Drug 'reverses' ageing in animal tests | Hacker News Reader

Drug 'reverses' ageing in animal tests

bbc.co.uk

23 pointsabhi313 comments

They should test these with old volunteers first.

Life expectancy of 90-year old is 4-5 years depending on gender. If the drug increases the life quality it's probably worth the risk even if it increases changes of getting some cancers.

It'd be interesting to know what research has been done on situations like this in the field of bioethics.

Or sell it for hamsters and old people will try it anyways...

Mind blown.

Original paper: http://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(17)30246-5

The SENS Research Foundation (http://www.sens.org/) has identified the seven ways that the elderly are different from the young, and hypothesizes that the aggregate damage from these seven things is what we call "aging".

Essentially, aging is just accumulated damage from these seven processes.

One of the seven processes is the accumulation of senescent cells. They clog up the works and also release chemicals that prevent normal cells from functioning at full effectiveness. Normally senescent cells kill themselves and are broken down by the body, but this process gets worse over time and senescent cells multiply.

The drug in this story targets and kills these senescent cells selectively. Effectively they are reducing the population of senescent cells in your body from the number you'd find in an 80 year old person so some lesser number (perhaps like a 20-, 30-, 40-, or 60-year old, but human studies would be required to say how effective it is).

But that's what aging reversal is. It's taking the seven biomarkers identified by SENS and reverting them from 85-year old levels to 25-year old levels. If all you're biomarkers are the same as a 25-year old, you are 25 in every sense except calendrical.

EDIT: typo

Seeing the headline I shrugged and thought to myself, "oh, I bet it's rapamycin again." That and a few other old cancer drugs routinely get studied for antiaging effects- which is cool, but somewhat less than directly applicable because of the side-effects associated with what is essentially chemo.

But here the drug is apparently a peptide, so it's presumably somewhat more benign (at least relative, mind you, to chemo.) Also easily synthesizable! I wonder if an amino acid sequence can be patented?

I am not a biologist but the whole business of senolytics is to mess with the cell cycle. That is not something benign.

Not really the cell cycle per se, but yes, the idea is to poison senescent cells. But it can be benign to the organism as a whole nonetheless.

There are lot of buzz since some months about "senolytics". However I think aging is a complex phenomena, including having social dimensions. It is probably not something that you could solve with a pill.

I would imagine that many of the social dimension are consequences of, rather than sources of, the physical ones.

If a pill could give someone more energy, less daily pain, a more regular sleep schedule, and/or increased sex-drive, I suspect we'd see their place in society nudge towards that of younger persons.

I am not sure. For example menopause had been linked to social events like having grand children. It can occur earlier in those who smoke tobacco. Immune system working depends on your social status and has consequences on aging diseases. People who are engaged in a relation and that have a strong social network are aging better. And people are dying around us as we age, one in four people that were born at the same time than me has already died, and I am only 60. So being older means more solitude, which means more biological aging. All in all, there are many indications that aging is something social as well as biological. (edited)

Than there should be outliers of those who have younger friends. E.g. Professors with a good relationship to the students or people that live in more age-diverse peergroups/communities like in a small village.

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