From the desk of Methuselah Foundation chairman Aubrey de Grey:
I am writing to notify you that registration and abstract submission are now open for the third Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) conference, to be held at Queens’ College, Cambridge, England on September 6th-10th 2007. The early registration and abstract submission deadlines are both June 15th. All details, including forms for abstract submission and online registration, are at the conference website:
The preliminary program already has 48 confirmed speakers, all of them world leaders in their field. As for previous SENS conferences, the emphasis of this meeting is on “applied gerontology” — the design and implementation of biomedical interventions that may, jointly, constitute a comprehensive panel of rejuvenation therapies, sufficient to restore middle-aged or older laboratory animals (and, in due course, humans) to a youthful degree of physiological robustness. The list of sessions and confirmed speakers is as follows:
New pharmaceutical interventions in aging: Patrizia D’Alessio, Laura Dugan, Randy Strong
Immunotherapy against cancer: Zheng Cui, Robert Hawkins, Claudia Gravekamp
Persistent viruses in aging: Ruth Itzhaki, Ed Mocarski, Rita Effros, Arne Akbar
Protecting the brain (genes and delivery): Elizabeth Corder, Pedro Alvarez
Damage to long-lived intracellular molecules: Sataro Goto, Kim Janda, Paola Scaffidi
Non-insertional gene therapy: Nicola Philpott, Michele Calos, Fyodor Urnov
Rescue of mitochondrial mutations: Ian Holt, Marisol Corral-Debrinski, Volkmar Weissig, Samit Adhya
Telomeres and cell senescence: Mary Perry, Gillian Butler-Browne, Lenhard Rudolph, Walter Berger
Non-specific nuclear DNA damage in aging: Jan Vijg, Michael Siciliano, Aubrey de Grey
Deriving autologous embryonic stem cells: Chang-Kyu Lee, Wolfgang Engel, Miodrag Stojkovic
Regeneration of complex structures: Stephen Minger, Chris Mason, David Gardiner
Eliminating beta-amyloid: Ashley Bush, Beka Solomon, Yoh Matsumoto, David Morgan
Repair and turnover of extracellular material: Robin Franklin, Dwight Towler, Cato Laurencin
Long-term goals of biomedical gerontology: Chris Phoenix, Ben Best, Ray Kurzweil
Outreach to key communities: Linda Powers, Michael Rose, Huber Warner, Bernard Siegel
In addition, there will be at least a dozen short talks selected from submitted abstracts, as well as poster sessions each evening. Authors of short talks and posters will, like the invited speakers, be invited to submit a paper summarising their presentation for the proceedings volume, which will be published in the high-impact journal Rejuvenation Research early in 2008.
Please note that registration fees are fully inclusive of accommodation and all meals. Journalists wishing to obtain press passes are asked to contact me by email (aubrey@sens.org).
I hope to welcome you to Cambridge in September!
Cheers, Aubrey
Aubrey de Grey
Organiser, SENS 3
Chairman and Chief Science Officer, Methuselah Foundation
Editor-in-Chief, Rejuvenation Research (impact factor 8.571)