Right, but isn't this only referring killing old immune system cells, but the treatment in this article is referring killing old cells throughout the entire body?
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.
Private funding is great for engineering projects. But it is only useful in scientific endeavors when the scientist can talk with the academic community openly.
If I had a choice between A) death or B) a chance at continuing to live, I'd choose B. And if B doesn't work out, A can still be chosen. So choosing B is not much of a risk.
You should probably freeze some eggs/sperm before you start messing up your genome. If you end up with some weird illness, at least your children won't get it.
Yes, people are extremely shortsighted. Imagine the world 50, 100, and 200 years ago. the microprocessor didn't exist 50 years ago. Most households still had black&white tv's.
"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.
Basic income will only create more basic couch potatoes.
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.
> We are not strengthened by having things handed to us, but by challenges.
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.
Having to work for everything you have is not a burden. It is perfectly natural for nearly all of humanity throughout the ages.
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.
I think we have too many people working on the wrong problem.
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.
>"Investigators were blinded to allocation during experiments
and outcome assessment, except for rare instances where blinding was not possible."
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.
I think the biggest bit of positive news in this fascinating study is mentioned just in passing...that the treated mice "developed Cancer later".
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...
People also report ~2x differences in tumor death rates due to weird stuff like cage row though: "a strong correlation between cage row and RE (reticulo-endothelial tumor) death rates, which varied from 17% (bottom row) to 32% (top row) (table 2)."
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6935460
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?
Ageing seems to have several orthogonal causes[1]. So it's a mistake to see each discovery like this in isolation as a candidate cure for ageing. A real cure is likely to need a series of distinct cleanup processes.
Interesting, I don't think that they were behind a paywall when I first posted them. Certainly the editorial wasn't, or I wouldn't have been able to read it.
The company founded for this is Union Biotechnology; they wouldn't be getting VC money if they were more than a couple years away from human trials. Indeed, the CEO is on record in some of the present press as saying two years.
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.
This is the dawn of the age of rejuvenation biotechnology, with a near future of widespread support for that goal.
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.
Someone is running a clinical trial for metformin as an anti-aging drug. One of their explicit goals is to get the FDA to reclassify aging as a potentially treatable condition.
they wouldn't be getting VC money if they were more than a couple years away from human trials
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.
It depresses me that people get so easily excited without checking what is going on. This will only encourage more sloppy research and vague reporting on said research in the future, slowing down actual progress.
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.
> Nature is perhaps the most prestigious and respected academic journal in existence...
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.
>"Nature is perhaps the most prestigious and respected academic journal in existence..."
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.
"Nature is perhaps the most prestigious and respected academic journal in existence" implies that this paper was vetted by what is likely the best peer reviewing process that exists on the entirety of Earth. Which is relevant.
>"Nature is perhaps the most prestigious and respected academic journal in existence" implies that this paper was vetted by what is likely the best peer reviewing process that exists on the entirety of Earth.
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.
SENS is if anything under-mentioned. Not only everywhere but I get the feeling on HN too. For fun, I did a google search on this site for "aging" and looked at the first page of results, 3/7 relevant threads make mention of SENS, and most of the 7 are kind of old threads. In order, with the first three mentioning SENS:
It seems fair enough to talk about SENS in connection with a long awaited research success that is in the SENS portfolio, and has been since the beginning.
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.
It's called liposuction. Don't do it, it causes permanent damage to your body, as the fat cells are not replaced and that is a problem when fat has to be stored again in the future.
This was developed more than 30 years ago by the CISRO here in Australia. What they did is made antibodies against fat cells surface proteins. When injected into an animal the animal lost the fat cells all over their body if injected into a vein and just locally if inject into fat tissue.
I don’t know whatever came of the technology, but I always thought it would be very popular if applied to humans.
Yes this is what I thought too. I have no idea why it never was developed for humans - the original idea was to use it to make lean meat. Done with monoclonals and careful dose escalation it would be a huge hit.
As usual this kind of articles has no info on base size, effect size and whether the findings are totally significant or not. Science reporting at its best.
> 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.
https://news.usc.edu/63669/fasting-triggers-stem-cell-regene...
https://news.usc.edu/82959/diet-that-mimics-fasting-appears-...