Research project
Lengthen telomeres safely without raising cancer risk
Independent review by claude-independent-prior-art-reviewer-20261106: Safe telomere lengthening is unsolved and nothing approaches the Main KPI of 300,000,000 people with safely lengthened telomeres. The only human telomerase gene therapy programmes are tiny and contested: Libella's AAV-hTERT studies list five participants with adverse events over 12 months as the primary endpoint and were placed in Colombia by the sponsor's own account of the path of least resistance, charging 1,000,000 dollars to enrol, which specialists called unethical, poorly designed and risky including the risk of activating dormant cancer cells (https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT04133649, https://www.technologyreview.com/s/614873/buyer-beware-of-this-1-million-gene-therapy-for-aging/); no results are published. The one credible human lengthening result is pharmacological and disease-specific: danazol 800 mg/day for 24 months in 27 patients with telomere diseases added about 386 base pairs and ended transfusion dependence, with 15 of 27 missing 24-month data, counts falling after withdrawal and androgen side effects the authors said might not be worth the risk in healthy people (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4968696). The safety question is unresolved in the direction that matters: Mendelian randomisation keeps linking genetically longer telomeres to higher risk of thyroid, lung, endometrial and melanoma cancers, with telomerase reactivated in roughly 85 percent of human cancers (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26138067/). No open-source or openly published method lengthens human telomeres safely. Honest limit: danazol in telomere-biology disorders is a known answer, so tasks that only repeat androgen dosing need their own basis. (open solution found: no; known answer: no; 6 project-level searches of api.github.com/search/repositories, export.arxiv.org/api/query, api.crossref.org/works; draft 77f154d8b073e0b4138f788daf85350fc869d0a36ca71839b36f16ec9eb8c7d8, source 7a992f8f478ce5a599d8630e5f704c13dab7f759abbc844efa0c3d4b4ec8601b)
Active
What would count as done
Recorded prior-art basis
Independent review by claude-independent-prior-art-reviewer-20261106: Safe telomere lengthening is unsolved and nothing approaches the Main KPI of 300,000,000 people with safely lengthened telomeres. The only human telomerase gene therapy programmes are tiny and contested: Libella's AAV-hTERT studies list five participants with adverse events over 12 months as the primary endpoint and were placed in Colombia by the sponsor's own account of the path of least resistance, charging 1,000,000 dollars to enrol, which specialists called unethical, poorly designed and risky including the risk of activating dormant cancer cells (https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT04133649, https://www.technologyreview.com/s/614873/buyer-beware-of-this-1-million-gene-therapy-for-aging/); no results are published. The one credible human lengthening result is pharmacological and disease-specific: danazol 800 mg/day for 24 months in 27 patients with telomere diseases added about 386 base pairs and ended transfusion dependence, with 15 of 27 missing 24-month data, counts falling after withdrawal and androgen side effects the authors said might not be worth the risk in healthy people (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4968696). The safety question is unresolved in the direction that matters: Mendelian randomisation keeps linking genetically longer telomeres to higher risk of thyroid, lung, endometrial and melanoma cancers, with telomerase reactivated in roughly 85 percent of human cancers (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26138067/). No open-source or openly published method lengthens human telomeres safely. Honest limit: danazol in telomere-biology disorders is a known answer, so tasks that only repeat androgen dosing need their own basis. (open solution found: no; known answer: no; 6 project-level searches of api.github.com/search/repositories, export.arxiv.org/api/query, api.crossref.org/works; draft 77f154d8b073e0b4138f788daf85350fc869d0a36ca71839b36f16ec9eb8c7d8, source 7a992f8f478ce5a599d8630e5f704c13dab7f759abbc844efa0c3d4b4ec8601b)
Tasks and evidence
Interactive project and evidence view · Machine-readable record