Let’s imagine the world Where do you slow down, stall, or in some cases go backwards, our body clock. A place where 22-year-olds can keep looking and feeling like that for longer and 65-year-olds can get their mind and body back to that age again. Scientists believe that this is no longer a ridiculous proposal.
We are now in the midst of a golden age of longevity research. Huge amounts of money have been poured into the field recently, most notably from Silicon Valley billionaires. In addition to traditional players such as pharmaceutical companies and research institutes, a series of headline-grabbing startups are emerging and the anti-aging industry is converging into a remarkable one. In 2022, an estimated $5.2 billion was invested in 130 long-lived companies. The market predicts that he will reach a value of $44.2 billion per year by 2030.
“Our understanding of aging has matured,” says Dame Linda Pert, founder of the Max Planck Institute for the Biology of Aging in Cologne and teaching fellow at the UCL Institute for Healthy Aging. Professor Ridge says: “We can target that mechanism to maintain health as we age. And it’s one of the hottest topics in the pharmaceutical industry right now.”
Some of humanity’s greatest successes include extending human lifespans. In 1900, the average life expectancy was 32 years, but now it is over 70 years old. We achieved this longevity not only through technologies such as seatbelts and life jackets, but also through vaccines and medicines that allow us to avoid and treat infectious and chronic diseases.
But in doing so, we’ve highlighted how much our bodies deteriorate over time. Symptoms of aging include brittle bones, weakened muscles, and an increased risk of diseases such as dementia and cancer.
“So what we’re seeing increasing – and it’s a real problem – is people having disability, poor health, overt illness, multi-morbidity later in life, and this is something we need to address. “, Partridge said. “We need to eliminate the period of bad things happening at the end of life so people can function longer and stay healthy and happy.”
To this end, scientists have been researching ways to control aging, in particular whether it is possible to address not only the symptoms but also the causes of aging. There was little hope until 1993, when scientists discovered that they could extend the lifespan of worms by disabling a single gene. The worms looked healthy throughout, which means they were aging more slowly than simply living longer.
This research has led to an awareness of “how plastic and flexible the aging process is,” says Partridge. Its impact has sparked a flurry of research into the cellular processes that cause human aging and the various methods that can be used to tackle them.
“I think what’s changed is that we now have a real molecular, cellular, mechanistic understanding of the underlying processes that are affected by things that we all know about, like diet and exercise.” says Partridge. “We may be able to manipulate them in other ways, such as with drugs or cell techniques.”
A discovery has been made that it is possible to restore the biological clock inside cells. By adding a cocktail of four proteins, typical human adult cells can be transformed into youthful stem cells, whose appearance and function resemble those of newly formed embryos. Molecular measurements show that in 2022, scientists were able to use this approach to wind back the biological clock in human skin cells by about 30 years.
However, there is a long way to go before this can be used in humans. Cell rejuvenation could theoretically help treat certain diseases, Partridge said, but it needs to be proven it’s not harmful before it can be used to wind back a person’s biological clock. It is said that there is. “If you have a lot of people working on it, the process needs to be very secure,” she says. And that assumes that the treatment can actually be put into practice.
That’s why Partridge believes there may be more immediate success by identifying existing drugs that can also be used to target the causes of aging, another key component of current longevity research. I believe. New computational techniques, including molecular simulation, genomics, and machine learning, have proven powerful in assisting in prioritizing drug repurposing candidates.
