Destroying worn-out cells makes mice live longer
nature.com
nature.com
https://news.usc.edu/63669/fasting-triggers-stem-cell-regene...
https://news.usc.edu/82959/diet-that-mimics-fasting-appears-...
Journalistic reporting of 'miraculous' pre-clinical results hasn't changed much in 100 years it seems. Of course, we aren't using trypsin to treat cancer today.
Nevertheless, we should be optimistic, we live during a golden age for the life sciences.
What I find disappointing is that this work has been spirited away to a VC funded private company. At best they will fail, at worst they will stop others from making progress.
"Go big or go home" as it were. What's my other choice? Death? Nothing but upside.
...if I could get my hands on some of this stuff :) For some reason, I feel like that might be a little difficult.
I am, of course, going to wait a few years between the two :)
A new drug that harms your nervous system or starts an auto-immune disorder could be a real bummer.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2013/06/12/tele...
We have twice the population now. If we could get more people working on real problems...
That's a political economic, and social problem. I wonder if a basic income couldn't help here. Of course "free" education also, if it could keep high standards of quality.
We are not strengthened by having things handed to us, but by challenges.
Of course, there is nothing stopping proponents of basic income from proving me wrong with their own private experiment. I'm sure it would get a lot of volunteers, at least for one half of the equation.
Who is "we"? People in wealthy families? This analysis seems to ignore a large part of the population, even within first-world countries.
Poor people have more than enough "challenges". Well, those aren't really "challenges", these are burdens that keep them down and unhealthy. Those people will not be strengthened by more of those "challenges". But they would be strengthened if they received a stable income (through whatever measure, basic income is just one possibiliy).
Having to count every cent, worring about the next day rather than the next year ... this all is a huge sink of brain power, and a motivation killer as well. Increasing those people's lives to "couch potatoes" would be a huge step forward, because only then they will have the time and energy to become bored, and then to engage in creative activities, volunteering, problem solving, etc.
If you give them just callenges without freeing them from their huge daily burdens, nothing will happen.
I personally grew up poor and while it would have been nice to not have struggled for things many people take for granted, I probably feel a greater sense of accomplishment than many.
I did count every cent. I worked two jobs before I finally went back to school. My motivation wasn't killed. But I doubt that would have been the case if that effort wasn't going to improve my situation in the slightest.
Of course, I also didn't believe I was entitled to what other people produce, simply for being alive.
Personally, while I like the silicon chip, there were more jobs 50 years ago. I was still a gleam in my father's eye, but in the 70's, their were a lot of jobs. Not working was a choice. Bad jobs were a choice. I'm not completely blaming the microprocessor.
As to B & W t.v., I've always liked it. Don't know why, but just like it. Would watching The Twilight Zone be better in color? I'm partially color blind.
Not saying this should mar the study or anything, but I wonder what that could mean.
Edit: It appears I spoke too soon and this does mar the study. I thought they always waited for natural death, but no:
"mice were injected twice a week with AP or vehicle until they became moribund or died of natural causes."
They don't explain the methods or data (how many, etc) regarding these moribund mice anywhere either. The lack of effective blinding procedures combined with this undefined "moribund" state is actually a huge red flag.
In a lot of Aging related research tinkering, very often there are steep costs to improving life-spans - increased rates of Cancer. See anytime you mess with the reason a Cell lives or dies due to ageing, you are risking higher Cancer rates. The fact that this treatment both improves life-spans and "delays cancer" is indeed very promising. Now hopefully the transmission pathways hold true in Humans...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategies_for_Engineered_Negl...
Doesn't look like they controlled for that in the current paper. Who knows? In the extended figures they report a huge variation in median lifespan between different labs (like 33%, corresponding to what would be differences of 25-30 years for humans). It could have something to do with closeness to the door, air circulation, etc that people aren't thinking about.
Maybe rodents gain some health benefit from being nearer the ground. Less stress when they look out the window?
0. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/natu...
1. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/natu...
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/unity-biotechnology-launches-f...
The technology being used here in mice is not suitable for humans in its present form. But it won't take much tinkering to make it so - this is an age of gene therapy. The most important things here are that:
(a) a robust life extension was achieved with a SENS approach of damage repair, something that SENS advocates have been working towards for more than a decade. The SENS view is right. It is right today, as demonstrated, and it was right ten years ago when people were lining up to deride it. A SENS technology has produced a robust life extension and remediation of age-related diseases across the board in normal mice. People who think that SENS and damage repair are not the way forward need to take a long, serious look at why they think that, and then revisit the science.
(b) The Union Biotech VC and university PR machines are putting out word for word the SENS vision of damage repair to treat aging. SENS has won. This is the dawn of the age of rejuvenation biotechnology, with a near future of widespread support for that goal.
(c) There are at least three methods of clearing senescent cells in mammals, and most likely four. (1) The method of Oisin Biotechnology, seed funded last year by Methuselah Foundation and SENS Research Foundation, (2) the senolytic drug combination demonstrated last year, (3) the capase/gene trigger work linked here, and (4) the adaptation of method #3 currently underway at Union Biotechnology.
To be clear, half of these methods work in mammals now. If you had the right connections you could use them today. Clinical availability will not be a long time in coming, and I for one hope to see this escape the regulatory gauntlet very rapidly and get into medical tourism and clinics worldwide just like stem cell therapies did at the turn of the century.
Finally a note for investors and business people: every SENS rejuvenation technology of this ilk has a target market of every human being on the planet over the age of 30. Everyone, with treatments once every decade at a minimum. This is medicine that will make blockbuster drugs of past years look like damp squibs. That is why this should and will escape the narrow regulatory gauntlet that will try to restrict use to old people with the late stage of a few specific illnesses. That is nonsense and no way to run the future - senescent cells should be periodically cleared every few years starting at 30.
http://sens.org/research/introduction-to-sens-research/death...
The SENS Research Foundation has for some years funded work on clearing senescent cells at the Campisi lab, and Judith Campisi is one of the people involved in Union Biotechnology, the company commercializing therapies created from the study discussed here. Senescent cell clearance was advocated and funded by SENS advocates and organizations long before the rest of the scientific community caught up. It has been a long slog to get to the tipping point, and here we are, being proved right.
So, you know, slightly relevant.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8838073 (394 days)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9592378 (256 days)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6406084 (868 days)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9844909 (211 days)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8727314 (420 days)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10468025 (98 days)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9613206 (252 days)
See my post in this thread about how they admit not being properly blinded, and also decided in some unspecified way when a mouse was "moribund" at which point the mouse was killed. The former is maybe ok (shit happens), but the lack of details regarding "moribund" are unacceptable. For that info to be missing, we can deduce this paper was not approved by a honest/competent group of reviewers.
And it's sort of mean to say that my naive response to this SENS stuff is "slowing down actual progress."
What does that have to do with the quality of this paper?
>'And it's sort of mean to say that my naive response to this SENS stuff is "slowing down actual progress."'
Sorry for that, it is not really your fault, rather the fault of those involved in the publication of this paper. But don't shoot the messenger, it is also not my fault this study was apparently poorly peer reviewed yet got a bunch of press coverage. I just wish people were doing their jobs and acting with proper skepticism because I want medical research to be successful.
It would be nice if this were true and we could have a easy to use heuristic. But, as pointed out by others, the evidence seems to point to either no, or even an inverse, relationship between journal prestige/respect and the quality of peer review and journal articles.
Maybe the first, certainly not the second.
There's an unfortunate correlation between sloppy science and popular journals that's been shown again and again. Nature is one of the journals with the highest rates of retractions[1]. Thinking "it's been published in Nature, it must be good science" is certainly not reasonable in any way.
Seems to me like we're not that close to having "widespread support" in the general public for tackling aging, so I'm curious to know why you think this will change in the near future. Is it just that attitudes will change once everyone realizes how close to reality it is, rather than crazy sci-fi?
Isn't regulation also a problem here? That is, aging is not considered a disease in and of itself, making it difficult to authorize any human clinical trials? I thought it was necessary for SENS to piggy-back off of treatments for officially recognized diseases caused by aging. But I've been reading a book from 2007 about this stuff, so it's possible all that is completely out of date now.
Edit: sorry missed your last bit about regulation. I suppose with big-pharma lobbying, that could be cleared up easily enough, given the profit potential you mention.
http://www.nature.com/news/anti-ageing-pill-pushed-as-bona-f...
Best of all, for all it does, generic Metformin/glucophage is DIRT CHEAP, even in the USA.
I wouldn't be so sure. They have the science, but do they have product leads? If not, that could take a few years alone. Then tack on all the pre-clinical testing.
The average drug takes ~8 years once it's discovered to get approved by the FDA. And that's if nothing goes wrong.
Also this song popped in my head... of course... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1foeTSHrgiU
I don’t know whatever came of the technology, but I always thought it would be very popular if applied to humans.
But seriously, if it was viable and productizable, somebody would make a mint. Lipo in a syringe?!
> Mice whose senescent cells were killed off over six months were healthier, in several ways, than a control group of transgenic mice in which these cells were allowed to build up. Their kidneys worked better and their hearts were more resilient to stress, they tended to explore their cages more and they developed cancers at a later age. Eliminating senescent cells also extended the lifespans of the mice by 20–30%, Baker and van Deursen report in Nature on 3 February.