Follistatin Gene Therapy Doubles Muscle Mass in Mice

Follistatin is an inhibitor of myostatin. Blocking myostatin activity enhances muscle growth, with accompanying beneficial side-effects such as a loss of excess fat tissue. This is well proven. There are a good number of animal lineages (mice, dogs, cows, and so forth) resulting from natural or engineered myostatin loss of function mutations, and even a few well-muscled human individuals with similar mutations. A number of groups are at various stages in the development of therapies to either upregulate follistatin or inhibit myostatin. The latter is further along in the formal regulatory process: human trials have been conducted for myostatin antibody therapies. Meanwhile, first generation follistatin gene therapies, such as that pioneered by BioViva Science, are available at great expense through the medical tourism market, such as via Integrated Health Systems, with all too little data on their efficacy. In a world in which gene therapies become cheap and reliable, which will happen over the next ten to twenty years, follistatin upregulation will likely be one of the more widely available enhancement therapies. Who doesn't want more muscle, less fat, and a better metabolism, and all of that lasting for longer into later life? Unfortunately, gene therapy platforms are at present not all that efficient when it comes to systemic delivery throughout the body, at least not without a great deal of optimization to the specific use case. It is true that targeting muscle can...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs