Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
Find out the gene, make a few interfering RNAs candidates, blast it into the skin cells (not as hard since its a surface tissue), choose the ones that did not knock down other similar proteins and BAM! you got it.
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)
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
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.
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.