Upregulation of Autophagy to Treat Age-Related Disease

Regulation of autophagy has been a tremendously popular topic in the aging research community over the past twenty years, so much so that it is very surprising that little progress towards clinical therapies has been made. Search PubMed for autophagy and aging and you'll find a deluge of papers over this time frame, many of which express optimism on the topic of finding ways to upregulate autophagy to improve health and slow the aging process. It is the consensus in the research community that autophagy declines with age, and that there are benefits to be realized through increased autophagy. This may allow many age-related conditions to be treated, slowed, or postponed. All of this is taken as self-evident from the voluminous evidence accumulated to date. What is autophagy? It is a collection of maintenance processes responsible for recycling broken or otherwise unwanted cellular structures and proteins. In the case of chaperone-mediated autophagy, target proteins are guided by a chaperone protein and imported into a lysosome for disassembly. For macroautophagy, an autophagosome membrane forms around the target structure, moves to a lysosome, and fuses with it. In microautophagy, a lysosome directly engulfs the target without assistance. In all cases, a lysosome is the final destination, a membrane packed with enzymes capable of taking apart near everything it will encounter inside a cell. The component parts are then released for reuse. Many of the methods sho...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs