Dear Friends,

We hope you’ve been having a productive and satisfying 2014.

If you haven’t seen it yet, definitely visit our new Methuselah Foundation blog and let us know what you think. We’ve been publishing weekly posts, including a primer on the science of organ regeneration and a regenerative medicine news roundup from around the web during April and May.

We’ve also posted several recent interviews there, with Dr. Alan Russell of Carnegie Mellon, Dr. Takanori Takebe of Yokohama City University, Dr. Eric Lagasse of the University of Pittsburgh, and Brock Reeve of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute. In the weeks ahead, look out for part 2 of the Brock Reeve piece, a new interview with MIT’s Dr. Robert Langer, and more.

CONGRATULATIONS TO DR. HUBER WARNER

On May 30th, at the 43rd Annual Meeting of the American Aging Association in San Antonio, Texas, we awarded a $10,000 Methuselah Prize to Dr. Huber Warner for founding the National Institute on Aging’s Intervention Testing Program (ITP), a “multi-institutional study investigating treatments with the potential to extend lifespan and delay disease and dysfunction in mice.” Dr. Warner is a former program director for the NIA Biology of Aging Program and former Associate Dean of Research for the College of Biological Sciences at the University of Minnesota.

Kevin Perrott, Huber Warner, and Randy Strong at the 43rd Annual Meeting of the American Aging Association

According to Kevin Perrott, Executive Director of the Methuselah Prize, “The vision Dr. Warner showed, and his persistence over years of resistance to establish the ITP, is truly worthy of recognition. This program is going to provide not only potential near-term interventions in the aging process, but hard data to support claims of health benefits in a statistically significant manner. Science needs solid foundations on which to base further investigations, and the ITP provides the highest level of confidence yet established.”

“I saw lots of papers from grantees of the NIA about slowing down aging and extending lifespan,” said Dr. Warner, “but they were rarely backed up and given credibility through testing. Research over the last 25 years has been characterized by great success in identifying genes that play some role in extending the late-life health and longevity of several useful animal models of aging, such as yeast, fruit flies, and mice. The next challenging step is to demonstrate how this information might be used to increase the health of older members of our human populations around the world as they age.”

OTHER NEWS

With New Organ, we’ve been busy growing our partner alliance, garnering endorsements (for example, from the Founding Fellows of the Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine International Society), defining criteria for our upcoming heart prize, and working toward an official announcement of our first group of teams participating in the liver prize. We’ve had good initial interest, with five teams committed so far, and we’re currently in dialogue with many more.

The pre-release construction phase of our beautiful marble and granite monument installation in the U.S. Virgin Islands, to honor all of the major donors who are part of the Methuselah 300, will be completed by August. We’ve got some cool surprises in store, and our goal is to formally dedicate the monument in the first quarter of 2015, during the peak tourist season—with as many of you in attendance as are able!

Finally, don’t miss the SENS Research Foundation’s upcoming Rejuvenation Biotechnology Conference, taking place on August 21-23 in Santa Clara, CA. All the details are here.

And as always, please don’t hesitate to contact us with any questions, comments, and feedback.

Warm regards,

Dave Gobel