Telomere extension turns back aging clock in cultured human cells, study finds

http://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2015/01/telomere-extension-turns-back-aging-clock-in-cultured-cells.html

by albanlv • 12 years ago

139 52 12 years ago

med.stanford.edu

nicwolff• 12 years ago

If they find a way to stop aging when I'm already 75, I'm gonna be pissed. (And if they then cure death, I'm gonna be pissed forever.)

adamio• 12 years ago

At least then you have an excuse to not work, being 25 perpetually for most people could simply mean an eternity of work

JoshTriplett3• 12 years ago

There's an old joke (and programming exercise) about how long Methuselah would collect Social Security...

raingrove• 12 years ago

But we are talking about reversal of aging, not pausing.

Htsthbjig• 12 years ago

It is not stopping aging, it is reversing it. You get old because your cells divide just repairing and maintaining the body. Each time one cell divides itself, the copies get a little shorter telomere.

When the telomere is in bad condition, your cells divide slower or even not divide itself.

When this happens your tissues do not repair fast enough, and everything gets a worse condition, your skin, your hair, your brain, your heart.

Restoring telomeres means your cells could start dividing again. At 75 your body will go back to "young adult" 20 years old, without the hair, teeth and whatever you have lost in your life, and the scars, and broken bones soldering, or damaged ligaments that you already have got in your life.

However, lots of animals could grow hair and teeth again so they will probably find a way to make that too.

People will continue dying, but young in their 100s, or in their 20s like today, in things like accidents, wars, terrorist attacks and so on.

People won't die from old age, like most people do today.

Of course this will change the world and will have terrible social consequences.

We will need a better (bigger and cheaper) energy source(fusion) that what we have today to sustain a population that mostly never dies, population and social controls(because old-now young people will have a terrible advantage, experience while being young, and all their accumulated compound wealth) and a way to start exploring other planets and living there.

ypeterholmes• 12 years ago

People will continue dying, but young in their 100s, or in their 20s like today

Not for long. Years from now living without a backup of yourself will be as abhorrent as currently operating a database with no backup.

JoshTriplett3• 12 years ago

If they find a way to stop aging when I'm already 75, I'm gonna be pissed. (And if they then cure death, I'm gonna be pissed forever.)

You'd then have all the time in the world for them to find improvements.

jzila• 12 years ago

This isn't _really_ news. It's been known for a while that cells can be made "immortal" by repairing telomeres [0]. In fact, for stem cells and cancer cells to keep their immortal properties they use various mechanisms to repair telomeres [1]. The major issue is that the more times a cell divides, the greater the likelihood that it will develop cancer. Some theories postulate that the Hayflick division limit on cells is actually a defense against cancer.

The Wikipedia articles on telomeres and telomerase have plenty of further resources[2][3].

[0] http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/chromosomes/telomeres...

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3370421/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telomere#Cancer

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telomerase

edit: formatting

gonehome• 12 years ago

I think the idea that aging may be an evolved anti-cancer mechanism is interesting. Death of individuals is itself probably a selective advantage for the species. Though I suppose shorter lifespans are also more commonly seen in species that reproduce sexually so that preference for continued biological variance is probably also a factor.

narrator• 12 years ago

Well why don't we just stay hyper fertile till we drop dead? That would be very positive evolutionarily! Truth be told evolution is a chaotic imperfect process that does all kinds of glitchy seemingly suboptimal things so aging is not perfect and divine because it's evolution. Sorry Candide, we do not live in the best of all possible worlds.

DavidSJ2• 12 years ago

Keep in mind that evolution works primarily at a subspecies level, so any mutations which benefited that lineage at the expense of the species as a whole would tend to be favored.

waps2• 12 years ago

Lifespan is a function of organism size (ironically measured in weight, mostly). The bigger an organism, the longer it's lifespan. Keeping in mind normal human lifespan would be about 30-35 years, you find that many animals of similar size have a natural lifespan within a factor 2 or so of a formula that also applies to humans. Normal whales, for instance, have a natural lifespan of about 70 years.

That this formula works would seem to indicate that you are right. Death is natural, but it's "planned". The easiest way for such a formula to work would be that your genes somehow contain a death clock.

But there are multiple death clocks. One limits number of cell divisions. There is another one known that limits the amount of energy that can pass through a cell, after which it will kill itself. There are various others, one that kills the cell if it isn't deactivated on a regular basis (presumably meant as a check on DNA integrity), one that is triggered from the outside of the cell, ... the list goes on.

pepon• 12 years ago

It has been know, but has it been done before?

Florin_Andrei3• 12 years ago

I'm guessing if you get really close to the limit predicted by the actuarial tables, then it's not that big of a gamble to play with the telomeres. If something goes wrong, what's the worst that could happen - you could die? Well, you'll probably do that soon anyway.

im3w1l• 12 years ago

So how can we repair the mutations?

Omniusaspirer• 12 years ago

Presumably sequence your genome early on in life while you're still healthy, then somehow (nanobots?) go in later in life cell by cell detecting things that have changed and fixing them.

That's my uneducated but logical sounding assumption.

thaumasiotes3• 12 years ago

I don't get the logic. The division limit is a defense against cancer in the same way that equipping your home with a selfdestruct button is a defense against burglars. Getting cancer is better than preemptively dying because you might or might not have gotten cancer.

lamuerteflaca• 12 years ago

Getting cancer before you reproduce is not good for the species.

eob• 12 years ago

You're comparing things of different scales. Your body has many cells, but cancer in one can take down the whole system. It's more like a self destruct button on each AWS machine bacause they have a nasty habit of propagating a worm that spreads across the rest of the data center

pinewurst• 12 years ago

This indeed is news! It's not the idea of telomere extension or telomerase, but a quick hit, temporary way of inducing that extension. Every other time I've seen this discussed, it involved some sort of modified virus or persistent agent.

TerraHertz• 12 years ago

Yes indeed. Black market treatment offers appearing in 5... 4... 3...

JoeAltmaier• 12 years ago

They're all over the internet already.

reasonattlm• 12 years ago

This is of interest because it provides a much better methodology for lengthening telomeres, with more control than genetic engineering, and therefore a faster path to establishing why telomerase therapy extends life in mice.

Average telomere length in tissue is a measure of health in general: since telomere length decreases with each cell division it is a proxy for some combination of cell division rates and rate of influx of fresh new cells with long telomeres provided by the stem cell population maintaining a tissue. Since average telomere length is often measured in white blood cells it goes up and down with health and generally downward with age. Stem cell activity declines with age, so this shouldn't be surprising.

Lengthening telomeres via telomerase may extend life in mice for any number of reasons, some of which actually have nothing to do with telomeres. Telomerase, like all biomolecules, has a lot of roles, not all of which are fully understood. Alternative and more controllable methods of lengthening telomeres should help narrow down what is going on in those studies. Is it greater stem cell activity, something to do with telomerase influencing mitochondrial function, something completely different?

In general if you're thinking of aging as accumulated molecular damage, telomere shortening looks like a consequence not a root cause. It may cause further issues itself, but targeting it is probably not as effective as going for the actual root causes that lead to it. The interesting question is why telomerase therapy does do comparatively well in extending life in mice.

vannevar• 12 years ago

I suspect that telomeres are just one component in a system that maintains an organism's biological stability, and that simply lengthening them without reference to the rest of the system will just get you a young, cancer-ridden body.

beeworker• 12 years ago

Yes, sometimes the problem is that a cell refuses to die. SENS has come up with a list of 7 general problems (it's increasingly unlikely to be any more) that collectively form the problem of "aging" and need to collectively be addressed to cure aging. Death-resistant cells is just one of the 7. http://sens.org/research/introduction-to-sens-research

daemonk• 12 years ago

Interestingly, there are evidence of non-cannonical functions of telomerases involved in wnt/myc signaling.

codecamper• 12 years ago

but, how to find mutations somewhere along the thousands of pairs of compounds along a DNA strand?

I guess if you could compare many strands you could find the spots that are the same in all.

But then to somehow repair them all?

mkempe• 12 years ago

If a private individual wanted to produce and experiment (let's say on pet animals) with that extension-RNA, what would be required?

cowardlydragon• 12 years ago

Also great for cancer...

Telomere extension turns back aging clock in cultured human cells, study finds

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