All geroprotectors in one database

The largest database of geroprotectors has been made publicly available

Denis Strigun, Naked Science

British scientists have created the largest open database of promising chemical compounds and drugs with geroprotective properties. Details of the work are presented in the journal Aging Cell.

The aging of the world's population poses an economic threat to developing and developed countries. At the same time, the prevalence of chronic age-related diseases, such as Alzheimer's disease, is expected to continue to grow in the coming decades. Therefore, scientists are looking for ways to prevent, early diagnosis and treatment of pathologies associated with aging. One of them is geroprotectors — chemical compounds that can slow down or reverse the aging processes in model organisms or in humans, as well as increase the duration and quality of their life.

Currently, the classification of geroprotectors is carried out using two main approaches. The first one provides a description of the systemic effects that such drugs can achieve: in this case, the compound is evaluated by how much it minimizes pathological processes at different levels of the organization of the body. Another approach is to describe substances that affect the key "nodes" of the body and pathological processes associated with aging, in particular the central nervous system (CNS), inflammation, malignant neoplasms. To simplify the search for geroprotectors at the international level, information about the latter is collected in online databases, the largest of which until recently remained Geroprotectors.org. The site stores data on 259 promising drugs and 2408 experiments in the field of gerontology, the objects of which were 13 model organisms.

In a new paper, scientists from the University of Liverpool and the Oxford Gerontology Research Foundation (BGRF) The DrugAge database was presented, which covers 418 promising geroprotectors and experiments conducted on 27 model organisms, including unicellular (for example, yeast) and mammals (gray rats). With its help, users can get acquainted with the description of individual chemical compounds, as well as compare them in the format of diagrams and tables. DrugAge is hosted in the aggregator Human Gening Resources, which also contains GenAge databases (with information about the links between age and genetic changes), AnAge (includes the results of observations about the history of life and its duration on the example of more than 4,000 species) and others.

With the help of DrugAge, the authors also conducted a preliminary study that showed a statistically significant correlation between some geroprotectors and a number of "age-related" genes, as well as between the gender effects of drugs. It is noteworthy that the analysis revealed a large number of signaling pathways that are associated with age-related changes, but are not the target of known geroprotectors. According to scientists, the new database can help in improving existing and discovering new drugs in this category.

Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru  14.03.2017