BioSynthAge: Do not go gentle into that good night

Why ageing?

How do you envision yourself as an elderly member of society? Frail, with a stooped posture and with greater risk of some cancers? Or healthy, active and living a high quality of life? This year the UCL iGEM team are working to build new systems that increase the healthy human lifespan and solve some of the issues of the ageing population. We are achieving this by focusing on the root cause as opposed to traditional medicine which focuses on treating the symptoms of disease. For instance, we are developing gene therapies that target cellular aging and encourage cellular and tissue regeneration.

Ageing is a process that is caused by the cellular degeneration that leads to reduced maximum functional capacity of many organs, reduced capacity of cells to divide and increased risk of age-related diseases such as cancer. Simply put as cells age they become increasingly poor at functioning and repairing damage [3] .

Even though we are living longer than ever before, this does not equate to a higher quality of life in our older years. About 2/3 of the global population (100,000 per day) die as a result of age related causes. In industrialised nations, the proportion is much higher, reaching 90% [1] . We believe that by targeting the causes of ageing, we are able in turn to cure the symptoms of ageing such as age related diseases like Alzheimer's and lung disease (COPD).

We are living longer, and maintaining a high quality of life depends on healthy ageing. We all aspire to a long and healthy lives in old age, but we know that older people are at increased risk of disease and disability that can seriously affect quality of life for them and their families.

Healthy ageing is about “optimising opportunities for good health, so that older people can take an active part in society and enjoy an independent and high quality of life” [2].

Ageing is not necessarily a burden, and it doesn’t decrease a person’s ability to contribute to society. By showcasing some practical synthetic biology solutions to healthy ageing, interacting with the society, talking to politicians, religious leaders and policy makers we hope to that UCL iGEM can make healthy ageing a reality.

An ageing themed project has never been explored before on iGEM and we are really excited to build new systems that solve the issues of the ageing population as well as add to the registry and be one of the first people to propose synthetic biology solutions to ageing!

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