May 1st, 2023

Here's update #5 on our study!

The more timekeeping-inclined among you may have noticed that this time I'm a full week late, relative to the two-week interval that I've been religiously adhering to until now. That's mostly just because there is less to say right now than originally expected, on account of the two-week interval that we inserted (see update #3) between the HSC treatment and the senolytic treatment, so as to allow the animals a little time to recover. Arguably that has now become unnecessary, given the switch to oral gavage for the senolytic (see update #4), but once we had made the change to the schedule there was no reason to change back.

So, well, cohort 3 (i.e. treatment groups 6 and 7) have now had all their treatments. These groups are the first ones to receive telomerase gene therapy; group 6 is getting only that, while group 7 is getting that plus HSCs plus senolytic, so all but rapa. Cohort 4, consisting of the all-but-senolytic, the all-but-HSCs and the all-four, is still part-way through.

But other than that, the good news is that there's no news! No new hiccups. Thus, rather than disappoint you with a short post, let me instead add a photo that perhaps conveys the sheer scale of this experiment. These are insulin syringe tops, from the dosing of mice with virus, and it's only about 20% of the total. Staggering.