 Welcome to our new X-10 YouTube channel and Happy New Year! 2020 was a doozy, huh? This is the first episode of Lifespan News on X-10's new YouTube channel and also our first episode overall. Science and advocacy episodes as well as others will follow soon. Our next X-10 episode will be on the topic of chromatin remodeling and it will be published on January 7th, 2021 at noon Eastern time. While 2020 wasn't especially unique and challenging year, 2020 also brought us a lot of exciting longevity scientific advancements. So let's start off 2021 in our new X-10 YouTube channel with a recap of the most exciting stories from Lifespan News in 2020. Welcome to Lifespan News on X-10, your source for longevity science updates. I'm your host, Brent Nally. 2020 brought many new longevity-focused initiatives that show how the subject of healthy longevity is growing in popularity, not just amongst the general public, but also institutions. The World Health Organization launched a new data portal to monitor the health and well-being of people over 60. While the portal doesn't focus on regenerative medicine against aging, it helps draw attention to the problem of aging and it can be very useful to policymakers to foster initiatives aimed at supporting better health as we age. If the World Health Organization doesn't yet seem to know about aging as a malleable process, then the European Longevity Initiative launched by biologists and philosopher Attila Cordis may help change that. The European Longevity Initiative aims at bringing together EU citizens and residents to advocate for healthy longevity and bring this issue to the attention of lawmakers. We encourage you to subscribe to our new X-10 YouTube channel to help us solve the human aging problem. Once you're subscribed, be sure to click the notification bell and select all notifications to ensure you don't miss any videos. Now, back to the news. 2020 also brought us a new scientific journal focused specifically on aging and gerontological science. The Lancet Healthy Longevity was launched in 2020. For years now, there has been no shortage of the growing interest of the scientific community for this field. And by the way, Nature Aging, a spin-off of the popular journal Nature, focused on aging research will launch officially in January 2021, although articles are already available on its website. Several companies and research centers received substantial funding for aging research in 2020. As an example, a $5 million grant by the National Institute of Aging in the U.S. will be used to establish the San Diego Nathan Shock Center. This new center will be studying cellular and tissue aging in humans, reaching out to medical practitioners to let them know about advancements in the field of aging is every bit as important as creating new institutes and financing research. And 2020 saw the launching of an initiative in that direction. The Longevity Medicine Course held by Deep Longevity, a spin-off of Enceliopo Medicine. I took this course and I thoroughly enjoyed it and I really appreciate the team putting it together. And I'm also very excited for the more advanced longevity medicine courses that are coming soon. So if you would like to learn more about biojarentology, the hallmarks of aging, and other longevity course content, then check out the description for links. Lifespan.io's annual Ending Age-related Diseases Conference took place on August 20th and 21st, 2020, virtually. Originally a real world event, our conference turned into a fully online event due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The conference featured many prominent experts in the field such as Judy Campisi, Steve Horvath, Arboretta Gray, and many more. Recordings of the events are publicly available on Lifespan's YouTube channel and website. COVID-19 has certainly been the dominant news item of 2020. COVID-19 has also raised awareness of issues around aging because aging is the foremost risk factor for morbidity and mortality of COVID-19. COVID-19 disproportionately affects the elderly probably because of inflammation. The aging immune system is an underappreciated driver of the increased risk of poor health in old people. This may serve as a wake-up call on the importance to target basic aging mechanisms in order to reduce the vulnerability of the age during epidemics and or pandemics. COVID-19 has also begun a discussion about the health of the elderly and our collective responsibility to keep people safe and healthy as they age. Many experts of the longevity community have spoken up about the clear connection between aging and COVID-19. If you'd like to learn more then we suggest you read the article linked in the description below. We hope that at the very least the COVID-19 pandemic has brought more awareness to aging research. Our next story from 2020 was mixed news from Unity Biotechnology which announced that the Sinalitic candidate UBX-0101 did not have a significant effect in a phase two clinical trial. However Unity Biotechnology also announced a phase one clinical trial of a new Sinalitic UBX-1325 which aims at clearing senescent cells that may be involved in the progression of diabetic macular edema, an eye disease that can develop in patients suffering from type 2 diabetes and can lead to blindness. For our next story a study has shown that resveratrol which is found in grapes, peanuts, cocoa, blueberries, raspberries, and cranberries might be beneficial for people suffering from heart failure. In a small three-month human trial participants who were given resveratrol had an improvement in their heart function along with increased exercise capacity and a reduction in inflammatory cytokines. These are promising results but there needs to be a larger-scale trial ideally one with a longer treatment and follow-up period. Reversing cellular age in mice restores vision. Researchers managed to restore vision and reverse cellular aging in eye tissue and mice using cellular reprogramming with the yamanaka factors. This increased the number of cells surviving optic nerve injury and produced a five-fold increase in optic nerve regrowth. The treatment also restored vision and aging mice and made their optic nerve cells behave similarly to those of young mice. Next UC San Francisco scientists discovered that just a few doses of an experimental drug called ISRIB can reverse cognitive aging in mice within days. Older mice given small doses of ISRIB performed as well on a maze task as younger mice and discontinued for three weeks after the treatment. A single dose of ISRIB was enough to make the neurons form connections and react as sensitively as those of younger mice. For our next story from 2020, selectivity of the blood-brain barrier changes with age. Researchers have discovered that the performance of the barrier changes with age becoming less selective. It's not yet clear if or how this will change the research and therapeutics landscape, but it could affect how we think about processes involved in age-related disease and this could also be relevant for the design and delivery of therapeutics. For our final recap story from 2020, a deep learning network known as AlphaFold outperformed other teams in a protein structure prediction challenge by a significant margin. In some cases, its predictions were indistinguishable from experimentally determined structures. This is important because form follows function. A protein does its job because of the way it's shaped and predicting the shape of a protein from its sequence has been challenging for decades. AlphaFold successfully predicted the structure of a bacterial protein that had eluded researchers for a long time. The general consensus is that AlphaFold will be a game changer for structural biology, which will have a huge impact on related fields like molecular biology. That's all the stories from our 2020 Lifespan News review. Thanks for watching on our new X10 YouTube channel. Our next X10 episode on this YouTube channel will focus on chromatin remodeling on January 7th, 2021, noon Eastern time. Before you go, there's a few quick, free, and simple things that you can do to help us solve the human aging problem. If you haven't already, then please like this video, share this video on your social media to let your network know about our new X10 YouTube channel. Which of these stories from 2020 excited you the most? And was there a story in here that we didn't include that you thought that we should? Please let us know what you think in the comments below. And finally, please make sure that you're subscribed with the bell turned to all notifications. We really appreciate it, and we look forward to seeing you in the next episode, at least as healthy as you are now.