Intervene Immune Publishes Thymus Regrowth Trial Results
Intervene Immune is the company formed to commercialize the methology for regrowth of thymic tissue used in the small TRIIM (Thymus Regeneration, Immunorestoration, and Insulin Mitigation) trial, a combination of growth hormone, DHEA, and metformin. As I've noted in the past, that the approach involves the use of human growth hormone over an extended period of time makes it less desirable as an intervention, but if one can gain an expectation of some thymic regeneration, leading to an extended improvement in immune function that lasts for years beyond the treatment period, then it might be worth the trade-off. In general, higher growth hormone levels are associated with a worse outcome in the study of aging, while lower levels are associated with a slowing of aging. Using growth hormone for anything other than treating rare clinical conditions of deficiency is something like burning the candle at both ends.
The thymus is an inaccessible organ in the chest responsible for transforming thymocytes created in the bone marrow into T cells of the adaptive immune system. This complicated process takes place in thymic tissue that, unfortunately, atrophies with age, becoming replaced with fat. The less tissue, the fewer T cells are generated, and the worse the function of the immune system over time. The thymus loses much of its mass quite early in life, following childhood, but the later, slower decline over the course of adult life is a different process mediated by chronic inflammation and other factors that arise with old age. The adaptive immune system is vital to health, and thus a great deal of research has taken place over the past few decades into means of thymic regeneration: upregulation of FOXN1 or related genes such as BMP4; engineering of new thymic tissue; delivery of recombinant KGF, delivery of growth hormone; sex steroid ablation; and so forth. Some are more reliable than others, and some, such as KGF, have succeeded in mice and failed in human trials.
The Intervene Immune team has presented a fair amount of data on the results from their trial at recent conferences, including epigenetic age changes, and you'll find it all in the open access paper noted here. The results unfortunately don't include all of the assays of immune cell characteristics one might want in order to be able to compare directly with the effects of sex steroid ablation in human patients, but are intriguing. (In turn the sex steroid ablation trials didn't look at thymic mass in CT scans, an unfortunate omission). Further, it isn't possible to clearly associate all of the outcomes with regrowth of thymic tissue, particularly the epigenetic age effects, given everything else the treatment might be doing. Nonetheless, taken as a whole this is good supporting evidence for those groups working on more direct approaches to the problem of the atrophied thymus, such as Lygenesis and the company Bill Cherman and I founded last year, Repair Biotechnologies.
First hint that body's 'biological age' can be reversed
A small clinical study has suggested for the first time that it might be possible to reverse the body's epigenetic clock, which measures a person's biological age. For one year, nine healthy volunteers took a cocktail of three common drugs - growth hormone and two diabetes medications - and on average shed 2.5 years of their biological ages, measured by analysing marks on a person's genomes. The participants' immune systems also showed signs of rejuvenation.
The latest trial was designed mainly to test whether growth hormone could be used safely in humans to restore tissue in the thymus gland. The gland, which is in the chest between the lungs and the breastbone, is crucial for efficient immune function. White blood cells are produced in bone marrow and then mature inside the thymus, where they become specialized T cells that help the body to fight infections and cancers. But the gland starts to shrink after puberty and increasingly becomes clogged with fat. Evidence from animal and some human studies shows that growth hormone stimulates regeneration of the thymus. But this hormone can also promote diabetes, so the trial included two widely used anti-diabetic drugs, dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA) and metformin, in the treatment cocktail.
Checking the effect of the drugs on the participants' epigenetic clocks was an afterthought. The clinical study had finished when researchers conducted an analysis. Four different epigenetic clocks were used to assess each patient's biological age, and he found significant reversal for each trial participant in all of the tests. "This told me that the biological effect of the treatment was robust. The effect persisted in the six participants who provided a final blood sample six months after stopping the trial. Because we could follow the changes within each individual, and because the effect was so very strong in each of them, I am optimistic,"
Reversal of epigenetic aging and immunosenescent trends in humans
Thymus regeneration and reactivation by growth hormone administration have been established in aging rats and dogs by restoration of youthful thymic histology and by reversal of age-related immune deficits. The present study now establishes highly significant evidence of thymic regeneration in normal aging men accompanied by improvements in a variety of disease risk factors and age-related immunological parameters as well as significant correlations between thymic fat-free fraction (TFFF) and favorable changes in monocyte percentages and the lymphocyte-to-monocyte ratio (LMR), independent of age up to the age of 65 at the onset of treatment. These observations are consistent with the known ability of growth hormone to stimulate hematopoiesis and thymic epithelial cell proliferation. Our finding of an increase in FGF-21 levels after 12 months of treatment suggests that thymic regeneration by the present treatment may be mediated in part by this cytokine, which we believe is a novel finding.
Treatment-induced increases in naïve CD4 and naïve CD8 T cells were relatively small compared to changes reported in recombinant growth hormone treated HIV patients, but our volunteer population was pre-immunosenescent and not depleted of naïve CD4 and naïve CD8 T cells at baseline. Positive responses also occurred despite potential complications caused by lymph node aging. Therefore, the small increases observed in these cells and in CD4 T-cell recent thymic emigrants are consistent with the ultimate goal of preventing or reversing the normal age-related collapse of the TCR repertoire at ages just above those of our study population.
There may be both immunological and non-immunological mechanisms of epigenetic aging reversal. Growth hormone, DHEA, and metformin have unique effects that are in opposition to aging, and it is possible that the specific combination of these agents activates a broad enough range of therapeutic pathways to account for the previously unpredictable reversal of epigenetic aging, even independently of the immunological markers we have measured.
Josh Mitteldorf perspective:
https://joshmitteldorf.scienceblog.com/2019/09/07/1st-age-reversal-results-is-it-hgh-or-something-else/
The report seems willfully silent as to the amount of growth hormone administered. It only provides that the initial dose to test for insulin response was approximately 3IU. It seems to me likely the growth hormone is the predominant factor. Maybe I am stating the obvious. Maybe do an MRI on Sly Stalone's Thymus to test the hypothesis.
I wonder why not try localized HGH release instead of treating the whole body. Wound't that allow for a higher and more targeted dosage ?
Btw, i am skeptical about epigenetic clock reversal. There might a be good correlation between the said clocks and the bilogical/calendar age before the intervention. But after an intervention we don't even know what the clocks is measuring. It is like resetting the car odometer while replacing the dashboard. It looks newer (it has new parts, so it is newer) but does the changed odometer correctly predict the rest of the car performance ? Same thing here. The growth hormone induced the creation of newer cells, which have less metylation but are the effects superficial or profound ?
@JohnD
>The report seems willfully silent as to the amount of growth hormone administered.
>"Side effects were mild, typical of rhGH administration, and did not require dosing modification except in two cases."
Not clear whether it was after the initial dose adjustment.
Again if the initial adjustment had a place, what was the protocol?
Was it the particular target blood hgh level or some percent of the initial base level?
These researchers will be presenting their data at Raadfest in October. Theses will be good questions to ask them.
Don't forget RAAD fest is effectively quackfest.
I vote for Oktoberfest.
So we don't know the full results yet as to whether it actually did regenerate some of the thymus or not?
Unrelated but looks like Insilico Medicine, although being successful in fund raising, is no longer going to be working on aging
"As we grow we will need to focus on what we do best and shelve the projects where there is no clear business model. Many of our longevity projects will need to be divested. For example, we already shut down Young.AI and other initiatives that were too far ahead of their time. "
https://medium.com/@longevity/insilico-secures-37-million-from-top-tier-experts-now-what-cc9dc339ffe1
Sad - but it is the nature of the drug discovery business
@David Permov: In the operational sense at least, working on biomarkers of ageing vs biomarkers of age related disease risk isn't really meaningfully distinct; that's the geroscience hypothesis at least; that the mechanisms leading to age related disease are/are directly coupled to the underlying biochemical mechanisms of ageing. I don't see how that couldn't be true, there's no more parsimonious explanation for the "age related" part of age related disease beyond some evolutionary kill switch that there is no biochemical evidence of in humans. Meanwhile the drug discovery methodologies that In Silico is pioneering are generically applicable, and could massively improve drug discovery workflows.
I don't think HGH reduces longevity in humans. A group of 12 Italian centenarians had normal HGH levels and those levels were ~5 times greater than a healthy control group aged 67-98.
(~ .8 vs ~4 ng/ml)
A person could do ONE SINGLE 30 second all-out sprint and increase HGH by 2-10 times.
"Growth hormone responses to treadmill sprinting in sprint- and endurance-trained athletes"
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=Growth+hormone+responses+to+treadmill+sprinting+in+sprint-+and+endurance-trained+athletes
"Hormone levels in centenarians"
https://vdocuments.mx/hormone-levels-in-centenarians.html
So basically just taking Metformin & DHEA without the HGH would be useless ? HGH that's not something the average people can take on a daily supplementation.
WE MIGHT CONSIDER: direct injection into the thymus gland itself of a small amount of hgh…… in mice or rabbits to see if the thymus gland improves overall anti-aging ….. or not...…. instead of oral ingestion.
@ROBERT JENSON
I guess there were some animal models before the human trials. However, it is very hard to truthfully simulate results of 5 -6 decades of aging and the respective repair.
If we could print a new tymus and implant it to replace the existing one then the models wow be more or less accurate. But even then we don't know what would be the effect on an agreed body. Wild the new tymus quickly be deteriorated, and what would be the improvements in the immune function.
Considering the relative rarity and expense of true HGH, would substituting an HGH secretagogue for actual HGH be a viable option? Thank you.
The LMR ratio changes really got my attention as my ratio had plummeted in the last year after being stable for over 5 years, and this is a more robust marker of prostate cancer risk than PSA, but not as robust as % Free. I did 3 major interventions and the LMR ratio improved almost 30% in 6 weeks, so I may be in a safer zone of risk. I did not know my IGF-1 at the time so all the ways to elevate the lymphocyte levels seemed too risky. Myo-inositol seemed a safe way to help lower the monocyte level, and b-alanine and creatine to boost growth hormone. I already do daily long saunas and intense daily exercise. Also , two weeks before the next white blood cell check, I took 15 grams of modified citrus pectin with honokiol, 9:1 ratio, for five days and then 5 grams of MCP each day with the honokiol.
Dramatic improvement in all values in the 6 week interval between tests, lymphocyte % increased 6% and all other values dropped, some by 50%. Exactly what I was hoping for . My suspicion is the MCP is the main player here. The LMR ratio is still in a high risk value area at 2.8.
Now, I know my galectin 3 is 9.6 and my IGF-1 is 111 so I may resume the DHEA , which I stopped about a year ago, Have been taking metformin for about 15 years as I was once pre-diabetic. Still taking the MCP at 5 grams per day with the honokiol, and the myo-inositol and b- alanine and creatine.
Also I am making my own liposomal NMN formula with some betaine and some glutathione and cherry acerola to maintain stability. been taking NMN since November with slowly escalated dose to 1 gram per day, with some resveratrol. Within the liposomal formula 300 mg of the NMN per day.
To keep the arteries clear take 1 tbsp of walnut oil with meals, 12 drops of pomegranate seed oil twice per day, and some aged garlic extract daily. CAC score at aged 73 is 11.5 and risk calculator says 1.6% risk of cardio event in the future. Strict keto , ala Gundry, for over 4 years.
"We have not found previous studies associating rhGH adminis-
tration with an increased LMR or reduced monocyte levels, whereas
DHEA administration may actually increase monocyte levels
(Khorram, Vu, & Yen, 1997). The mechanisms involved are not clear,
but the unexpected effect of our treatment on the LMR may be of
considerable significance, for two reasons.
First, higher LMRs are associated with better prognoses for a
variety of leading sources of human mortality, including at least 8
types of cancer (e.g., prostate cancer; Caglayan et al., 2019), athero-
sclerosis (Gong et al., 2018), cardiovascular disease (Ji et al., 2017),
and stroke (Ren, Liu, Wang, & Gao, 2017)], and are also associated
with less generalized inflammation (Gong et al., 2018). Protection
from cardiovascular disease has been associated with an LMR above
5 (Gong et al., 2018). In our study, mean volunteer LMRs were below
5 at baseline but were well above 5 at the end of treatment and
6 months after the end of treatment.
Second, the great majority of monocytes are CD38-positive.
CD38 is an NADase ectoenzyme and a degrader of the NAD + precur-
sor, nicotinamide mononucleotide, and increased CD38 expression
with age appears to be the primary cause of age-related tissue NAD +
depletion in mice and most likely in man as well (Camacho-Pereira
et al."
Could it be that Metformin (in a similar way to Berberine) clears away damage by inducing autophagy, whilst HGH generates new cells.
So would it be possible to have a protocol where damage clearance alternated with growth.
It seems logical that replacement of damaged cells needs to be upregulated, whilst the damaged cells themselves must be removed.
Could be mTor inhibition in a high HGH state. Pushing insulin or IGF1 assoc HGH into old cells is equiv to shortened lifespan of metabolic dysfunction. A recent paper of thymus regeneration offered additional methods so compounded all those methods is the protocol to follow.