Thanks for writing the OP and for your response, I now see you mentioned this in the original. I’m excited to check your links out.
Other commenters mentioned that an issue to anti-aging research in humans is the regulatory barriers.
Part of the reason I’m interested in tissue engineering is that it may circumvent that issue to some extent. You can do your research relatively freely on tissue until you’re able to replicate a certain organ, test it on people who need a transplant, and “patch together” an approach to life extension in this way.
I wasn’t precisely sure about the anti-aging applications of tissue engineering, so I asked a colleague and this is what he said:
The first application of tissue engineering is preclinical drug testing. Drug development starts with preclinical animal testing, but the vast majority of drugs that work in animals do not work in people. Estimates vary, but about 97% of preclinical leads that enter clinical trials do not exit them. Human organoids are a potential alternative that could allow at least some of this preclinical data to be obtained from humans, not animals, and hopefully be more accurate.
The second application of tissue engineering is testing cell therapies. Many future rejuvenative aging therapies will probably involve permanently engrafting engineered cells into people. If you can, say, engineer dermis in the lab, you can assess whether therapeutic fibroblasts can engraft in that dermis and whether they evenutally become cancerous.
The third application of tissue engineering is clinically putting engineered tissue into people. For example, some aging researchers are interested in thymic regeneration, but a potentially easier alternative would be adding engineered thymus-like tissues to a person instead of regenerating the involuted thymus.
Thanks for writing the OP and for your response, I now see you mentioned this in the original. I’m excited to check your links out.
Other commenters mentioned that an issue to anti-aging research in humans is the regulatory barriers.
Part of the reason I’m interested in tissue engineering is that it may circumvent that issue to some extent. You can do your research relatively freely on tissue until you’re able to replicate a certain organ, test it on people who need a transplant, and “patch together” an approach to life extension in this way.
Great to hear you are interested in contributing!
I wasn’t precisely sure about the anti-aging applications of tissue engineering, so I asked a colleague and this is what he said:
So, it definitely seems important!