Sirtuin Research Continues Ever Onward in Search of Relevance

As a result of failed commercial efforts a decade ago, research into sirtuins - particularly SIRT1 - in the context of aging is broader than it might otherwise be, and has a great deal of inertia. A lot of funding poured into this area, and as a result efforts to map all of the biochemistry that touches upon SIRT1 continue today, long after the goal of building a therapy to slow aging based upon manipulating SIRT1 was abandoned. The early evidence for SIRT1 to be important enough in aging to be a basis for therapies was demolished, no useful treatment ever emerged, a bunch of investors nonetheless made a very large profit, and the "anti-aging" marketplace continues to sell useless supplements hyped on the basis of sirtuin-related expectations long since shown to be wrong. Since the primary goal of the scientific community is to gather knowledge, and the one concrete outcome of the sirtuin hype was a foothold of new knowledge in this tiny slice of metabolism, research into sirtuins continues. Since researchers are better able to raise funding when they can offer at least the prospect of application of their research, even when the real goal is only the accumulation of knowledge, sirtuin researchers tend to explain their work in terms of potential impact on aging. But I think that ship has sailed. One should read SIRT1 research nowadays as a matter of interest, an example of the research community making slow progress in building the grand map of how exactly aging functi...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs