Presenters
Robert Cargill, Glionics Inc
Health technology entrepreneur working to accelerate advances in regenerative medicine. Driven, goal-oriented leader dedicated to bringing engineering and technology into the world of medicine in order to ease the burden of chronic disease, extend healthy human lifespan, and reduce the cost of healthcare. Interests in longevity technologies including models for advanced preclinical testing, regenerative medicine, epigenetic reprogramming, and cell therapy strategies to combat age-related indications such as sarcopenia, osteoporosis, ...
Ashton Trotman-Grant, Fifty Years Capital
Ashton Trotman-Grant is a Synthetic Biologist at Fifty Years, where he supports partnerships with bio founders daring to change the world for the better. Ash has a PhD (ABD) from the lab of Dr. Juan Carlos Zúñiga-Pflücker at the University of Toronto, Canada, where he studied thymic regeneration and T cell development. Inspired by the potential of living medicines, he co-founded Notch Therapeutics, a company that designs and manufactures therapeutic T cells from pluripotent stem cells. His experiences have built up unique...
Alex Trapp, Retro.bio
I'm building the computational biology team at Retro. We're a young startup with $180M in initial funding focusing on cellular reprogramming, autophagy, and plasma-inspired therapeutics for age-related diseases. I came to Retro after spending time in Dr. Vadim Gladyshev’s research group at Harvard, where I worked broadly at the intersection of epigenetics and aging. While in Boston, I developed the first computational framework for single-cell epigenetic age profiling, published on the cover of Nature Aging...
Summary:
What is the most undervalued area for longevity progress we should pursue?
Reversal of immunosenescence could be accomplished through adoptive T-cell transfer from a bank of universal induced immature T-cells with ex-vivo maturation and selection within an autologous iPSC-derived ex vivo thymus.
Where are we today? Where would we like to be?
Autologous CAR-T cell production is an FDA-approved therapy for several hematological cancers. Commercial scale production of master cell banks of genetically-modified induced T&NK cells is in US trials. Human thymus organoid production has proof of concept. Production of iPSC-derived thymi and in-vitro thymopoiesis in mice has been published.
What public and private actions have the biggest impact on those goals?
An academic or industry group needs to assemble the proper iPSC-derived universal donor cell bank. There should be a GMP iT differentiation process from that bank, as well as GMP autologous iPSC-derived thymus organoid generation. There should also be a GMP in-vitro thymopoiesis process in preparation for an IND filing.
What people, funding, resources, experiments would be required to test this hypothesis?
We need personnel with universal donor genetic engineering expertise, iPSC-derived cell bank manufacturing expertise, and personnel with experience growing thymus organoids and using them for in-vitro thymopoiesis. These processes need to be translated to clinical-scale GMP processes.
