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Molecule Kills Elderly Cells, Reduces Signs of Aging In Mice (sciencemag.org)

Posted by BeauHD on from the fountain-of-youth dept.

An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a Science Magazine report: Even if you aren't elderly, your body is home to agents of senility -- frail and damaged cells that age us and promote disease. Now, researchers have developed a molecule that selectively destroys these so-called senescent cells. The compound makes old mice act and appear more youthful, providing hope that it may do the same for us. As we get older, senescent cells build up in our tissues, where researchers think they contribute to illnesses such as heart disease, arthritis, and diabetes. In the past, scientists have genetically modified mice to dispatch their senescent cells, allowing the rodents to live longer and reducing plaque buildup in their arteries. Such genetic alterations aren't practical for people, but researchers have reported at least seven compounds, known as senolytics, that kill senescent cells. A clinical trial is testing two of the drugs in patients with kidney disease, and other trials are in the works. However, current senolytic compounds, many of which are cancer drugs, come with downsides. They can kill healthy cells or trigger side effects such as a drop in the number of platelets, the cellular chunks that help our blood clot. Cell biologist Peter de Keizer of Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and colleagues were investigating how senescent cells stay alive when they uncovered a different strategy for attacking them. Senescent cells carry the type of DNA damage that should spur a protective protein, called p53, to put them down. Instead, the researchers found that a different protein, FOXO4, latches onto p53 and prevents it from doing its duty. To counteract this effect, De Keizer and colleagues designed a molecule, known as a peptide, that carries a shortened version of the segment of FOXO4 that attaches to p53. In a petri dish, this peptide prevented FOXO4 and p53 from hooking up, prompting senescent cells to commit suicide. But it spared healthy cells. The researchers then injected the molecule into mutant mice that age rapidly. These rodents live about half as long as normal mice, and when they are only a few months old, their fur starts to fall out, their kidneys begin to falter, and they become sluggish. However, the peptide boosted the density of their fur, reversed the kidney damage, and increased the amount of time they could scurry in a running wheel, the scientists report online today in Cell. When the researchers tested the molecule in normal, elderly mice, they saw a similar picture: In addition to helping their kidneys and fur, the molecule also increased their willingness to explore their surroundings.

21 of 128 comments (clear)

  1. So ... what can I hope for? by Opportunist · · Score: 4, Funny

    More hair and better kidney function?

    In other words, it's like washing down Rogaine with beer?

    --
    We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
  2. Lab Rats have it made by SCVonSteroids · · Score: 5, Funny

    We're finding all these awesome ways to extend and enrich their lives. God I wish I was a rat...

    --
    I tend to rant.
    1. Re:Lab Rats have it made by PolygamousRanchKid+ · · Score: 4, Funny

      God I wish I was a rat...

      You might want to think about that wish again. Scientific studies have proven time and again that the leading cause of death among rats is lab scientists.

      --
      Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
    2. Re:Lab Rats have it made by denzacar · · Score: 2

      Are you pondering what I'm pondering?

      --
      Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
  3. Sounds nice! by Kokuyo · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I'm glad we seem to be on track to tackling frailty with age... however, we're nowhere when it comes to tackling our resource problems...

    A cynical though: Will we stay healthy and strong longer just so we can send the 50 year olds to war over water instead of just the 20 to 30 year olds?

    1. Re:Sounds nice! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      If we would live longer we would stay productive much longer in life, so it could possibly be a benefit too. Just because someone lives longer may not cause the population to grow since it may cause people to wait longer before having children..

      Imagine what could happen if researchers had 20-30 years extra, instead of 40 years in total, of productive lives and allowing them to continue using their experience and push their research even further. Just look at the guy that invented the current lithium-ion batteries managed to do at the age of 94..

      Anything to combat aging.. just look at the amount of resources we use to take care of the sick and elderly.. And as a big bonus everyone would have much better life-quality with less sickness etc.

    2. Re:Sounds nice! by bluefoxlucid · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Resource problems are a myth, in a sense. Population always expands until scarcity: at a point, you can't scale production of some products without investing more labor, which means the basic cost of those products increases, the economization of means decreases, the poor get poorer, and more people become poor. At that point, population expansion slows until technical progress raises the scarcity cap.

      Take food. Without GMO, fertilizers, pesticides, irrigation, tractors, and other modern intensive techniques, you need more land to grow the same food. That doesn't just mean more labor per yield of food; it also means you run out of good-climate, good-soil, accessible-irrigation land with a lower total food-per-year yield. Bump that and you can have more population.

      The resource scarcity issue is constant, and has always been constant. When we find more, we expand.

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    3. Re:Sounds nice! by gurps_npc · · Score: 2

      Your entire statement proves your are wrong or outright evil. You claim resource problems are a myth then say that scarce resources cause poverty and that means population expansion ceases. First of all poverty IS a resource problem. Poverty = not enough money = not enough resources.

      Population expansion is caused by more births than deaths. Poverty does not reduce the birth rate, it increases it. But it does increase the death rate more than the birth rate.

      Population up with scarce resources = poverty = deaths caused by: famine, disease, drought, war, crime, etc. (all symptoms of resource scarcity).

      It is true that recently (in the past two hundred years) birth control and capitalism combined with a larger enough population for scientific research has led to far better resource management and expansion. That is a recent phenomena and NOT related to resource scarcity. That is, science ameliorates the problem you describe, but it is NOT an automatic solution.

      It is true that population does expand to fit our current resources, but it is not true that = constant scarcity.

      --
      excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
    4. Re:Sounds nice! by bluefoxlucid · · Score: 2

      Look at the United States, the United Kingdom, China, France, and Germany. Sure, there seems to be tons of food, employment, etc... except if you're in the bottom 5% of the country, since we have about 5% unemployment and about half of those are begging on the streets and getting their food from trash cans.

      In African nations, they have a lower quality-of-life and a reduced standard-of-living. They outbreed the failures of their healthcare systems--we do, too, but we have great healthcare and so don't have to have 18 kids to ensure 2 survive polio and malaria--and have a population limited by availability of things like food.

      In America and Europe, the population spiked around the 1920s. There was food scarcity, and so a lot of Nobel-Prize-winning work went into developing new agricultural tools and methods. In a world with 1.9 billion people and an add of around 100 million per year, we suddenly saw growth to 3.2 billion people in less than a decade as food became more-accessible.

      So yes, historically, this is how it works. Not how it might work; not how it works with foxes and lemmings; this is how it works with people, throughout human history.

      Also, people are rational agents; they simply don't always have 100% of all information available. They make a rational decision based on imperfect information.

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    5. Re:Sounds nice! by bluefoxlucid · · Score: 2

      Okay, well, with a cut-down population, you also lose the labor required to produce to support the population. Then labor becomes a short resource. Without a labor reserve, you can't take advantage of technical progress, and so the economy becomes unstable and poverty becomes more wide-spread, rather than the normal model of developing better access to food, clean water, and healthcare as technology improves.

      It is true that population does expand to fit our current resources, but it is not true that = constant scarcity.

      Population expands to fit our current resources because it hits a wall. Communist leaders have not spent the past 10,000 year of human history dictating how many children each family shall have to properly manage global resources; we've just expanded until maximum.

      That means, yes, we expand until scarcity. We expand until the cost to acquire food starts increasing. We advance until the number of farmers needed grows proportionally-faster than the number of people being born. We expand until we can't build houses fast enough to house all these people, can't mine oil fast enough to provide all the industrial services they need, and so forth. Then we get more poor people and continued expansion necessarily will cause a rise in unemployment, a rise in poverty, and a visible and obvious economic recession, which slows population growth.

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    6. Re:Sounds nice! by bluefoxlucid · · Score: 2

      978sqft houses in 1950. 2,300sqft in 2003. We buy more shit, we get bigger houses, we fill the houses with more shit.

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      Support my political activism on Patreon.
    7. Re:Sounds nice! by avandesande · · Score: 2

      Most developed nations are undergoing a shrinking demographic. People having less children and living longer is more efficient and environmentally friendly than the opposite.

      --
      love is just extroverted narcissism
    8. Re:Sounds nice! by ragahast · · Score: 2

      I'm not sure the argument flies with actual humans.

      Just look at the data.

      The main reason behind the dramatic decline in children per woman, even in developed countries, is probably the similarly dramatic improvement in infant and childhood mortality seen over the last several decades (and not scarcity as suggested above).

      Even in developing countries, people prefer quality to quantity when it comes to children. If they're confident their children will survive to early adulthood, they have fewer children.

      --
      .:Semper Absurda:.
  4. Re:Does it work for meth heads too? by Lennie · · Score: 2

    Well, are you off the meth ?

    --
    New things are always on the horizon
  5. Re:Research to extend lifespans should be banned by arobatino · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Countries with longer lifespans have lower population growth, or even decline. This is plausible because people in those countries don't have to have extra children to be certain that some will survive. If life extension also increases the maximum reproductive age, people could put off having children which would reduce population growth even more. A lot of people in developed countries only choose to have children because their biological clock is ticking.

  6. Re:Research to extend lifespans should be banned by Nutria · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Correlation or causation?

    After all, education and prosperity are in that mix too.

    --
    "I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
  7. If this allows you to live a health life until 100 by Chrisq · · Score: 3, Insightful

    If this allows you to live a health life until 100 they will put retirement age up to 90.

  8. Fasting Mimicking Diet does this safely by NetFusion · · Score: 3, Interesting

    2015 - A Periodic Diet that Mimics Fasting Promotes Multi-System Regeneration, Enhanced Cognitive Performance, and Healthspan
    http://www.cell.com/cell-metab...

    2016 - Fasting: Awakening the Rejuvenation from Within | Valter Longo | TEDxEchoPark
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

    2017 - Fasting-Mimicking Diet Promotes Ngn3-Driven -Cell Regeneration to Reverse Diabetes
    http://www.cell.com/cell/fullt...

    You can replicate the study at home with 4 days of a ketogenic fasting mimic diet every 10 days for six cycles with a %5 carb ( 20 net carbs of nuts/greens/dairy) / %75 fat (nuts/olives/fish/eggs/butter) / %20 protein (nuts/fish/eggs/greens/bacon) macro and 50% then 20% , 20% , 20% calorie restriction (the 3 day 10% restriction of the study on mice was extreme and not for the faint of heart). Throw in multi vitamin and probiotic day 3 and 4 and lots and lots of water with pinch of salt now and then/mineral water/coffee/tea during the fast and... amazing. You lose fat, feel better, and if the studies are right; get some nice anti-cancer, anti-aging, anti-disease, body regeneration benefits.

  9. Broken cleanup mechanism? by Quirkz · · Score: 2

    For me, the following was one of the more interesting pieces:

    Senescent cells carry the type of DNA damage that should spur a protective protein, called p53, to put them down. Instead, the researchers found that a different protein, FOXO4, latches onto p53 and prevents it from doing its duty. To counteract this effect, De Keizer and colleagues designed a molecule, known as a peptide, that carries a shortened version of the segment of FOXO4 that attaches to p53.

    Does this mean we have an internal cleanup mechanism, but somehow it's gotten subverted over the years? Our ancestors may have had the benefit of p53, until something changed and we started developing FOXO4 when we hadn't before? Or somewhere along the line the amount of FOXO4 in our bodies increased? That seems fascinating to me.

    My first reaction was also to think, "That doesn't seem like a very useful mutation/bit of evolution" but of course most of the age-related stuff won't be important until you're beyond the age of reproduction, so it's probably relatively easier for that kind of problem to sneak in than something that affects the young. I also wonder if it's *just* a mutation, or if the FOXO4 is doing something else more useful for us when we're young, that the tradeoff is worth it?

    --
    The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
  10. Let's see... by MrKrillls · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Kill off all my elderly brain cells:

    a) Pretty much nothing left in my head.

    b) Nobody will notice any change.

    --
    Don't step on the baby.
  11. Death really is unnecessary by Tempest451 · · Score: 2

    Death really is unnecessary from an evolutionary standpoint. We have grown beyond the need to pass on genetic traits that allow us to adapt to changing environments since mankind uses technology to do this. Medicines are preventing the need to evolve immunities naturally so the fact that we die is simply the product of inefficiencies on cellular replication. The three things needed for immortality are negative apoptosis, efficient waste removal, and efficient genetic error checking. There is no need for the skin cells you have at 50 to be any different than at 20.