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The anti-cancer drug dasatnib in combination with quercetin being trialed for safety against lung fibrosis has shown impressive anti-aging results.
Participants in the trial were ~70 years old and suffering from pulmonary fibrosis a debilitating and eventually fatal disease. After the trial, 100% of the study showed improvement
participants were able to walk faster, get up from a chair more quickly and scored better in ability tests.
The benefit is a result of removing 'zombie cells' from the body.
Senescent cells - also known as zombie cells - are not completely dead so are not cleared out by the body, but are too damaged to repair tissue or carry out normal functions. Unable to repair itself or clear out the waste, the body gradually deteriorates.
Previously animal studies have shown that removing these cells reverses the ageing process, extends lifespan, and restores lost youth.
Better yet, it does not sound like a pill every day for the rest of your life sort of thing
“It has a hit-and-run effect,” added Dr Kirkland. “The drug starts working quickly and we would ideally like to be able to give it just once a month.”
Of course increasing the cost 30x should nicely take care of that drawback.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 11 2019, @12:16AM (8 children)
Here is what goes on.
1) Every tissue in your body consists of a number of "tissue stem cells" that divide when necessary to replenish the tissue when the functional cells die. One division from a tissue stem cell results in one daughter remaining as the stem cell, and the other going on to migrate where it needs to be. Once there, it will divide and each daughter will divide, etc to generate a population of final functional cells.
2) There is a certain chance of various errors every cell division of these tissue stem cells. These errors can be genetic (point mutations, chromosomal rearrangements, etc), or just junk like amyloids accumulating, or a mitochondria going bad, whatever. Anything that accumulates.
3) After these tissue stem cells undergo a certain number of divisions (seems to be ~40-60) from the zygote (fertilized egg), the risk of generating a descendant that is malignant gets too high on average. Thus, with the goal of extending the organisms life the stem cell is supposed to stop dividing and replenishing the tissue.
4) Because the tissue is not going to be replenished any more, the cells already there need to keep functioning for much longer than when the organism was younger. Eventually, not enough cells will be functioning correctly and you get organ failure.
So the choice is to
a) kill the partially functional cells (fast organ failure)
b) let the tissue stem cells keep dividing (increases the chance of cancer)
c) leave things as they are with partially functional cells in the tissue (slow organ failure)
These researchers are choosing choice A.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 11 2019, @01:45AM (5 children)
Or, maybe choice (a) (kill the partially functional cells) leads the tissue stem cells to notice a lack of functional cells and divide a little more to prevent organ failure. Which turns it into choice (b).
Choice (b) may be the best one these days. We have much better cancer treatments than we used to, so on balance getting cancer may be better than organ failure.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Friday January 11 2019, @02:25AM (1 child)
If we can tackle cancer with stuff like nanobots, then we should absolutely choose the option that leads to cancer.
Basically everyone will get cancer eventually, so it would have to be dealt with at some point regardless of anti-aging strategies.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by legont on Friday January 11 2019, @05:27AM
Yes. Basically, we convert all the issues into a cancer issue(s) and then deal with them one by one. This is not ideal, but should work. It also has an advantage of being incremental progress as opposed to a revolution.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 11 2019, @03:56AM (2 children)
Source?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 11 2019, @12:48PM (1 child)
https://progressreport.cancer.gov/after/survival [cancer.gov]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 11 2019, @03:41PM
As I expected. You can't really tell from that data, it would be interesting to look further but I'm pretty sure I know what I'll find (various issues with comparing changing populations in the 9% of the US they consider).
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.3322/caac.21551 [wiley.com]
So, looks like the headline chart[1] is only using data from the 9 original SEER regions (Connecticut, Hawaii, Iowa, New Mexico, Utah, and the metropolitan areas of Atlanta, Detroit, San Francisco–Oakland, and Seattle–Puget Sound). Also, some new data source was added in 1995, which is about when we see that peak in incidence/mortality. So we have some room for systematically biasing the data here, especially when we consider the various pitfalls of "age-adjustment".
They also say much of the mid-1990s spike in incidence for males was due to detection of asymptomatic prostate cancer:
[1] https://wol-prod-cdn.literatumonline.com/cms/attachment/479916e1-e899-4965-a35d-7517620064cf/caac21551-fig-0002-m.jp [literatumonline.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by ElizabethGreene on Friday January 11 2019, @04:45PM (1 child)
You're talking about something different.
The key points on senescent cells are:
They are old cells that have become non-functional. They don't perform the function they are designed to do.
They are functionally immortal, and continue taking up space and resources within the host. Their autolysis mechanism is busted.
They encourage senescence in their cellular neighborhood.
Most critically, they cause Inflammation [wikipedia.org]. This is the big problem.
Normally Inflammation is a good thing. It triggers your self repair mechanisms to come in, clean up an injury, and fix it. This "good" inflammation is called Acute inflammation. The problem with senescent cells is they request repair with nothing to clean up; there is no work to do. That creates systemic or chronic inflammation. Chronic inflammation is a DOT debuff. (DOT=Damage over Time [webopedia.com]) The more senescent cells you have the more DOTs you carry.
The working hypothesis is that killing off and cleaning out the senescent cells will reduce the overall level of systemic/chronic inflammation and let the body's own self-repair mechanisms step back in to fix real problems.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 12 2019, @05:41AM
Thats not the definition: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_senescence [wikipedia.org]