LONGEVITY AND REJUVENATION | health & wellness || 33
Gene manipulation
DNA fragments called telomeres are located on the ends of chromosomes, much like the aglets on the tips of our shoelaces, to seal the ends and protect the chromosomes from damage and to keep them from fusing with other chromosomes. These telomeres shorten every time cells divide. Russian scientist Aleksey Olovnikov was the first to suggest that this shortening process was implicated in both aging and cancer, but that there was also a mechanism to reverse the process.
More than a decade later, in 1984, biologists Carol Greider and Elizabeth Blackburn discovered that mechanism— the enzyme telomerase. They and geneticist Jack Szostak of Harvard Medical School won the Nobel Prize in 2009 for discovering that telomerase protected telomeres from shortening. Researchers further found that by artificially activating the telomerase gene, they were able to make a cell immortal. And with the help of certain viruses, the telomerase gene can be embedded in cells of our body in which telomerase is not normally expressed.
Impressive experimental results in this area were achieved in 2012 by a group of scientists led by Maria Blasco at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre. The researchers worked with mice aged one and two years old. The scientists infected the mice with a virus that activates the telomerase gene. The elderly mice lived 13 % longer than their controls; the younger ones lived 24 % longer. These results were reported in EMBO Molecular Medicine.
Elizabeth Parrish, CEO of BioViva, a Seattle biotech company, was energized by Blasco’ s results with mice and wanted to see immediate clinical trials in humans. The newspaper The Australian said that she decided to
conduct the procedure on herself when she discovered that her own telomeres were short for a person her age. In April 2016, six months after injection of a virus pre-embedded with the telomerase gene, BioViva’ s official Web site reported that the length of the telomeres in Parrish’ s immune cells had increased by 9 %, which corresponds to rejuvenation of those cells by twenty years. The length of the telomeres was measured by SpectraCell, an independent Texas company. But as reported in The Guardian, Forbes. com, The Australian, and other news sources at the time, many researchers in the field are skeptical on several counts, among them that a preliminary result for one person conducted outside standard procedures and with no backing from regulatory agencies is hardly a rigorous trial or even a safe experiment; and that Parrish’ s one reading could be used by charlatans to“ validate” quack products in the eyes of people desperate for a drink at the fountain of youth. Therefore the result thus far, while intriguing, must await confirmation by actual scientific studies.
Stanford Medicine announced in 2015 that a group of researchers at Stanford led by Professor Helen Blau had successfully used RNA modified with the coding for telomerase to lengthen telomeres in cultured human muscle and skin cells by as much as 10 %, allowing the cells to replicate vigorously for significantly more divisions than control cells before returning to the usual loss of length with each division once the effect wore off.
Research in extending the length of telomeres promises success in creating drugs that could lengthen the active life of our somatic cells, thus delaying the ravages of old age.
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