One of the Ways Researchers Narrow the Search for Drugs to Slow Aging

Small molecule and drug candidate libraries are huge. Much of modern medical research is a process of screening subsets of those libraries in search of molecules that can produce benefits with minimal side-effects. Usually the output of a successful screen is taken as a starting point for further exploration and molecular tinkering, to improve the effect or minimize undesirable side-effects. The great hope for gene therapy is that it will render all of this largely obsolete by offering ways to directly influence a molecular mechanism to a configurable degree without meaningful side-effects. That remains a way off in the future, however, and meanwhile a very sizable slice of medical research is still all about finding which cataloged molecules might be interesting to work with. Thus when it comes to aging, a majority of efforts are focused on adjusting the operation of metabolism via small molecules from the catalogs, interacting with one of the known aging-related mechanisms discovered via examination of the biology of calorie restriction, or autophagy, or other stress response mechanisms. This is somewhat depressing: none of this work offers either hope or possibility of doing more than slightly increasing human life span, yet it is where most the funding and effort is focused. An increasing fraction of those initiatives are concerned with ways to speed up this process, to make it more rational, to cut down the number of molecules to be assessed. These advances are in...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs