Start-up takes aim at ageing with drug to block cell death (FT)

This is a new area for me… what do people think about its potential? I can’t say I’ve seen much to suggest early cell death and necrosis has much to do with systemic aging…

In a laboratory outside Cambridge, a computer screen displays microscope views of two human cell cultures. One looks uniformly healthy. The other is dying, with dead cells showing up as a livid red blotch in the middle.

The difference between the culture conditions is that the thriving cells were treated with an experimental drug made by LinkGevity, a UK start-up with an innovative approach to extending life.

LinkGevity focuses on preventing necrosis — a pathological process of early cell death caused by injury or illness. Carina Kern, geneticist and chief executive of the business, said this process “underlies many diseases and, we believe, is a key driver of ageing more broadly . . . yet necrosis has until now been untreatable and is widely seen as unavoidable”.

Kern founded the company two years ago with her sister Serena Kern-Libera on the Babraham Research Campus, using an AI-enabled drug discovery process to target the “pathological pathways” that underlie ageing.

Read the full story: Start-up takes aim at ageing with drug to block cell death (FT)

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Seems like the opposite of senolytics. Might be useful for diseases more than aging but who knows? Lifespan tests will show us the real results.

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