May 30th, 2023

Image via Wikimedia Commons

The first thing to report this time is that all three of the one-time treatments are now complete, for all treatment groups. That means the telomerase gene therapy, the senolytic and the blood stem cells. The only treatment that we will be continuing is the addition of rapamycin to the mice's chow. I cannot say enough in praise of the heroes (OK, I've probably called them that enough times, I'll stop repeating it now!) at Ichor who performed this work over the past few months - including about ten staff who were enlisted at rather short notice from Ichor's other site, in order that the stem cell transplantation could avoid the need to freeze cells between their extraction from young mice and their injection into old ones.

So we now enter the phase of relative calm, where the only thing that's really going on is weighing the mice to see what the treatments are doing to their gross metabolism. As noted in the description on the LEVF site, we'll be launching into the full panel of health measures on a treatment-group-specific schedule, set by the rate at which mice in the given group die. Other than a couple of groups for which the total number of mice is now significantly different from 50 (see prior updates for explanation), we'll be kicking that off when a group hits 10 mice dying. As of now the closest we are to that is seven deaths, so we fully expect not to do the full panel on any group for another month or two. I will of course report on our findings as and when those points are reached.

Next update, I'll start reporting survival curves. I'm currently anticipating that by Christmas we have a good chance of seeing a pretty unarguable separation of curves between controls and anything that's working well. I don't expect to see that in time for Dublin, simply because not enough controls will have died. But that won't stop me updating you in the meantime!