Gompertzian Law is hard to spell, but pretty easy to understand: the older a mammal is, the more likely it is to die. That’s just a fact of life—except, apparently, for naked mole rats. A new study from Google's Calico Labs, which has the moonshot goal of unlocking the secrets of aging, found that the bald rodents’ risk of death isn’t necessarily proportionate to its age. The creepy, hairless critter (which was famously featured as an anthropomorphic, nacho-loving side kick in the cartoon Kim Possible) has an unusually long life span, and a host of characteristics that make it seem relatively invincible. Naked mole rats don’t appear to feel pain the way most mammals do, and only a few indivi
ORLANDO, Fla., Jan. 10, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Libella Gene Therapeutics LLC will conduct an outside the United States(OUS) clinical trial in Cartagena, Colombia, using gene therapy to reverse age-related diseases, starting with Alzheimer's. Unlike traditional drugs, which tend to be taken for months or years at a time, gene therapy interventions are intended to be one-off treatments that tackle a disease at its source, repairing faulty DNA and allowing the body to fix itself. Every day 228 Americans die from Alzheimer's disease, and there is currently no known treatment or cure. Gene therapy offers the ability to permanently correct a disease at its most basic level, the genome, and could off
It was a notable year for gene therapy. The first such treatments in the U.S. came to market this year after winning approval from the Food and Drug Administration. Meanwhile, researchers announced more miraculous cures of patients with rare and life-threatening diseases who were treated with experimental therapies. Decades in the making, gene therapy—the idea of modifying a person’s DNA to treat disease—represents a major shift in medicine. Instead of just treating symptoms like the vast majority of drugs on the market, gene therapy aims to correct the underlying genetic cause of a disease. Doctors and scientists hope these treatments will be a one-shot cure. Last year, we wrote that 2016 w
