Rejuvenating the Thymus to Prevent Age-related Diseases - Dr. Greg Fahy

The SoCal Longevity Association presents:

Dr. Greg Fahy , PhD, Chief Scientific Officer, Co-founder
Intervene Immune, Inc.

"Rejuvenating the Thymus to Prevent Age-related Diseases"

Dr. Greg Fahy – Rejuvenating the Thymus to Prevent Age-related Diseases

Dr. Gregory M. Fahy [1] is a cryobiologist and biogerontologist. As Chief Scientific Officer and co-founder of Intervene Immune [2] , he led the TRIIM (Thymus Regeneration, Immunorestoration, and Insulin Mitigation) trial at Stanford, an FDA and IRB approved study targeting immune system regeneration, which was the first study to demonstrate that epigenetic aging can be reversed significantly in humans. He is the originator and Editor-in-Chief of The Future of Aging: Pathways to Human Life Extension, and has been a Fellow of the American Aging Association since 2005. As a cryobiologist, Dr. Fahy is also the world's foremost expert in organ cryopreservation by vitrification. He introduced the modern successful approach to vitrification for cryopreservation in cryobiology and he is widely credited, along with William F. Rall, for introducing vitrification into the field of reproductive biology.

Dr. Fahy will present his ground breaking research in rejuvenating the thymus to prevent age-related diseases and how this provides the first hint that the body’s "biological age" can be reversed [3].

The thymus gland is located at the top of the breastbone and is where the majority of T cells are produced by the immune system. One can think of the thymus as being like an army camp where new soldiers are trained and given their weapons to fight invading forces; in this case, the T cells are those soldiers, and the battlefield is your body. As we age, the thymus begins to shrink, and fewer numbers of T cells are created and trained to fight. This structural decay of the thymus is one of the main reasons why we become increasingly vulnerable to infectious diseases, such as influenza and pneumonia. The other reason is immune cells becoming senescent.

There are a number of possible solutions to this problem. Firstly, engineering new healthy and youthful thymic tissue might help to restore the immune system, and indeed a number of groups are working towards this. Secondly, some researchers are focused on encouraging the aged thymus to regrow using various approaches, such as stem cell transplants, cellular reprogramming or chemical compounds. Dr. Greg Fahy is involved in researching this second approach, and we are very excited he has accepted to talk to us about his work.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Fahy

[2] http://interveneimmune.com/

[3] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02638-w

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