In the thick of SENS 2, a recent celebration and anti-aging scientific conference at Cambridge University, I had the pleasure of meeting John D. Furber, founder of Legendary Pharmaceuticals. I was blogging the conference and John was giving a presentation on crosslink breakers.

During one break in the relentless SENS 2 pace, I struck up a conversation with John and when he said that, "Legendary Pharmaceuticals has been established to develop pharmaceutical drugs and gene therapies which repair and reverse progressive damage to mitochondria and lysosomes, in order to prevent and treat serious late-onset diseases commonly associated with aging", he struck a familiar chord because this is the same repairing of lysosomes (cellular garbage collectors) and mitochondria (the cell's power plant) that Aubrey de Grey describes in his SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) initiative for curing human aging.

Indeed, further conversation revealed that Aubrey is on the scientific advisory board of Legendary Pharmaceuticals along with many other top anti-aging scientists like Judith Campisi of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Buck Institute for Age Research, also John C. Guerin, Director of the Centenarian Species and Rockfish Project.

To bring you up to speed on what John Furber was sharing with other scientists at SENS 2, let me say first that we're dealing with some pretty complex science here, but in simple terms, as we age, certain long lived proteins in our body hook together in harmful ways called crosslinking. This leads to hardening of the arteries, high blood pressure, heart failure and strokes. Crosslinking is also involved in urinary bladder stiffness which causes us to wake up in the middle of the night to urinate more frequently as we get older. Legendary Pharmaceuticals, John Furber's company, is working on ways to break up crosslinks to solve these and other aging problems.

Of course, there is a great deal more to it than that and I recommend visiting the Legendary Pharmaceuticals website for more information. You'll find it not only very informative but easily understood to boot. For hard core scientists out there, here's the link to the abstract of John Furber's presentation at SENS 2.

Anyhow, to make a long story short, John says, "New understandings in the sciences of Genetics, Genomics, Proteomics, Cell Biology and the Physiology of Aging are combining with new capabilities in the technologies of Combinatorial Chemistry, High Throughput Screening, and Rational Drug Design to permit the development of novel drugs and gene therapies specifically targeted at correcting the processes and repairing the damage which cause some of the most serious declines of aging."

We were very fortunate to record this 5 minute 26 second "wild track" webcam video of Ken Morse of The Ageria Group interviewing John Furber of Legendary Pharmaceuticals about aging, the extracellular matrix and intracellualar aggregates. It came out pretty good for a gonzo-citizen-journalism on a shoestring type of production. You can download it here (right click...save target as...[8.83 MB - wmv file] - you know the drill). The URL is: http://anti-ageing.us/graphics/video/John_Furber.WMV .