Fight Aging!

This is the third in a recent series of local news articles on the work of the Buck Institute for Aging Research in California. Sadly very little of that work is relevant to the SENS vision of rejuvenation biotechnology, targeted repair of the damage that causes aging with the ultimate goal of entirely preventing degeneration and disease. Like much of the field, research at the Buck Institute is almost entirely focused on modest goals; better understanding of the fine cellular details of how aging progresses, and manipulating the operation of cellular metabolism so as to slightly slow the accumulation of damage that causes frailty, suffering, and disease:

Simon Melov, a founding faculty member of the Buck Institute in 1999, trained in molecular biology. Before the 1990s, scientists shunned research on aging as too difficult. "You couldn't do anything about it," Melov said. That attitude persisted for years. "Gordon Lithgow and I would go to conferences. and people would say we were stupid for working on aging. Everyone knows it's ridiculous." A future Nobel prize winner came up to them at a podium where Lithgow was presenting, Melov recalls. "He said we should get out of this and go do something worthwhile. Nothing will ever come of this."

In about 1990, Tom Johnson, in whose University of Colorado lab Lithgow and Melov worked, discovered that aging in worms could be changed by modifying a gene. A few years later, Cynthia Kenyon's paper on her similar research drew acclaim. "When her paper came out, the floodgates opened. It was the aha moment. Cynthia (now at Calico, Buck Institute's Google-funded partner) was a big name." The 2000s brought a shift toward finding drugs that manipulate lifespan. Now the emphasis is on healthspan. "Function is more important than lifespan. The elderly complain about living too long in poor health. Is it easy to put your clothes on every day, reach the top shelf in your kitchen? Is it painful to walk, carry loads? Can you get in and out of the shower easily?"

Melov looks for interventions that improve gene-expression profiling, for instance. In people, he studied resistance exercise as a means to stress bones and help preserve their integrity. "In the mouse, you argue with it for an hour before it goes anywhere. In people, you get a good degree of compliance. We found that repeated resistance exercise over six months reversed many gene expression profiles -- a genetic fingerprint of cellular function in muscle -- associated with aging, back to a more youthful profile. Exercise rejuvenates the tissue." Exercise in the future will be viewed as essential to functioning. "If you don't exercise, you're going to add to the health-care burden. You have to make the time or end up subtracting years from your life." He used to take supplements then realized there's little data to support such intake. "If you exercise and have a good diet. you don't need supplements. It's a very different matter if you have a bad diet and don't exercise."

Lack of substantial federal funding for aging research confounds Melov. "Look at the NIH," he said. "There was an expectation that legislative bodies would recognize that baby boomers were aging," that this is a serious health care crisis "with large-scale financial ramifications for the economy. Unless that investment happens rapidly over the next five years. we are going to be in big trouble. This is a slow-motion train wreck. We're not going to be able to reach into the back pocket of our scientific lab coats and pull out a solution on demand. We need time and money. I'm still optimistic that reality will rear its ugly head."

Link: http://www.northbaybusinessjournal.com/northbay/marincounty/4206440-181/buck-research-mice-clues-on