternative approach would be to attempt to slow the rate at which aging damage accumulates in the first place, by altering the metabolic pathways that create it (see the Flowchart). This “gerontological” approach, while intuitive, holds very limited potential to alleviate age-related suffering and disease. Firstly, it requires us to improve the functioning of complex metabolic processes that we are still far from fully understanding. Secondly, it requires us to interfere with the very biochemistry of life itself, leading inevitably to harmful side-effects. And most importantly, even if successful, a “gerontological” approach can even in principle only slow down the aging process, rather than reverse it: it can draw out age-related degenerative processes, but cannot cure them.

An Engineering Solution to Biological Aging

There is a third way to intervene in the biological aging process: the “engineering” strategy (see the Flowchart). Instead of interfering with the metabolic processes that ongoingly cause aging damage (the “gerontological” approach) or fighting a losing battle to keep badly damaged bodies from falling apart altogether (the “geriatric,” conventional medical approach), the “engineering” strategy is based on the direct repair, replacement, or rendering harmless of the damaged structures themselves. In this approach, metabolism still causes ongoing damage, but the total burden of such damage is repaired well enough to prevent eventual pathology indefinitely (see the Flowchart).

Thus, the engineering strategy avoids both of the problems with the other approaches: it sidesteps our ignorance of metabolism (because it does not attempt to interfere with metabolic processes) but also pre-empts the chaos of pathology (because it prevents the precursors of that pathology from reaching dangerous levels). Instead, this approach allows us to perpetually maintain youthful health and functionality, because the total burden of damage is always maintained at levels similar to a biologically young person’s.

This “engineering” approach forms the broad basis for Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS), a detailed plan for curing human aging. This area of the Methuselah Foundation website sketches the outlines of the SENS platform, which is described in detail in the recent book Ending Aging , by Methuselah Foundation Chief Scientific Officer Dr. Aubrey de Grey (with Michael Rae).

The Methuselah Foundation SENS Research Program

As part of its mission to significantly increase the healthy human lifespan, the Foundation is funding scientific research to repair key aspects of the damage of aging, including:

1) LysoSENS – identification of microbial enzymes capable of removing the recalcitrant wastes of damaged cellular components that our cells can’t break down and recycle on their own (cellular “junk”), and delivering these enzymes to the cellular “incinerator” (the lysosome).

2) MitoSENS - the transfer of vulnerable genes from the damaging environment of our cellular “power plants” (mitochondria) to the relative safety of the cell nucleus.

With preliminary results from these projects proving exciting, and with greater funding coming onstream, the Methuselah Foundation is pushing forward to take on additional research projects aimed at repairing the damage of aging (see anticipated “Next Steps” research projects under the “Future Directions” from the SENS Research dropdown menu). To support our efforts and the work of these scientists, click here to join the ranks of generous donors and help make this new rejuvenation science a reality.