Thinking About the Pipeline: Getting Therapies into Clinics

A legitimate, actual human rejuvenation therapy is one that repairs one of the forms of cell and tissue damage that are collectively the root cause of aging. By root cause I mean that this damage occurs as a result of the normal operation of cellular metabolism, and is not itself caused by another form of damage. The present list includes a few classes of persistent metabolic waste, such as misfolded proteins and sugary cross-links, mitochondrial DNA damage, senescent cells, cancerous nuclear DNA mutations, and loss of necessary cell populations, such as active stem cells and long-lived cells in the central nervous system. While not directly caused by one another, these various forms of root cause damage do interact with one another. One type of damage can speed up the progression of another independent form of damage by harming quality control or repair mechanisms, for example.

Do any real, legitimate rejuvenation therapies exist yet? Why yes, as it happens. In 2015, Pentraxin Therapeutics and GlaxoSmithKline completed a small trial of a therapy capable of partially clearing transthyretin amyloid in human patients. Amyloids are misfolded protein, a type of persistent metabolic waste that accumulates in all of us with age, and which in this case is implicated in the development of cardiovascular disease, among other conditions. The presence of amyloid in older tissues is a form of damage, and clearing it is a form of repair, and thus a narrow and specific form of rejuvenatio...

Source: Fight Aging! - March 18, 2016 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Of Interest Source Type: blogs