A Note from William H. Andrews, Ph.D. President and CEO

A Point of Critical Mass for Anti-Aging Research?

It's been another exciting month at Sierra Sciences. On March 22, just last week, the results from our latest SAR custom screen came in, and we've discovered another four promising telomerase-inducing compounds. All four are significantly stronger than our first telomerase-inducing drug, C0057684- in one case, nearly 250% as potent.

It took Sierra Sciences eight years to discover C0057684. It took an additional two years to discover drugs more potent than C0057684. Now, we've repeated that accomplishment within one month. Advances that used to give us cause to break out the champagne and celebrate are becoming routine.

And the compounds themselves aren't the most important yield from our SAR work - even more valuable is the information we're receiving from these screens. For a decade, we've envisioned a drug that would render every cell in the human body immortal. Today, we're beginning to see a picture of what that drug looks like - of its shape and its chemical properties. The picture is still blurry, but it's rapidly coming into focus.

It's safe to say that progress in anti-aging research has begun to accelerate geometrically- not just here at Sierra Sciences, but in labs around the world. And mainstream publications around the world are beginning to take notice. Just three weeks after BBC Horizon's documentary on curing aging attracted two million viewers, Time Magazine ran a special 22-page section on curing aging on February 22, entitled "The Science of Living Longer," detailing work taking place across the globe. This issue reached an estimated 3.5 million people.

In the development of any new technology, there's a kind of "feedback loop" between progress and investment: progress attracts investment, which creates more progress, which attracts more investment, until finally the technology is perfected. It can take decades for this feedback loop to reach a point where the technology is progressing as fast as it can.

For example, look at the progress of the computer. The first commercial computer was developed in 1951, and the first personal computers were widely available in the early 1980s. But it wasn't really until the mid-1990s when we saw the cascading interaction between investment and technological progress that would completely transform our society.

People often remark that if they had bought Microsoft stock in the 1980s, they would by multi-millionaires today. We believe that what the 1980s were for computing, the 2010s will be for anti-aging research.

The existence of telomerase was predicted in 1973. It was discovered in Tetrahymena in 1985 by Blackburn and Greider, and in humans in 1994 by a team at Geron Corporation (which I personally led). But it's only now that progress in anti-aging science has begun to accelerate geometrically, and it's only now that the public is beginning to sit up and take notice: a cure for aging is really going to happen, and it's going to happen in our lifetimes.

William H. Andrews
Pesident and CEO, Sierra Sciences LLC

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Sierra Sciences has a Facebook page that we use to keep our supporters up to date on the progress of our company. If you have a Facebook profile, you can receive these updates by "becoming a fan" of the company. Just visit this address and click "Become a Fan":http://www.facebook.com/pages/Sierra-Sciences/130839216671?ref=nf. Hope to see you there!

Sierra Sciences maintains a Twitter page where we post updates on our research, and the research of our colleagues in anti-aging science, in real time. Come follow us at http://twitter.com/SierraSci!

At our YouTube page, you can watch Dr. Andrews' presentations at last year's A4M conference in San Jose, and at the Manhattan Beach project last November. Be sure to subscribe to our channel so you don't miss upcoming videos! The channel can be found at http://www.youtube.com/sierrasciencesLLC.

SIERRA SCIENCES NEWS

On Friday, April 9, and Saturday, April 10, Dr. Andrews will be speaking in Sao Paulo, Brazil, at the "A4M Brazil Stem Cell and Genetics" conference, a workshop associated with the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine (A4M).

The topics of his speeches are "Clinical Applications of Telomeres and Telomerase Technology" and "Telomere Basics: Curing Aging."

Finding the cure for aging is truly an international effort. Sierra Sciences made many valuable contacts during Bill's recent trip to the ECOPRAM conference in Milan, Italy. We look forward to forming important collaborative relationships during A4M Brazil.

There are just six weeks left until Dr. Andrews' talk in Key Largo, Florida on the effects of endurance exercise on telomere lenght. It's long been known that exercise contributes to well-being and longevity. Now, science is starting to uncover more about the mechanism behind those benefits: exercise appears to measurably slow telomere shortening.

The following day, Dr. Andrews will participate in the Keys 100 mile race form Key Largo to Key West. For more information on the race, go to http://www.keys100.com.

Dr. Andrews and Terry McAfee, Sierra Sciences' VP Finance, will be attending the 2010 BIO International Convention in Chicago, IL on May 3-6, 2010.

The BIO International Convention is the most widely-attended biotechnology conference in the world. Each year, it attracts approximately 17,000 attendees from 1,800 companies in over 60 countries.

Sierra Sciences attended the 2009 BIO International Convention in Atlanta, Georgia, which led to nearly a dozen important opportunities for collaboration. We hope to make 2010 even more successful!

Sierra Sciences is committed to making sure everything we say is as scientifically accurate as possible. The search for the cure for aging is often made with skepticism, but telomere biology is backed by thousands of repeatable, peer-reviewed publications. The last thing we want to do is undermine public confidence in this science by making unsupportable claims!

With that in mind, we made two claims in our February newsletter that were not scientifically correct.

First, we said that "for the last six decades, [HeLa cells have] exhibited no signs of aging whatsoever." We should have said that HeLa cells have exhibited no signs of cellular senescence whatsoever. Aging is a process that takes place in multicellular organisms, and equating it to the senescence that takes place in single-celled organisms hasn't been shown to be necessarily true.

Second, we said that "[W]e hypothesize that the level of telomerase expressed in a HeLa cell is probably very close to the level of telomerase a cell would have to express to achieve immortality." We should have specified that the cell would achieve cellular immortality; this should not be taken to imply that cellular immortality is the same thing as the immortality of a multicellular organism like a human being!

We regret any confusion we may have caused with these claims.

ANTI-AGING NEWS

One of the most widely-reported anti-aging publications released this month was Vaziri, et. al, "Spontaneous reversal of the developmental aging of normal human cells following transcriptional reprogramming." (see http://www.ncbi.nih.gov/pubmed/20230312). Published March 16, 2010 in the journal Regenerative Medicine, this paper caused BioTime, Inc.'s stock prices to rise 28% overnight.

Sierra Sciences is proud to have contributed to our own research to this paper. Three of the authors of the paper are Sierra Sciences employees: Dr. Andrews; Dr. Laura Briggs, our VP Research and Discovery; and Jessica Wheeler, our Cell Biology Manager.

The topic of this paper is iPS cells, which made headlines in a big way in 2007: they're adult human cells that have been reprogrammed to act like embryonic stem cells. Although many of the iPS cell clones showed reduced levels of telomerase activity and markedly shorter telomeres compared with hES cells, one of the clones, EH3, expressed relatively high levels of telomerase and after 60 days of serial culture telomere lengths increased back to that of the parent hES cell line. The authors conclude that the selection of iPS cell lines with relatively high levels of telomerase activity may allow the routine reversal of aging in normal human somatic cells.

This discovery could have exciting implications for anti-aging science. We hope it does: after all, at Sierra Sciences, we always say that we want to see a cure for aging discovered-even if one of our competitors beats us to it.