Japan’s anti-aging vaccine looks promising in mice

https://vstories.medium.com/japans-anti-aging-vaccine-looks-promising-2d9b5e48ce56

by codewiz • 5 years ago

92 106 5 years ago

vstories.medium.com

dado3212• 5 years ago

Can anyone with a scientific background chime in on why this is nonsense that will never come to viability?

hobofan• 5 years ago

It's very hard to critique an article that has the quality of GPT-3 generated blogspam and doesn't contain a link to better sources.

fsflover• 5 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong ?

more_corn2• 5 years ago

I take offense at your implication that GPT3 generates poor quality articles.

bostonpete• 5 years ago

I usually look to r/science for this sort of skepticism. This particular thread doesn't seem especially negative...

https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/ren6cc/japanese_sc...

carbonguy• 5 years ago

Reading the abstract for the paper (thanks to skybrian for providing the link) it seems that the phrase "anti-aging vaccine" is a gross exaggeration in this context rather than the science itself being flawed.

Broadly, the abstract seems to be describing a particular cell-surface marker found to be associated with senescence ("seno-antigen") which can be targeted by a therapy ("genetic ablation") which accelerates removal of cells with that marker. Doing so improves the lifespan of mice so treated.

Thus, as the abstract concludes, "...vaccination targeting seno-antigens could be a potential strategy for new senolytic therapies."

almmoip• 5 years ago

Killing senescent cells is one thing.

Making sure they actually get replaced with new cells instead of scar tissue is another.

Until that’s resolved, killing the wrong kinds of senescent cells will kill you much faster than leaving them alone, so even highly targeted killing of senescent cells can’t “rejuvenate” all your organs.

https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131(20)...

coding123• 5 years ago

Shouldn't science be the standard? Why implicitly be doubtful?

AnimalMuppet• 5 years ago

History?

Given N "advances" that you hear touted based on mouse trials, how many turn into real human therapies? (Curing aging in mice isn't really the advance we're looking for.) How many turn into real human therapies that live up to the breathless announcements that were made based on the mouse trials? I don't have hard evidence, but my gut estimate is 10-20% actually deliver.

So, yes, while waiting for the science, there is some empirical grounds to have a default stance of doubt (or, if you prefer, skepticism).

siver_john• 5 years ago

1) The original linked article is not a link to a scientific work. Therefore it's credence should be taken with a grain of salt as news articles need clicks more than they need boring sounding article titles.

2) In science often abstracts or intros open with grand ideas before settling into a much smaller scope.

3) The rise of predatory journals, not to mention people citing pre-print arXivs means even if something looks likes a reasonable article, it's good to get the opinions of other experts.

4) Just because something works doesn't imply how practical it is for actual deployment. (I've been to plenty of chemical talks about fantastic polymers, I've only ever seen one turn into anything of value.)

Symmetry3• 5 years ago

Senescent cells are only one factor in aging. You've also other mitochondrial DNA damage, accumulating nuclear DNA damage leading to cancer, gunk building up inside lysosomes, gunk building up elsewhere, etc. If I were to try to rank them senescent cells would probably be second or third on the list. Potentially a really big deal but not at all synonymous with aging in general. That is, if this actually pans out.

skybrian• 5 years ago

Paper is here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43587-021-00151-2

Thoreandan• 5 years ago

Came to comments to share this, thanks.

Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/882/

spywaregorilla4• 5 years ago

Posting that comic without any particular context seems distracting. Do you see any evidence that the authors paid no attention to FPR corrections?

mikhailt• 5 years ago

It seems odd this is perceived as anti-aging rather than removing "zombie" cells from our body as a preventative measure that could be turned against us.

This wouldn't stop the cell from "aging" and we still have aging-related issues like with memory degradation and other stuff that is not related to the zombie cells.

more_corn2• 5 years ago

Rebranding it an anti-zombie vaccine would be metal.

mkaic• 5 years ago

"Yeah, stopped by for my Anti-Zombie booster shot at CVS on the way home today, feeling a little ill but looking forward to surviving the apocalypse. How was your day?"

kingcharles• 5 years ago

What kind of metal? Zinc? Nickel? Hassium?

hinkley7• 5 years ago

I'm worried we're going to find an epigenetic time bomb in destroying all senescent cells. These cells aren't just old, they remember our old life. Some adaptations to past trauma save us from further trauma. Others are more maladaptive.

If this vaccine causes the immune system to 'forget' by killing off B cells, then you may have to get a booster shot for every vaccine you've ever had. That may not sound like a big deal but that creates a class division for longevity treatments. I could afford to take a month off, quarantine myself and get twenty booster shots. Some of my neighbors can't, so either they risk getting sick or they don't take the treatment at all.

Science fiction has always asserted there would be class divisions in these sorts of treatments, so perhaps that's not a surprise.

codeddesign3• 5 years ago

This is a little extreme. When was the last time you had to take a month off for a flu shot? Adults do this all the time when traveling overseas. It may be inconvenient to take a half day off to go to the clinic, but what you are saying is extreme.

Not to mention, people take time off for augmentations and plastic surgery all the time.

Symmetry3• 5 years ago

If a B cell becomes senescent it isn't going to be contributing contributing to your immune response in any event. In general a senescent cell represents a cell that failed at apoptosis when it was supposed to kill itself, going in and having the immune system finish the job won't hurt anything. That is, assuming that the vaccine works in humans and doesn't have unwanted side effects, which is very much a possibility at this stage.

varelse4• 5 years ago

Before an epigenetic time bomb detonates it's likely you will get your own very personalized cancer that will take you out unless we have come up with a universal cure-all for it. We could probably do that in a decade or two now but it would require concentrated effort. And the same mRNA technology behind the Moderna and the Pfizer vaccines might be the basis of a first generation treatment. But also it won't be cheap. At least initially. So either you'll have to have the money up front or you'll have to make a deal with someone who does and I doubt the latter ends well.

nomel2• 5 years ago

To put it another way, this won't extend the Hayflick limit [1], so your cells will still die after the same number of divisions.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayflick_limit

grishka2• 5 years ago

There's telomerase whose job is to lengthen telomeres. Telomere attrition is not irreversible.

staticassertion7• 5 years ago

"aging" is a complex set of a number of different issues. Cell senescence is generally considered to be an age related issue.

swader999• 5 years ago

Fisetin does the same thing.

jacquesm3• 5 years ago

In mice.

dang• 5 years ago

Ok, we've inmiced the title above. Thanks!

Eyght• 5 years ago

The contention that mice are the most intelligent beings on the planet seems more plausible every year.

cblconfederate3• 5 years ago

They certainly coopted humans to solve all their problems

cblconfederate3• 5 years ago

If it was in humans you wouldn't read about it anywhere

pengaru• 5 years ago

So is this a similar anti-aging mechanism to autophagy triggered by fasting?

datavirtue• 5 years ago

That's what it sounds like to me as well.

yodon• 5 years ago

Anti-aging is an economics problem more than a medical one. If you radically extend lifetimes, those who have been alive the longest have had the most time accumulate capital. There's very little chance for someone 200-300 years younger to have any way to match the economic means of their seniors, resulting in a highly destabilizing permanent economic hierarchy.

If you think gen z are pissed at boomers, slip another 200 years of differential in and things start to look really bad.

collias• 5 years ago

I wouldn't say it's more of an economics problem...it's still a medical impossibility as far as we know.

Everyone develops cancer given a long enough timeline. If we can somehow defeat that, or give everyone robot bodies after their biological one fails, we still have a wide array of brain diseases to defeat.

spywaregorilla4• 5 years ago

fwiw, robot body with human brain would almost certainly be severely immunocompromised. Organs are important.

JohnWhigham• 5 years ago

Yup, while societies do have momentous occasions of revolution, they are rather rare. It's more so people of a generation dying off allowing newer blood to come in. I have no doubt that societies would eventually stagnate if such anti-aging mechanisms become widely available enough. And they will only be available to the rich and in-power at first, mind you.

cblconfederate3• 5 years ago

economy is downstream from technology, economy adapts

But more importanly, this isn't necessarily about extending lifetimes but making them worth it (and possibly productive until the last minute)

jquip• 5 years ago

I do believe that economics itself will take into account increased lifespans, UBI and other measures of normality...

Here's a take, if people get to live so much longer, then money is not the variable to be optimised for humanity in general...

Also, rates of labour, skill, energy expenditure and so many variables will undergo a change in definitions.

I would like to see everyone make it... I believe so would everyone else, if increased lifespans are on the line.

pezzana• 5 years ago

The usual caveat applies:

Does it work? It does and it works quite well. Tests have shown that the preparation developed by the scientists forced the production of antibodies in the bodies of mice, which through the white blood cells attacked the aging cells in their bodies. The average lifespan of laboratory rodents that took the preparation extended by 15 percent relative to the control group, and individuals suffering from arterial stiffness saw a significant reduction in the damaged areas of these blood vessels.

Results in mice will probably not track to humans, assuming this treatment even makes it to that stage. The development time for most vaccines is on the order of 10 years or more, so even if it does make it (again, unlikely), it would be at least 10 years before this becomes available to humans. And there's a lot that can go wrong along the way. The biggest problem is that mice are not humans, and as far as animal models go, they're not even a good one.

Regarding that 15%, without some error bars (which can be quite large) it will be hard to say how "promising" this actually is.

pcthrowaway• 5 years ago

Now that we have precedent to fast-track vaccines based on impact of the thing they treat, maybe we can apply this to aging which kills more people per year than pre-vaccine COVID did.

codeddesign3• 5 years ago

Haha.. Why test when we can fast-track and test on live people! Great analogy and made me laugh ;)

meitros• 5 years ago

One thing I never understood is that if results in mice so often don’t carry over to humans, what about the opposite - treatments that might work for people but are discarded because they don’t work well with mice.

tsol• 5 years ago

There are a lot of problems with medical testing, and much of it stems from simple ethics. It would be more effective to test on humans directly and who knows what amazing treatments we might find that don't work in rats. And yet.. that's hopelessly unethical.

It reminds me of a scene from House MD; >People should not be testing drugs because they are desperate. But, people won't test drugs unless they are desperate. We need drugs to save children and puppies ergo we need desperate people ergo welfare kills sick children.

Maybe in the future AI will solve this problem, if we can learn to accurately model the human body. But given it's insane complexity that's certainly going to be a big challenge

JamesBarney4• 5 years ago

This probably happens. We're searching for drugs that "help humans, and don't kill them". And limiting our search to "helps mice, and doesn't kill them" is much more viable than trying random drugs on people and seeing how they do.

biryani_chicken• 5 years ago

At least in this case, maybe as legislators get older they'll become more friendly to the idea.

JamesBarney4• 5 years ago

The biggest problem is that mice are not humans, and as far as animal models go, they're not even a good one.

A model != an animal. A model is an animal + process for giving the animal a disease.

Mice can be a very good model. As a model for obesity drugs that work through appetite reduction most mouse models are great.

For Alzheimer's all models are terrible (amyloid beta injection, genetic over expression of tau, etc).

"Mice models are bad" sounds profound but doesn't really say anything. Far more informative to say "mouse models of senolytics are bad, and have poor translation to human trials." But we don't know this because we haven't really tried senolytics in humans, so we have no idea if mice are a good or bad model of human senolytics.

I'm idealistic because "mouse gets old and blood vessels don't work as well" is probably pretty similar to "person gets old and blood vessels don't work as well". As opposed to ALS, Alzheimer's, and Parkinson's which mice don't get so we just inject them with stuff we find in the blood and brain of the afflicted.

staticassertion7• 5 years ago

Results in mice will probably not track to humans,

In this case I don't know if that's true. Total layman, but this sounds like autophagy triggered through an immune response. Autophagy is already promising fro human life extension. This feels like an approach that could be generalizable, even if perhaps the specific antibody might not apply.

chasil• 5 years ago

There have been a few past studies on senescent cells with quercetin, both alone and combined with other "senolytics" that have been encouraging.

A vaccine would be ideal, but senolytic supplements are likely closer.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/ebiom/article/PIIS2352-39...

Jansen3122• 5 years ago

They could go along the route of mRNA vaccines. Experimental granted for "emergency use". The rich and powerful will do that. So I doubt it needs 10 years. If they do this altruistically for the masses, yeah 10 is a good number. Not so for the rich and powerful that wish to live immortally.

optimalsolver• 5 years ago

I'm annoyed to have been born early enough for biological life extension to not be available, but late enough to actually consider it a possibility.

orang2tang• 5 years ago

What are you afraid of?

RivieraKid• 5 years ago

He said "annoyed" not "afraid".

w0m• 5 years ago

'death' answering the question you mean; if not the one you asked.

mindcandy• 5 years ago

When the day comes that it becomes really real and everyone from now on gets to live for a few hundred years. But, not you. You are already too old for it to work. Maybe if you led a much more healthy lifestyle. But, no. You get to grow progressively more decrepit while watching people younger than you not go through the same problems. Eventually you will die of it while they are still partying hard in their 80s and will continue to do so for two hundred more years. Good for them. Sucks to be you.

credit_guy• 5 years ago

I still have hopes. I don't think meaningful (decades-long) life extension will become reality before my time comes due, but maybe suspended animation can. We discussed isochoric freezing (for food preservation purposes) recently on HN. The concept can be used for tissue preservation as well [1], and at some point maybe for whole body preservation. One can dream ...

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-021-02650-9

grishka2• 5 years ago

I'm still hopeful. There's quite a lot of promising research being done right now, with huge amounts of money being poured into it. Latest papers point to aging being an intentional, programmed, self-sustaining process, that is the continuation of the organism's development which just happens to become destructive around 25 years of age (in humans). The older theory that aging is due to accumulated damage and telomere attrition is mostly getting abandoned.

The process of aging, as it turns out, is malleable. It's most probably controlled by some signaling molecules in the bloodstream, it's just that we don't know yet which ones. Look up "heterochronic parabiosis" for related research.

Then there are Yamanaka factors, those not only erase cell identity, they also erase the age. Of course you don't want all your cells turning into stem cells, but the fact that this mechanism exists at all means that it's likely possible to isolate the pathway that resets the age of a cell but keeps the identity.

Then there's the "rejuvenation event" during embryonic development shortly after conception, as shown by DNA methylation clocks.

So currently we have these puzzle pieces that we don't yet know how to put together, and some are still missing. We'll get there eventually.

It's not even going to be life extension, as in, "you'll still get old and eventually die of old age but slower", it's full-on rejuvenation, as in, "you'll look and feel 25 and the only thing giving away your actual age will be your ID".

jacquesm3• 5 years ago

I'll bet you that this goes for everybody alive today. Wait, strike that ;)

reducesuffering2• 5 years ago

Not too late to improve your chances with great amounts of exercise, nutrition, and green tea, while minimizing calories.

mamcx• 5 years ago

Great.

One step closer to raise our mice overlords.

0xDEEPFAC• 5 years ago

Seems odd to call this a "vaccine" isn't this more like "gene therapy"?

glouwbug• 5 years ago

Do the Japanese need it? They have excellent genetics already

Jansen3122• 5 years ago

Basically, they created anti-aging vac for mice. Human-wise remain to be seen. We are creating a super mice species. Better pray they don't screw up and release this to the wild. I already have hard time containing cockroaches and ants in my home. I don't want to add mice (or woest rats) to that list.

Japan’s anti-aging vaccine looks promising in mice

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