A Brief Look at Retrotope

Today, I'll point out the early stage company Retrotope, more out of curiosity than as an example of a research and development strategy that I'd favor pursuing. They don't make it terribly easy to see exactly what they're up to, as seems to be the trend for the online presence of young biotech companies these days, but the digest is that the staff there are trying to build therapies based on substituting deuterium for hydrogen in some of the molecules employed in cellular structure and machinery.

As long-time readers will no doubt recall, a slow trickle of evidence has arrived over the past decade to suggest that replacing a small fraction of hydrogen atoms with deuterium atoms in the proteins and other molecular machinery of a living organism produces a slight beneficial outcome to health and longevity. Deuterium is an isotope of hydrogen, with a nucleus containing a proton and a neutron rather than just a proton. So it is twice as heavy, but with the same single electron as hydrogen it has similar chemical properties. Molecules in which this substitution has been made have broadly similar characteristics, but there is enough of a difference to ensure that, for example, heavy water is toxic, more so to lower animals than to mammals, and, apparently, that a low level of deuterium substitution in cellular machinery can be slightly beneficial. In studies of deuterium substitution a common methodology is to culture worms, flies, and so forth, with a diluted dose of heavy water...

Source: Fight Aging! - October 30, 2015 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs