Alzheimer’s disease

Aging is poorly understood, While the process seems obvious, the reality is far more complex than we realize. In this series of blogs I will explain how aging works and how aging results in disease. In passing, I will touch upon why aging occurs and will culminate in an explanation of the most effect single […]

Aging and Disease 0.1 – A Prologue Over the past 20 years, I have published numerous articles, chapters, and books explaining how aging and age-related disease work, as well as the potential for intervention in both aging and age-related disease. The first of these publications was Reversing Human Aging (1996), followed by my articles in […]

Many of you have written to me, expressing surprise about the lack of public reaction (such as media interest) regarding the potential for telomerase therapy to treat age-related diseases. Some of you wonder why people (and particularly the media) “don’t get it”. I’ve had the same thought for a bit more than two decades now, […]

About a century ago, in a small American town, the first automobile chugged to a stop in front of the general store, where a local man stared at the apparition in disbelief, then asked “where’s your horse?” A long explanation followed, involving internal combustion, pistons, gasoline, and driveshafts. The local listened politely but with growing […]

A physician friend asked if a patient’s APOE status (which alleles they carry, for example APOE4, APOE3, or APOE2) would effect how well they should respond to telomerase therapy. Ideally, it may not make much difference, except that the genes you carry (including the APOE genes and the alleles for each type of APOE gene, […]

A major stumbling block in our understanding of age-related disease, such as Alzheimer’s, is a propensity to focus on large numbers of genes, proteins, etc., without asking what lies “upstream” that results in the associations between such genes (etc.) and the disease. While some would tout the advantages of using Artificial Intelligence to attack the […]

Several of you have asked why I don’t update this blog more often. My priority is to take effective interventions for age-related diseases to FDA phase 1 human trials, rather than blogging about the process. Each week, Outlook reminds me to update the blog, but there are many tasks that need doing if we are […]

Recently, John Cooke at the Houston Methodist Research Institute, showed that telomerase, when expressed in cells from progeric children, caused a “substantial physiologically relevant and meaningful effect on the lifespan and function of the cells.” As many of you know, progeria is a disease in which young children appear old, with baldness and osteoarthritis, and […]

Why do Alzheimer’s interventions always fail? Whether you ask investors or pharmaceutical companies, it has become axiomatic that Alzheimer’s “has been a graveyard for many a company”, regardless of what they try. But in a fundamental way, all past and all current companies – whether big pharma or small biotech – try the same approach. […]

What is regenerative medicine? To bystanders, regenerative medicine might be merely a catch-all category or simply a current medical fashion. The reality, however, is that regenerative medicine represents a conceptual, material, and historical transformation of human medical care. Even the key researchers and clinicians who are moving this field ahead are often so busy in […]

Curing disease correlates with insight, not blind effort. There is an eternal trade-off between insight and effort. If we think carefully, understand the problem, and plan, then effort is minimized. If (as too often happens) we think carelessly, misunderstand the problem, and rely on hope instead of planning, then effort is not only maximized, but […]

Innovation requires novel thinking, not incremental actions. We can cure age-related diseases – such as Alzheimer’s – not with funding, intelligence, or effort alone, but only if we reassess our assumptions. Until we look carefully at our conceptual foundations, we cannot expect to build a therapeutic structure. Ironically, the key problem lies in our looking […]

Often, when problems seem intractable, we’re asking the wrong questions. We want to get to the moon: how can we jump higher? We want to get to the stars: how can we make bigger rockets? As Henry Ford once suggested, people wanted a better way to travel, so they wanted to know how to breed […]

Everyone favors innovation and diversity, as long as you’re not innovative or diverse. This remark, snarky as it is, is also (heartbreakingly) accurate. We argue that we support innovation, but we fight to prevent innovative concepts or industries. The more innovative an idea, the more we actively resist, regulate, and revolt against that idea. Diversity […]

It’s funny how often we make assumptions that are not only wrong, but that we are completely unaware of making. Having spent more than twenty years dealing with the clinical implications of cell aging, telomeres come to mind as an immediate example of this mistake. Hardly a week goes by without another claim that some […]