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Researchers Accidentally Discover How To Turn Off Skin Aging Gene
BarbaraHudson sends this excerpt from The Province:
While exploring the effects of the protein-degrading enzyme Granzyme B on blood vessels during heart attacks, professor David Granville and other researchers at the University of British Columbia couldn't help noticing that mice engineered to lack the enzyme had beautiful skin at the end of the experiment, while normal mice showed signs of age. The discovery pushed Granville's research in an unexpected new direction.
The researchers built a mechanized rodent tanning salon and exposed mice engineered to lack the enzyme and normal mice to UV light three times a week for 20 weeks, enough to cause redness, but not to burn. At the end of the experiment, the engineered mice still had smooth, unblemished skin, while the normal mice were deeply wrinkled.
Granzyme B breaks down proteins and interferes with the organization and the integrity of collagen, dismantling the scaffolding — or extra-cellular matrix — that cells bind to. This causes structural weakness, leading to wrinkles. Sunlight appears to increase levels of the enzyme and accelerate its damaging effects.
The researchers built a mechanized rodent tanning salon and exposed mice engineered to lack the enzyme and normal mice to UV light three times a week for 20 weeks, enough to cause redness, but not to burn. At the end of the experiment, the engineered mice still had smooth, unblemished skin, while the normal mice were deeply wrinkled.
Granzyme B breaks down proteins and interferes with the organization and the integrity of collagen, dismantling the scaffolding — or extra-cellular matrix — that cells bind to. This causes structural weakness, leading to wrinkles. Sunlight appears to increase levels of the enzyme and accelerate its damaging effects.
Or is the rest of the body "not aging "also?
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
the redness is caused by blood swelling to the damaged skin to flush out the dead stuff.
Without the 'redness' of sunburn your body would simply be poisoned by the toxins that ruptured cells release.
Supporter of the +1 Over Dramatic mod option. In memory of apk.
On the one hand, this could be huge. On the other hand, let's see the peer reviewed articles. Remember "resveratrol"? After seeing resveratrol covered by CBS 60 Minutes, etc, I bought some tablets, based on the similar mouse aging claims. Interesting history in Quackwatch.com describes how the mouse aging study led to $720M investment by GlaxoSmithKline. Once the money started rushing in, it went quacky...
"In 2012, the University of Connecticut announced that it had concluded that Dipak K. Das, Ph.D., a professor in its Department of Surgery and director of the Cardiovascular Research Center, was guilty of 145 counts of fabrication and falsification of data and that the university had notified eleven journals about this problem [20]. In recent years, Das had gained attention for his reports on allegedly beneficial properties of resveratrol. As of March 2014, journals had retracted 20 of his papers, many of which were repeatedly cited by others [21]. Das died in 2013."
Some interesting research is still going on, tangentially from the resveratrol research. But the way anti-aging anything gets marketed, suspicion always seems warranted.
http://www.quackwatch.com/01Qu...
Gently reply
Does anyone know how to make an inhibitor for this Granzyme B enzyme?... Before pfizer patents it and charges $10.000 per drop?
Billions of women (and men) around the world paying TRILLIONS for cosmetic product for what?
Skincare is the number one profit making venue for many cosmetic companies, big and small, all around the world
So, will the cosmetic companies let stupid progress destroy their revenue stream? Uh, I guess no. They will buy the researcher's startup for a shitload of money, and then suprise suprise it turns out the method wasn't so promising after all. And they will keep all patents on the technology so that nobody else can release a competing product.
Interesting, but I can't help wonder if this enzyme exists for a reason. I presume these scientists are working hard to determine what evolutionary role it fills (before working on selling it as part of an anti-aging cream)
welcome our new handsome mice overlords
viDA Therapeutics, a company co-founded by Granville, is currently developing a Granzyme-B inhibitor based on technology licensed from UBC. The company plans to test a topically applied drug within two years on people with discoid lupus erythematosus, an autoimmune disease worsened by sunlight that can lead to disfiguring facial scarring. (The musician Seal has such a condition.)
If the drug proves effective in preventing lupus-related skin lesions, there is potential for a cosmetic product to prevent the normal, gradual aging of the skin, which is mostly caused by sun exposure. But the drug might also be used for life-threatening conditions, such as aneurysms and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, caused by the breakdown of collagen and other proteins that provide structure to blood vessels and lung passages.
I believe it's already known that avoiding sunlight helps prevent this enzyme from being released, and in turn keeps skin looking younger. This is just artificially lowering it even further in an attempt to to create immortal, sunlight-fearing vampires.
Supporter of the +1 Over Dramatic mod option. In memory of apk.
Why would they do that? If you're a cosmetics company and you can buy a startup that owns the patents on a technique that actually works, then you'd be stupid to keep competing on a level playing field when you could be the only company that's selling the real thing. Even if you multiply your normal profit margin by a factor of ten, you're still going to be selling huge quantities and raking in the money.
The problem with these conspiracy theories is that they assume that people with large entrenched interests and lots of money somehow have an aversion to turning their big pile of money into an enormous pile of money.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
So they could come up with a cream that lets you remain wrinkle-free until you are past your nineties, but at the expense of being unable to tolerate prolonged exposure to sunlight?
Don't tell me, the other side effect is the development of fangs and a desire to drink blood.
given that tumour cells (for solid tumours) normally have defects in extra-cellular matrix related genes (eg genes in the collagen family are sometimes mutated in advanced gastric cancer) that help the tumour invade and spread through tissues, I wonder if using such a treatment increases the chances of either tumours forming, or tumours becoming higher grade/more serious more quickly...
Skin-care professionals do hate them. Learn their one simple trick!
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
It seems that wrinkling may be the price we pay for clearing potentially cancerous UV-damaged cells from the skin. It might be a bargain.
Exactly right and if you're the company with the one, true "cure" for skin aging then you have to look at the population of the world and think "I've got an endless supply of customers!" This isn't something an entire industry would shut down. It's something they'd go into a crazy bidding war to possess.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
I think you may be misunderstanding. The summary says that it is the engineered mice that could resist the sunlight while the normal mice became prunes. In this case the cream (more likely a shot) would be what allows you to stay out in the sun without using sunscreen at all.
"There are lies, there are damn lies, and there are statistics"
Instead of trying save people from the ravages of heart attacks, they'll all be golden parachuting into their new startup selling this crap to vain and insecure one-percenters at immoral levels of profit.
Before completely writing it off, perhaps we wait and see what useful things could also come of this technology, to include funding the original research with "immoral" profits.
... getting burned and wrinkled . . .
We gain and lose traits when they affect our ability to reproduce... and at no other time.
This isn't quite accurate. We can gain/lose traits randomly and if they don't impede our ability to reproduce they could get passed on. Also, some traits are genetically linked to more desirable traits, so they get dragged along by the other traits even if they're not necessarily desirable in and of themselves.
In most cases, Google doesn't sell to you. Instead, it sells you. Google sells you and me to advertisers, trend analysers and whatnot. That's why Google's services are "free". Bait is always free.
All lowering taxes on a business guarantees... is they make more money. The savings only get passed on to the customer if they feel they need to lower prices to better compete. It doesn't mean it won't happen, but it also doesn't mean it will. In this particular case, it almost certainly wouldn't get passed on to the customer.
A few decades back, I knew a researcher/university professor who had developed a ready-for-market, one-day yeast infection treatment when seven-day (or longer) treatments were still the norm. A major pharmaceutical showed extreme interest, purchased the rights from him, then sat on it for the better part of a decade, much to the consternation of the researcher, who was hoping society could benefit from the treatment more rapidly.
What he didn't know at the time was that the pharma company had already developed a three-day treatment that they were getting ready to introduce within the next year or two. They stood to gain a significant competitive advantage in introducing the three-day treatment, since they'd be the first-to-market with it. When they saw the researcher's one-day treatment, they realized that a competitor could leapfrog them if it got ahold of the treatment, so they knew they had to buy it out, but rather than introduce the one-day treatment immediately (i.e. leapfrog themselves) and give up any advantage the three-day treatment could have afforded them in the market, they decided to sit on the one-day treatment for several years. Doing so allowed them to benefit from being first-to-market with the three-day treatment, giving them a few years of market dominance, and then as their competitors started to catch up, they were able to be first-to-market with a one-day treatment which they could sell at a premium price. In essence, it allowed them to double the length of their lead in the market and command a higher price for the faster treatment.
All of which is to say, these aren't conspiracy theories. You're absolutely correct that these companies want to make even more money than they already have, but there are plenty of sound, financial reasons for them to sit on better technologies rather than introducing them immediately. I've highlighted merely one of them here.