5 ms·

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

139 points by albanlv 12y ago

nicwolff 12y 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 12y ago
  At least then you have an excuse to not work, being 25 perpetually for most people could simply mean an eternity of work
  - JoshTriplett 12y ago
    There's an old joke (and programming exercise) about how long Methuselah would collect Social Security...
- raingrove 12y ago
  But we are talking about reversal of aging, not pausing.
- Htsthbjig 12y 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 12y 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.
    - JoshTriplett 12y ago
      I don't want a backup; I want RAID. The existence of a copy of a person does not preserve the continuity of the original.
      - Florin_Andrei 12y ago
        > The existence of a copy of a person does not preserve the continuity of the original. Amazing how many people forget this simple fact.
        malka 12y ago
        Yes. In a skewed way, in a lot of sci-fi show, the characters commited suicide on a regular basis.
      - csixty4 12y ago
        Hmmm...Redundant Array of Inexpensive Daves...I feel inspired to write a short story...
    - hughes 12y ago
      The very possibility of a "backup" implies a dualism that makes me uncomfortable.
- JoshTriplett 12y 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 12y 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/ http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/chromosomes/telomeres... [1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3370421/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3370421/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telomere#Cancer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telomere#Cancer [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telomerase https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telomerase edit: formatting
- fossuser 12y 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 12y 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.
    - nostromo 12y ago
      Most animals don't survive past their reproductive years. Humans and some whales do, but that's it. Some evolutionary biologists suggest that animals that share wisdom or share childbearing duties with their offspring evolved to survive past fertility because doing so increases the competitiveness of their shared genes.
pinewurst 12y 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 12y ago
  Yes indeed. Black market treatment offers appearing in 5... 4... 3...
  - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
    They're all over the internet already.
reasonattlm 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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 http://sens.org/research/introduction-to-sens-research
- daemonk 12y ago
  Interestingly, there are evidence of non-cannonical functions of telomerases involved in wnt/myc signaling.
codecamper 12y 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 12y 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 12y ago
Also great for cancer...

139 points by albanlv 12y 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 12y ago
At least then you have an excuse to not work, being 25 perpetually for most people could simply mean an eternity of work
- JoshTriplett 12y ago
  There's an old joke (and programming exercise) about how long Methuselah would collect Social Security...
raingrove 12y ago
But we are talking about reversal of aging, not pausing.
Htsthbjig 12y 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 12y 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.
  - JoshTriplett 12y ago
    I don't want a backup; I want RAID. The existence of a copy of a person does not preserve the continuity of the original.
    - Florin_Andrei 12y ago
      > The existence of a copy of a person does not preserve the continuity of the original. Amazing how many people forget this simple fact.
      - malka 12y ago
        Yes. In a skewed way, in a lot of sci-fi show, the characters commited suicide on a regular basis.
    - csixty4 12y ago
      Hmmm...Redundant Array of Inexpensive Daves...I feel inspired to write a short story...
  - hughes 12y ago
    The very possibility of a "backup" implies a dualism that makes me uncomfortable.
JoshTriplett 12y 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 12y 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/ http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/chromosomes/telomeres... [1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3370421/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3370421/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telomere#Cancer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telomere#Cancer [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telomerase https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telomerase edit: formatting

fossuser 12y 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 12y 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.
  - nostromo 12y ago
    Most animals don't survive past their reproductive years. Humans and some whales do, but that's it. Some evolutionary biologists suggest that animals that share wisdom or share childbearing duties with their offspring evolved to survive past fertility because doing so increases the competitiveness of their shared genes.

pinewurst 12y 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 12y ago
Yes indeed. Black market treatment offers appearing in 5... 4... 3...
- JoeAltmaier 12y ago
  They're all over the internet already.

reasonattlm 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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 http://sens.org/research/introduction-to-sens-research
daemonk 12y ago
Interestingly, there are evidence of non-cannonical functions of telomerases involved in wnt/myc signaling.

codecamper 12y 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 12y 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 12y ago

Also great for cancer...