A Look Into George Church and Rejuvenate Bio's Work on Extreme Longevity

Sunday - October 8 2023, 22:53 UTC - 1 year ago

Harvard's George Church has been involved in starting successful biotech companies and has past experience initiating the Human and Personal Genome Projects. His current project, with Rejuvenate Bio, is a combination gene therapy clinical trial to treat age-related diseases in humans with an aim of developing and scaling human genome engineering to 20,000 targeted genes at a time. This ultimately aims for extreme longevity in humans.

Harvard’s George Church has been involved in starting many successful biotech companies. In 1984, he developed the first direct genomic sequencing method, which resulted in the first genome sequence (the human pathogen, H. pylori). He helped initiate the Human Genome Project in 1984 and the Personal Genome Project in 2005. George invented the broadly applied concepts of molecular multiplexing and tags, homologous recombination methods, and array DNA synthesizers. His many innovations have been the basis for a number of companies including Editas (Gene therapy); Gen9bio (Synthetic DNA); and Veritas Genetics (full human genome sequencing).

Rejuvenate Bio is one his companies that has completed some clinical trials of combination gene therapy to treat age related diseases in dogs. They will soon start human clinical trials for combination gene therapy to treat age related diseases.

George Church is also leading an effort to develop and scale human genome engineering to 20,000 targeted genes at time as a process in about 6 years. It would be a lab proven capability at that time and then worked through the clinical trials. Large scale gene modification for adults that fixes all seven biological pathways for aging is what George believes will enable extreme longevity in humans. He thinks we can go beyond the 200 year lifespans of the bowhale.