Rejuvenation of Immune Function is One of the More Important Outcomes to Engineer through the Treatment of Aging

One would hope that it does not require an ongoing pandemic and related hysteria to point out that old people have poorly functioning immune systems, and thus suffer disproportionately the burden of infectious disease. But perhaps it does. The 2017-2018 seasonal influenza, a modestly more severe occurrence of something that happens every year, killed something like 60,000 people in the US alone, with little notice or comment. There is nothing so terrible that it won't be accepted - ignored, even - if it is normal. Floodgates of funding for infectious disease research and development have been opened in response to COVID-19, and while no doubt all too little of it will be spent wisely or usefully (public funding being the very definition of waste and corruption) it has certainly prompted many groups to try to position themselves to benefit. Those who have, all along, been working on ways to try to make older people more resilient via improvement in their immune function are perhaps more deserving than others, but it really isn't the case that much of this work is closer than five to ten years away from practical realization and completed human trials. Of the ways to restore immune function in the old, the worst are the small molecule drugs that show signs of adjusting metabolism in the right direction. For example, the mTOR inhibitors that just failed a phase III trial for reducing influenza incidence in the old. Better drug or drug-like approaches are those that...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs