The Thalion Initiative (US)

The Thalion Initiative is a global researcher driven initiative focused on the fundamental biology of aging.

US Head Office. Visit @TheThalionInit in Canada

[The Thalion Initiative (US) @TTIScience]

The impact of age-related diseases happen sooner than you think. Welcome to the Thalion Initiative...

[HackAging.ai @HackAgingAI]

To find why some mammals live many times longer than others, @MaxUnfried of @TTIScience proposes a shared freezer bank of tissue from about 200 species, young to old, all stored and measured the same way, so lab quirks stop passing for biology. For now it is a plan.

[The Thalion Initiative (US) @TTIScience]

Dr. Max Unfried talks about why larger projects are still needed. https://t.co/EjDOAclnO0

[Max Unfried @MaxUnfried]

Fantastic interview 👀

[Max Unfried @MaxUnfried]

Had fun chatting with @NautilusMag about Gerophysics and recent advances, and what it means for the field of aging biology!

Could Physics Help Us Solve the Mystery of Aging? https://t.co/cX3ArzUZDH

[Todd White @DToddWhite]

https://t.co/vohj89XRP9

[Todd White @DToddWhite]

It is our pleasure!

As part of @TTIScience's Computational Biology program we're focused on building resources that cater to aging research, and protecting the investments the research community has made is part of that.

[João Pedro de Magalhães @jpsenescence]

A few months ago, we faced some challenges keeping our online resources running due to a lack of funding.

Thanks to the generous support of the longevity community, we were able to keep them online. We've now migrated our largest resources to a new server hosted by the Thalion Initiative, which will help reduce our operating costs and give us some breathing room while we seek additional funding.

A huge thank you to @DToddWhite @MaxUnfried and @TTIScience for hosting our genome resources, including the bowhead whale and naked mole-rat genome resources, as well as GeneFriends, helping us continue to serve the research community.

Thank you! 🙏

[João Pedro de Magalhães @jpsenescence]

Have we been looking at RNA changes during ageing the wrong way? 🧬

In our new study we use a largely overlooked technique called spike-in normalisation to investigate age-related changes in transcripts across mouse cell types.

A thread 🧵

1/6

https://t.co/jgmelVQUO3

[Todd White @DToddWhite]

@adamgries' last point is the key. Most philanthropy is unambitious, serves a tax purpose, and provides virtue signaling at the country club. Very few philanthropic entities are about advancing civilization and discovery or solving problems from first principles. 1/3

[Maria Marinova, PhD @m__marinova]

Last week at Longevity Summit Dublin I spoke about Open Questions in Reproductive Aging and Female Longevity. The talk was inspired by @jpsenescence's paper mapping 100 open problems in aging against > 200,000 PubMed papers (post Thalion roadmapping workshop in Birmingham 2024).

[Max Unfried @MaxUnfried]

The aging science and gerophysics community should really try to figure out why hazard ratio of supercentenarian seems to be constant?

Is there a evolutionary argument to be made? Seems unlikely that selection pressure is at work.

Is there a thermodynamic argument where entropy has reached a maximum? More damage does not matter anymore?

A cheat code to the programed theory of aging?

Lots to explore!

[Maria Marinova, PhD @m__marinova]

Impressive advancements in IVG, early follicle and ovaroids from Conception! This space is getting really exciting

[Max Unfried @MaxUnfried]

1. AI companies hyping AI for drug development are doing it as they need a story

2. Spending 5% of the cost for computing on collecting real world data in a standardized manner would go a long way and is probably a better long term ROI then just scaling models.

[Maria Marinova, PhD @m__marinova]

Biology humbles me almost daily. Recently found out mice can put their pregnancy on pause. The whole embryo stays in suspended animation for a period of time at the blastocyst stage. This happens when a mouse has just had a litter but gets pregnant again right away. Her energy and resources are spent nursing the pups and can’t also support developing the next batch (it also happens during starvation in the wild). It’s called diapause - yes, like the worms.
Despite running breeding trials for years, I didn’t know this because we separate the mother and pups from the males until they wean. So I only found out from a poster years later. And apparently over 130 species can do it. How crazy is that?
When I get past the shock and horror of my own ignorance, it’s incredible to think about biological timing and all the intense work the embryo is doing during that time. There seems to be a clear uncoupling of biological and chronological time. As we know from the Gladyshev lab’s work, epigenetic age goes down until gastrulation (to reach ground zero), and then it starts increasing again. So during that process of rejuvenation, it can just… halt - from 1 week normally to a month+ (bears can do 4-7 months). And amazingly, the resulting offspring seem completely fine despite that temporal disruption but we haven’t measured lifespan as far as I know.

[Maria Marinova, PhD @m__marinova]

A few companies working on gametogenesis. It’s done in mice. In humans we have primordial germ cell-like cells (PGCLCs) but it’s harder to make these proto-eggs mature. What’s harder is constructing the actual follicle and ideally ovarian tissue, but that’s what would be useful not just for IVF but also menopause

[Max Unfried @MaxUnfried]

Congratulations! Big win for longevity drug discovery!

[Maxim Kholin @GeroMaxim]

Gero has been named a 2026 Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum (WEF) for Advancing the Physics of Aging in Drug Discovery

Gero’s physics-first AI drug discovery platform is transforming breakthroughs in the physics of aging into a pipeline of medicines designed to treat age-related diseases and slow the aging process itself.

We're especially glad that the World Economic Forum and Davos platform will help us educate the community and lead the conversation on a question we believe defines the next decade of medicine: treating aging as a new pharmaceutical category, one we are working to define.

[Maria Marinova, PhD @m__marinova]

The biology is ready? ...to be studied, sure. That's why we need funding.
Nice proof-of-concept grant opportunity for repro aging

[Maria Marinova, PhD @m__marinova]

Are biophysical constraints biology's underrated variable?
We focus mostly on signalling molecules but this new paper from @PetrovaLab shows that a physical constraint like osmotic pressure can block lymphatic vessel growth even when growth factors are abundant. So it's not controlling it instead of signalling but alongside it like an independent gate.
If we remove AQP1 (might have heard of this water channel, Nobel-winning discovery, etc) , gut lymphatics shorten, fat absorption fails, mice gain less weight on a high-fat diet. The physical microenvironment is a co-determinant in the process.
Another curious thing is the context-specificity: AQP1 marks stress-adaptive lymphangiogenesis in the gut, lymphedema, and inflammation but not in normal embryonic development. We see different programs, depending on physical context.
Maybe biology is more mechanical than the dominant frameworks suggest.

[Maria Marinova, PhD @m__marinova]

Great piece on comparative biology and what it can teach us about aging by @Aria_Babu . Humans are already outliers. Most mammals get 1 billion heartbeats, we get 2 billion; we live decades past reproduction and way longer than animals our size. Yet there's so much more to learn from other species that can repair DNA, avoid cancer, or regenerate.
https://t.co/4Eal8UqKCN