LMRF is a 501(c)(3) non-profit charity organization which holds fundraising events to help support medical research, focusing on pathology that impairs and shortens one's quality of health, especially in later years.

The longevity research that LMRF helps fund target:

The aim is to target points early enough in the aging process, before symptoms arise, to cure what is now merely treatable, while reducing frequency and cost of treatment.

The strategy (actually, there are seven strategies) is to implement relatively new knowledge about the ill effects of aging to target normally benign metabolic by-products and damage that, with time, become early precursors to age-related pathology. Previously, this rich opportunity for medical progress has been only weakly explored.

The Leading Killer and Highest Priority

Our first funding priority is an innovative strategy to prevent atherosclerosis, a narrowing and hardening of the arteries that, because of its role in strokes and cardiovascular disease, kills more Americans each year than all cancers combined.

Atherosclerosis is a cumulative, chronic, incurable disease whose precursors first appear in adolescence and is ubuquitous throughout the population.  Even young adults have atherosclerotic plaques, to some extent.  After many years of benign accumulation, these plaques become pathogenic.  Disease then manifests itself with chronic and cumulative tissue death in various organs from blocked blood flow.  Such blockage becomes most seriously symptomatic in the case of the brain and heart.

Ideas Successful Elsewhere

The proposed approach is a modification of therapy used for lysosomal storage diseases and is based on evidence that atherosclerosis is caused by build-up in lysosomes, the cell's garbage can of last resort, of a usually benign but undegradable cholesterol that, given time, leads to atherosclerotic plaques, lesions, and a cascade of other damage.

Exploiting Commonalities Between Age-related Diseases

If the approach is fruitful, it will likely be modified to degrade a similar precursor of age-related macular degeneration (ARMD), the leading cause of blindness in those over 50 and another likely result of catabolic recalcitrance.

Furthermore, there is strong evidence that similar aggregates lower lysosomal acidity. One of the import mechanisms that lysosomes use depends on adequate intralysosomal acidity. Several neurogenerative diseases, including Alzheimer's, are associated with aggregation of molecules that are normally imported by this mechanism. Improving lysosomal function may therefore be an important tool for extending brain longevity as well.

LMRF also helps fund research to test the benefits of preventing cumulative intracellular free radical damage. The innovation here is a recent understanding that free radical damage to the mitochondrial genome may significantly accelerate the ill effects of aging by turning a small proportion of the body's cells into prolific exporters of damaging free radicals.