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Telomere-Lengthening Procedure Turns Clock Back Years In Human Cells
Zothecula writes Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have developed a new procedure to increase the length of human telomeres. This increases the number of times cells are able to divide, essentially making the cells many years younger. This not only has useful applications for laboratory work, but may point the way to treating various age-related disorders – or even muscular dystrophy.
Seems like make stem cells young again will extend us past 120. The last 115 year old that died had 2 stem cells supplying more than 80% of her red blood cells. If you can rejuvenate them, they should be able to slow down aging everywhere else as well.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
You might be thinking of something different, reverting the cells to stem cells. These are the telomeres, which are the tail end of the DNA strand that gets chopped a little every time the cell splits. After many splits, there's none left and the cell dies.
There are already ways to extend the telomeres, that is something telomerase accomplishes, but this is a new procedure.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Making the treatment directly with mRNA sidestep a lot of dangers of promoting cell replication, the immune system would not have any foreign proteins to recognize and so multiple doses are feasible, the RNA is degraded over time so the replication goes back to normal instead of keeping forever in an artificial state and it was demonstrated that the cells grow "old" again after the treatment.
Still, it feels like its going to be much more a lab tool than a anti-aging treatment for a few more decades, RNA treatment is very tricky to do in vivo and even the most promising candidates for treatment (vaccines and so on) only produce very limited success, unless some revolutionary vector is invented in the near future it will pass a lot of years before this can be safe and efficient enough to be commercialized.
The first author of the paper did an impromptu AMA over at reddit. http://www.reddit.com/r/scienc...
========== "Hello World" in my programming language of choice: ATG - LET THERE BE LIFE - TAG ==========
Sarcasm is just a lie with an attitude problem, isn't it!
Although application of this RNA initially causes telomeres to lengthen, within 48 hours they once again begin to shorten as cells divide. This is a good thing, however, as cells that divide endlessly could pose a increased cancer risk if used in humans.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Yeah thats the Hayflick limit which is designed to stop that.
Theres actually a damn good reason why cells are designed to stop reproducing after a certain limit. In fact one of cancers strategies is to artificially prevent telemere shortening to try and circumvent the hayflick limit.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
I suspect that this will be one of the most expensive treatments ever.
There is no particular reason to believe this will be expensive. It is just some RNA, which can be inexpensively replicated. Even if it is patented, it is likely that someone else can some up with a similar technique, making it a competitive market, and driving down prices.
If you really want to be a pessimist, you should instead focus on how this is going to bankrupt Social Security. People are going to retire at 65, and then collect benefits for the next 55 years.
It already is to some degree
Yes, the article mentions that, and says extending by only 1000 nucleotides is a good thing because "cells that divide endlessly could pose a increased cancer risk if used in humans.". Of course if you kept repeating the treatment, it would be the same as dividing endlessly anyway.
More likely the opposite. One of the hallmarks of cancer is genomic instability caused by abnormal chromosomes. Restorative extension of telomeres would in fact stabilize chromosomes and protect them from developing anomalies.
========== "Hello World" in my programming language of choice: ATG - LET THERE BE LIFE - TAG ==========
If it really works people won't give a damn about patents.
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
My question is will it reverse aging? Can you rejuvenate?
This is only one aspect of aging. Here is a list of several others. All of them probably need to be addressed to reverse aging (and probably other things we don't know about).
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Good for you. At least you're not having to watch all those damned social engineering commercials.
The ads this year suck big time. Half the time I can't tell what they're trying to sell, if anything.
Not offhand in any good laymen's literature I know of. But the process is described in a bunch of molecular biology textbooks I don't have access to at the moment. When chromosomes are not protected with telomere caps on the ends, the cellular machinery is likely to mistakenly treat them as DNA double strand breaks. What happens in such situations is that proteins involved in DNA repair will try to join the "naked" end to the nearest other piece of DNA, even if it belongs to another healthy chromosome. Fused chromosomes are always bad news for cellular health. The problem is amplified in what is called a breakage-fusion-bridge (b/f/b) cycle as cells try to continue dividing with abnormal chromosomes that now doesn't separate as they should.
The presence of healthy telomeres suppresses this process. Even if your chromosomes get messed up through the infrequent snags that still happens occasionally, a damaged chromosome that is able to restore the presence of telomeres at the end by one means or another (there are several) will stop undergoing b/f/b cycles. Mind you, the chromosome is still damaged to some degree, but it doesn't get worse.
========== "Hello World" in my programming language of choice: ATG - LET THERE BE LIFE - TAG ==========
Even as a sardine is just a bird with an altitude problem.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Or you could, you know, treat the number one killer of humans: aging.
What we would ideally need to achieve elimination of cellular aging is the ability to sequence a person's entire DNA when they are young. And later digitally replicate an exact copy of the originals and print new undifferentiated cells to replace old ones, so the telomeres are longer, and also.... there are no mutations.
From the Reddit AMA by JohnRamus (the lead author):
Asked to describe a bit of background and where he thinks this research fits in with the rest of the field:
People have been extending telomeres in human cells since at least 1998, and there are many methods of extending telomeres, including delivery of TERT DNA, delivery of small molecule activators of TERT, and other methods. However, before our method, there was no method to extend telomeres that meets all of several criteria that we think are probably of value in a potential therapy: a method that extends telomeres rapidly, but by only a finite amount after which the normal protective anti-cancer telomere shortening mechanism remains intact, without causing an immune response, and without risk of insertional mutagenesis.
The innovations brought by our study:
Our method meets the above criteria for a potentially useful therapy. Specifically, we found that by delivering mRNA modified to reduce its immunogenicity and encoding TERT to human fibroblasts, telomerase activity was transiently (24-48h) increased, telomeres were lengthened (~0.9kb over a few days), proliferative capacity of the cells increased in a dose-dependent manner, telomeres resumed shortening, and the cells eventually stopped dividing and expressed markers of senescence to the same degree as untreated cells.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I hate to go all Negative-Nellie on you here, but let me give you a counter-example. There is a drug marketed under the name "Xyrem" that is used to treat very difficult cases of narcolepsy, which is no laughing matter if you know someone with the disease (which I do) or have it yourself (which I don't). This drug used to be cheaply available over the counter, but in more recent times, it has fallen under patent protection and costs up to $12,000 per month, with the price regularly increasing. You read that right: an over the counter drug became an obscenely expensive patent medicine. When I learned this story, I learned the lesson that money buys public policy in the USA.
You can tell yourself that the fedgov and megacorps can't keep something from us, but in practice, they can make it very difficult and dangerous to obtain outside of the authorized channels when there is enough money involved. Enforcement of laws against marijuana, cocaine, ecstacy, and even meth are nothing compared to this obscenity.
In short, I do believe that the establishment has the power to keep this from us no matter how bad we want it.
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
My question is will it reverse aging? Can you rejuvenate?
This is only one aspect of aging. Here is a list of several others. All of them probably need to be addressed to reverse aging (and probably other things we don't know about).
He lists seven, but there are actually eight aspects to aging - the last being not having a picture of yourself in the attic. Surely Dr. Grey should know this.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
People are going to retire at 65, and then collect benefits for the next 55 years.
If aging can be postponed, then so can retirement. Also, perhaps work will become more pleasant without the pressure of having to rush and save up for retirement.
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
Step One: 30 yo man buys 30 yo woman dinner.
Step Two: ?
Step Three: Baby
Sent from my ENIAC
The problem there would be that the epigenome, developed through one's life, would also get reverted. Your body might not recognize the reboot cells as its own.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
What we would ideally need to achieve elimination of cellular aging is the ability to sequence a person's entire DNA when they are young. And later digitally replicate an exact copy of the originals and print
new undifferentiated cells to replace old ones, so the telomeres are longer, and also.... there are no mutations.
Decent strategy but a DNA map of you in your youth shouldn't be necessary. The mutations only really cause problems at the cell level.
If you take a few thousand/million samples from different parts of the body then you should be able to look at the averages and determine
what the starting cell DNA was as different cells shouldn't have the same mutations so you should be able to average out any mutations.
Once you have the good dna and can replicate it then doing as small as a 1% cell replacement per month should be more than enough to
halt and/or reverse the aging process getting you back to your youth in about 8 or so years.
Sarcasm stems from the greek word Sarx which means 'to cut or rend flesh'. That's why people who use sarcasm appropriately are told that their sarcasm has bite to it. Sarcasm isn't a lie with an attitude problem, it's usually a truth with bite which is why sarcasm is the most violent uses of comedy... and sometimes tragedy.