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Elizabeth Parrish, CEO of the biotech company BioViva, claims that her body's cells are 20 years younger after testing her company's age-reversing gene therapy on herself.
[...] Though details of the fast-tracked trial are unpublished, Parrish says it involved intravenous infusions of an engineered virus. That infectious germ carried the genetic blueprints for an enzyme called telomerase, which is found in humans. When spread to the body's cells, the enzyme generally extends the length of DNA caps on the ends of chromosomes, which naturally wear down with cellular aging. In a 2012 mouse study, Spanish researchers found that similar treatment could extend the lifespan of the rodents by as much as 20 percent.
Parrish claims that test results from March—which have not been published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal—reveal that her blood cells' telomeres have extended from 6.71 kilobases of DNA to 7.33 kilobases. The difference, she estimates, equates to a cellular age difference of 20 years.
Would you put your life on the line for your company?
(Score: 2) by Non Sequor on Wednesday May 04 2016, @03:49AM
Uninformed speculation is free, but informed speculation is a premium service. Seriously, what do you expect?
I was just thinking about it as a statistical modeling problem. Each cell has certain genes that regulate division rates and also that detect faults and trigger apoptosis or other protection mechanisms. Telomeres set a clock (the Hayflick limit) on cell lines with accelerated division rates meaning that it generally can't become a sustained process without another mutation to activate telomerase. You have a combinatorial problem where there are certain mutation combinations that result in cancers and the Hayflick limit is one of the factors that controls the number of "trials" in a Bernoulli process.
Cancer incidence rates start ramping up in the 40s. So in my head, I'm just thinking, x% longer telomeres means she's looking for x% longer lifespan, but the cancer chance should also grow proportional to (1-(1-p)^(n*(1+x%))), for some p, assuming that there is no effect on the incidence rate of pre-cancerous mutations (I'm assuming a Poisson process for that).
Write your congressman. Tell him he sucks.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Wednesday May 04 2016, @06:55AM
So what's needed is a set of retroviruses carrying a fresh master copy of each gene to go around correcting errors.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek