There is clear evidence for the rejuvenation of specific biological functions is now available in model organisms for a growing range of treatments. Achieving full medical control of aging, however, will certainly require the use of not just one, but an arsenal of longevity therapies. Aubrey de Grey explained how the Robust Mouse Rejuvenation program under way at LEV Foundation has been designed to identify synergies – and conflicts – between existing interventions with a credible path to clinical translation, thus laying the groundwork for future multifactorial therapy in humans.
UPDATE : Sign the Longevity Declaration to support a call for major funding for antiaging studies.
The early results seem to indicate all four treatments (rapamycin, stem cells, telomerase gene therapy and navitoclax) in combination provide the best survival rate. However there is still a lot of noise in the study and we need to wait some months to get better confirmation. The other thing is to see if the survival rate is over one year beyond the expected one year remaining life without treatments.
Aubrey is getting ready for a second round of robust mouse rejuvenation studies. This will study a different batch of promising antiaging therapies.
RMR Update 8
Aubrey released the fist the survival curves. With each month that goes by it’ll become more and more tempting to extract conclusions from the data, but for now I want to make very clear that nothing whatsoever can yet be concluded. Even the conspicuously high mortality of “no-mTERT” males may be just noise.
The other thing Aubrey wanted to include today is a taster for the data they are collecting when a group’s survival curve reaches a particular mortality rate, which for the first such point is 20% dead. As you see from the curves, among males only the “no-mTERT” group has got there, while for females they are there there with four groups. The analysis takes time, plus they are still putting the finishing touches to their database where everything gets stored.
Also, honestly, for this data he says that it means nothing yet, because it even LOOKS boring. First off, here’s the glucose tolerance data for the three groups that reached 20% mortality a few weeks ago, compared with baseline. It’s very much what one would expect – all groups show a delay of maybe half an hour before glucose starts to decline from its peak, as compared to the baseline response when the mice were four months younger, but there is no obvious difference between the groups. The point when this will get interesting is when a few more groups hit 80% mortality at a few months older, because then we will see whether the glucose tolerance correlated better with chronological age or with biological age as estimated by mortality.
Next time Aubrey releases data will be in another month. He is hoping to provide a much wider range of the “cull point” data.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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“The other thing is to see if the survival rate is over one year beyond the expected one year remaining life without treatments.”
This is a lifespan extension story, but to me health span is equally important. Even if I only live to be 90 (based on actuarial charts, location, and year of birth), If I can maintain great health up to 88 that would be huge.
Last time I counted, there seemed to be about 40 major efforts underway for radical life extension, covering a great variety of different approaches, and also many that overlapped on the more promising methods.
I have confidence that my grandchildren could still be around to celebrate their 1000th birthdays. I strongly suspect that their parents might be able to be there, too. The real question, for me, is not whether or not the first person to live to be 1000 has already been born, but what year were they born in?
Because I like birthday cake, too.
Pardon, what are diets rated PUFA’s, and why would they be cheap?
Deuterated PUFAs; Also known as “reinforced lipids”. (You’ll find them discussed on Wikipedia under that name.)
They’re Poly Unsaturated Fatty Acids where hydrogen in key locations has been replaced with deuterium. Basically, due to the difference in behavior between deuterium and regular hydrogen, they’re a lot more resistant to, in effect, going rancid.
Lipids in biological membranes are subject to oxidation reactions that tend to be auto-catalytic; Once they get started they keep spreading. That produces all sorts of toxic products, and appears to be one of the chemical drivers of aging.
The D-PUFAs stop those chain reactions, so you don’t need a large fraction of them in your body to make you much more resistant to that degradation mechanism.
Happily, besides the anti-aging application, they appear to be effective in treating a number of diseases, so they’re getting a lot of research funding, and stand a good chance of being available for anti-aging treatment off label, if the FDA approves them for any of those diseases.
As for why they’d be cheap, they’re relatively simple molecules, aside from the deuteration, and deuterium isn’t a particularly expensive isotope. So I think if there was a considerable market for them, mass production could really bring the price down.
The real problem at this point is that anti-aging interventions that work in short lived species have a long track record of failing in longer lived species. OTOH, tests in longer lived species… take longer!
But a lot of these interventions they’re testing now look promising in that regard. I’m particularly interested in the dueterated PUFAs, they look like they’d be fairly cheap.
The average lab rat lives 2-3 years.
When they can show a 10 year old rat that is indistinguishable from a one year old rat, THEN I will pay attention; until then this is snake oil science.
I actually know a little bit about lab mice (not rats).
I took care of ~150 of them while a High School senior during a FT Internship program in lieu of High School (had to pass the tests though).
There is a GREAT variation in how long they live depending on: species, feedstock, crowding in cages, stress, nocturnal vs. diurnal proclivity, etc.
We’d need to see very robust numbers and clear differences, repeatedly, to conclude anything with such a multi-factor set of protocols.
Try going to oldsmallpast.com if that’s the level of evidence you need.
Aubrey de Grey : “I want to make very clear that nothing whatsoever can yet be concluded”
Brian Wang : “Clear evidence of rejuvenation”