Scientists successfully activate human telomerase | Hacker News Reader

Scientists successfully activate human telomerase

liebertonline.com

59 pointsswwu28 comments

I might be missing something, so please correct me if I'm wrong, but this looks like a non-peer-reviewed pre-print written by employees/investors of companies that produce or sell the product being tested. There are also some red flags in the paper itself, such as the discussion about how the original data gathering was "hypothesis generating".

Maybe the red flag is constant reference to the product instead of the claim that some active substance effect is tested, but I admit I don't know how otherwise such articles are written. I have impression you're right.

Also see the comment of terrapinbear here, it's a "proprietary extract of the dried root of Astragalus membranaceus." and of tomwalker: "they want about $1000 a month."

This is just an ad masquerading as research, I'm flagging this.

I mean, please: "Calvin Harley is one of the inventors of TA-65. He consults for TA Sciences and is personally taking TA-65. He owns stock and stock options in Geron Corporation, a company that is developing telomerase activators for therapeutic purposes and the company that licensed TA-65 to TA Sciences." how transparent can you be.

Also, if something is present in nature you discover it, you don't invent it.

If you google around a bit, elsewhere they claim it can cure cancer and will cause wounds to heal rapidly.

Amazing compound, really.

Interesting comments here:

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2007/04/more-on-ta-scienc...

On http://www.quackwatch.com/ the publisher Marie Ann Liebert, Inc is listed as a publisher that promotes quakery.

Quackwatch is a useful resource, provided that you realize it is overly conservative in anything relating to longevity science. Historically that has been the correct position, but a more careful approach is needed these days.

Personally, I'm disappointed with Sierra Sciences for associating with TA Sciences - the whole TA-65 thing is just a herb-selling operation with a cloud of hype of the sort that brings the whole field into disrepute. This essentially means that Sierra now gets lumped into the same category and anything they have to say in the future is looked at with skepticism. Which is a pity, since up to this point they looked like a sane group doing good, albeit slow, science.

This is extremely interesting, I wonder if serious breakthroughs in human longevity are on the near horizon. Directly related to this article, it turns out exercising probably keeps your telomeres "young" too: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/27/phys-ed-how-exercis...

It would be interesting to know whether amount of exercise is correlated with telomere length within the active group.

It seems to be based up on an extract from a plant root- it should be cheap to produce in that case.

edit: i checked the company website- they want about $1000 a month!

Raising an important question in a manner perhaps less (or more) abstract than "normal" life-saving medication: let us say that this or something else actually does work for longevity. Say it gives an extra 20 active years or whatever.

How should that be handled? Is every person equally deserving of it, or just the wealthy? Should a company be allowed to take in a thousand a month per person (particularly for a naturally occurring substance) or should governments maybe subsidise it for citizens? Or should it be made available for free, circumventing patent laws if needed?

You are free to produce the substance. If you produce it, it is your property. You own it. You may choose to keep it, or you may choose to trade it for someone else's property. You may ask a billion dollars per gram if you like. No one may force you to trade your property for anything specific, or even to trade it at all, or even to continue producing it.

I am free to produce the substance. If I produce it, it is my property. I own it. I may choose to keep it, or I may choose to trade it for someone else's property. I may ask twenty thousand dollars per gram if I like. No one may force me to trade my property for anything specific, or even to trade it at all, or even to continue producing it.

Et cetera, et cetera. Apply that same formula equally to each living being in the universe, and you have my view on the matter.

Also, no subsidies. A subsidy involves the taking of an individual's property by force, which is morally wrong.

<parody> This ignores patents, which is the prevention of the creation of something useful by force which is wrong. (Note: Some people disagree with my stance, they are wrong.) </parody>

IMO, there is no absolute morality, there are system of morality that are self consistent, but you cant transplant individual ideas between them to get an absolute truth.

That was a good parody. You got my position on patents exactly right. You also accurately mocked my tendency to state my views point blank without including disclaimers that they are my views. So excuse me: morally wrong in my book.

You say there is no absolute morality. I don't know. The more interesting question is whether you disagree specifically with the moral principles I invoked, and how and why. I can't tell from your post.

What about cancer? Does this increase the risk? It does seem like it would.

They say it didn't in their test subjects over one year, but to me as a layman this is very weak evidence still: cancer takes time to develop (and framing their result as "260 person-years" as they do is a case of the mythical man-month), and I don't trust drug developers to design and report their trials in an unbiased way.

I'd expect increased risk, too.

TL;DR

They used a telomerase activator to improve the immune system of CMV and HIV positive individuals. It worked.

"Chronic viral infections such as cytomegalovirus (CMV) and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) accelerate telomere loss and premature aging of the immune system, especially the virus-specific cytotoxic T cells31–36 responsible for killing infected cells."

Referring to cytomegalovirus as herpes is misleading. Herpes is both the name of a single virus and a family of viruses. What is commonly known as the herpes virus is Herpes simplex viruses 1 and 2. Cytomegalovirus is a herpes virus; that is, a member of the Herpesviridae virus family.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cytomegalovirus

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herpes_simplex_virus

You are right, fixed it.

Too Long; Didn't Read: Proprietary extract of the dried root of Astragalus membranaceus which WikiPedia states is also known as "Yellow Leader": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astragalus_propinquus

there's also a pretty significant protein aggregation component to aging. Adding telomeres back on assumes that the problem is just one of genetic decay and we're finding increasingly that that's simply not the whole story.

Layperson's explanation - this is a pretty important step to stopping aging in human beings. Telomerase lengthens telomeres, which are end-caps on DNA strands that are slowly whittled away as cells divide; without functioning telomerase human cells can only divide a finite amount of times before dying.

Also, telomeres are largely an anti-cancer defence mechanism, like a surprisingly large number of other things that your cells do all day. When a person 'gets cancer', this just means that one of the many, many potential cancers they've had, slipped through all the defences and got out of hand.

At a cellular level, the opposite of ageing isn't longevity, it's cancer.

However, our ability to fight cancer is also getting better and better, and likely will not be a serious issue in the long term.

I, for one, would be happy to trade longer life for a higher risk of cancer. As a reasonably healthy person today, I'm pretty sure that by the time cancer as a result of longer life became an issue (say, around the year 2040-50 in my case), the cancer itself would be easily treatable by other means.

You've clearly never had cancer. I too considered myself a "reasonably healthy person" and was surprised to get diagnosed at 32 with stage 4 lymphoma. I've had it and done the chemo and come out the other side (for now). My cancer is one of the more treatable ones (>80% survival over 5 years), the chemo one of the lesser ones (R-CHOP). Even so it was one of the most difficult experiences in my life.

Trading a probability of longer life for a higher probability of cancer is just stupid. Most cancer treatments have the potential to (dramatically) shorten your life -- i.e. the combined probabilities probably don't work out in your favor.

Make the time you have count.

> I'm pretty sure that by the time cancer as a result of longer life became an issue (say, around the year 2040-50 in my case), the cancer itself would be easily treatable by other means.

What makes you so sure it will be 'easily treatable' by then ?

It's just kind of hard to believe that there is some kind of "magic" about cancer that will make it impervious to treatment using mid-21st century medical technology. Just in the past 5 years there have been some pretty amazing breakthroughs related to targeting cancer cells with new drug delivery mechanisms, etc. Even with 20th century tech cancer survival rates have continued to rise. See, for example, pg 29 of this report: http://seer.cancer.gov/csr/1975_2004/results_merged/sect_01_...

Am I reading you wrong in understanding that you think that cancer will not be treatable in the mid 21st century, to at least a far greater extent than it is today? That seems the much harder case to make...

Cancer is not much better treatable today than it was in the 70's of the previous century, when the 'war on cancer' was launched, it's a 5% change in the 'death' rate over 40 years.

Newsflash, we've lost that war.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_Cancer

We are hoping but we do not know for sure that new directions and avenues researched for treatments will give us new tools to help in finding a real cure.

But for the moment, and probably for the foreseeable future there is no indication that we will actually find this cure. At the moment - as crude as it may sound - if you could choose between being HIV positive or having a malignant tumor I'd pick HIV, we have a much better handle on arresting HIV than we have on stopping a cancer once started, other than by surgery, radiation and chemo therapy and a lot of good will.

Once a cancer has metastasized you are living on borrowed time.

Just like cancer isn't treatable by a much greater extent than it was 40 years ago I would not bet on seeing that change in the next 40 years.

That does not mean we should stop researching or that we will 'just have to live with it' but I think it is a bit early to start putting dates on when a solution will be found.

One of the bigger problems is that the differences between healthy cells and cancerous cells are minute, in some way you could say that the cancerous cells are the stronger ones. This makes going after cancer cells and not killing the cells around them (or even the whole organism) very difficult.

You've never had cancer, have you?

laypersons explanation: this is a commercial entity that would very much like to sell you their snake-oil to the tune of $1000 per month on a product that you'll never be able to prove is at best a placebo.

If I want to activate more of my telomerases, I'll take up smoking.

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