The pill from old age is promised to be released in 2-3 years

A pharmaceutical company from Russia is creating a drug that will "slow down" aging

Pyotr Bely, director of the pharmaceutical company NCPharm, told RIA Novosti about how his corporation creates drugs that could slow down or even stop the aging process, and what problems they can cause in society and in medicine.

A laboratory where a drug is being developed to "slow down old age"

The development of these drugs, according to Bely, is directly related to telomeres – the end sections of chromosomes that are present in the nucleus of each cell. Telomeres protect DNA from damage, and with each cell division they become shorter. When their length is not enough for a new division, the cell dies or stops dividing, going into a special "old age mode".

A similar process occurs only in the "adult" cells of the body – the telomeres of stem cells and germ cells are constantly updated with special enzymes – telomerases, which allows them to divide an unlimited number of times and actually be immortal. In recent years, scientists have been actively looking for ways to turn on these enzymes and "levers" to control their activity in order to slow down or even stop the aging process and the mass death and decrepitude of cells due to the loss of their ability to divide.

For example, in January last year, biologists from Stanford University were able to "turn on" telomerases in cell culture in vitro using special RNA molecules, extending telomeres by about a thousand "letters"-nucleotides. This in some way rejuvenated the cells and allowed them to make about 30 more divisions after the time of old age.

– Tell us in detail how exactly do you plan to use telomeres to combat old age and its external manifestations?

– If you remember, the 2009 Nobel Prize was awarded for a discovery that was actually made by our scientist, Alexey Olovnikov, but contrary to protocol, the prize was given not to him, but to those people who confirmed his theory and proved the existence of telomeres and isolated telomerase as an enzyme.

Now the whole world is working to find some kind of "trigger mechanism" that would make telomerase work in the somatic cells of the human body. Why is this important? Telomerase is naturally present either in germ cells or in cancer cells. This explains why a whole organism can grow out of two germ cells, and at the same time they do not become elderly. The same is true for cancer cells – thanks to active telomerases, they are virtually immortal.

On the other hand, "normal" cells can divide a limited number of times due to the fact that telomeres do not renew and contract. Accordingly, the closer we are to this limit and the more our body contains aged cells, the greater the risks of degeneration and degeneration of cells, the development of oncological diseases, decreased immunity and everything else. Therefore, today, like our colleagues abroad, we are trying to find a substance that would include telomerases in ordinary cells and force them to lengthen telomeres.

Such a procedure of telomere elongation causes many effects in different organs of the body, including rejuvenation in some tissues of the body that are subject to natural age degradation – for example, in the retina of the eye, in the cartilage tissue of the joints, in the genital glands.

In addition, such a reception can give a long delay, maybe even remission for life, for example, for HIV carriers. Why?

– HIV?

– When HIV infects a person, whole "shelves" of lymphocytes, mast cells, macrophages and other components of the immune system begin to fight it. This regiment appears not just like that, but as a result of cell division. As a result, the immune cells of the body in such people exhaust the limits of division and become "elderly". Then the virus quietly comes out and multiplies in the body without any resistance.

On the other hand, if we artificially maintain the telomere length in such patients, it is clear that HIV in this case will never turn into AIDS. This, of course, is not a cure for the virus as such, but a lifelong remission that will allow such people to live a full life and not die from an incurable disease.

In principle, there can be a huge number of consequences from the fact that we learn to manage telomerases, and it is virtually impossible to list them all. What is most interesting? Both our people involved in the development of such drugs and their Western colleagues say that the clock that controls the course of our lives lies elsewhere, they are hidden somewhere in the structure of the brain. If we open them, then only then will we be able to reverse the age.

All this seems incredible today, but scientists also looked at telomeres until 1973, when they were discovered in living cells. The same scientist says that if we discover them and prove their existence, we will make a huge leap in increasing life expectancy, healthy young age.

– How exactly does the drug that your specialists are working on work on telomerases?

– There are countless ways in which we can influence the work and length of telomeres and the expression of telomerases. We took and figured out how the drugs created in the past by the American company Geron (TA-65), one of the first to work on such substances, work and understood what their product consists of.

Secondly, we thought about what would happen if we combined these substances with those very small protein molecules that our researchers have been working on for more than 30 years. Our preliminary results show that this is a very, very promising combination.

Now we are working on conducting clinical trials and developing a system of injections that cause minimal inconvenience to a person. So far, of course, we do not have a drug in a ready-made injectable form that could be shown to the public.

Both parts of our product have already been or are undergoing clinical trials, and we want to show that their combination is a big step forward, and we see this on preliminary data. Here, oddly enough, our science has managed to get ahead, and the fact that the 2009 Nobel Prize was actually given for a Russian discovery shows that we really have something here.

– When will your drug be ready?

– We expect that it will be ready in the near future, and that in two or three years we will receive a registration certificate. First in Russia, and then it will be more difficult because of the complex regulatory system in the USA and Europe. In countries with less strict controls, everything will proceed much faster.

– Will it be a medicine or some form of dietary supplement?

– In general, we are a pharmaceutical company, and in our portfolio there are more than 100 medicines, we have a large factory, thousands of workers, we produce all kinds of drugs. Therefore, the story of dietary supplements is an exception for us – we want to have something on our hands that we could use, and therefore we had to go this way and make a simple certification in order to have at least some legal status.

But we are not proud of this – we are proud of the fact that we conduct real research and are engaged in evidence-based medicine, we are developing new forms of medicines that are not yet used in practice. And in this case we have a very promising medical development.

– One of the reasons why cells stop dividing is to protect against cancer. If we turn on telomerases, won't it increase the likelihood of developing cancer?

– This is the number one question that always arises when we discuss the consequences of turning on telomerases. Here you need to understand that we are talking about a very small segment of states, when this is possible. Ordinary cells with normal telomeres will not change their vital functions if their telomeres are lengthened. On the contrary, it will most likely rejuvenate them and make them more energetic.

If the cell is already cancerous, then its telomeres are already long, and it will be immortal by itself without our help. Accordingly, we have only those conditions that we can consider conditionally dangerous – the so-called precancerous cells, the return of the ability to divide which can lead to dangerous consequences.

– Many promising medicines and vaccines, especially for HIV and a number of other dangerous diseases, often work in experiments on rodents and primates, but fail during clinical trials on volunteers. Are you afraid of such an outcome of events?

– We have reason to think that our chances in this case are much higher than normal for the following reason: both components of our drug have already been tested on humans, and these experiments have shown interesting results. We achieve a synergistic effect when there are already documented positive effects in human trials.

– How will representatives of the church and various religious denominations react to the appearance of such medicines? Are such drugs compatible with their spiritual principles?

– If we talk specifically about telomeres and our substances, then it does not have a deep philosophical background that you can think about. Rather, such thoughts may arise if we talk and think about those structures in the brain that scientists are now trying to find and about which Olovnikov was thinking. In those cases, we can really talk about prolonging life as such, for an extra 20-30 years relative to the average life expectancy of a person.

Here, since telomeres and their length are not, in the strict sense, clocks measuring our time on Earth, we cannot talk about it. Telomeres control and are an indicator not of the age of a person as a whole, but of individual functional organs and tissues, mainly those that are subject to age degradation.

Accordingly, we are not talking about the fact that we prolong life, but that we significantly improve the quality of a person's life within the time allotted to him. In other words, a person will stay young and healthy much longer, but unfortunately or fortunately, we do not change the overall life span.

– In recent years, gerontologists have been actively arguing about whether there is a certain age limit for a person, at which most of us die. How much is it possible to step over it?

– While gerontologists tend to believe that 100-120 years of age is the limit for a person. And so far no one has come close to seeing what is beyond this border. On the other hand, we can state the following: over the past 70 years, the average life expectancy has increased by 20 years.

This happened due to a number of factors, including unexpected things, such as the appearance of antibiotics. At that time, none of us thought that a simple influence on the life and development of bacteria could have such a significant impact on the life expectancy of a person as a whole. The average age of 80 is now taken for granted in most developed and medium-developed countries. And even our government is thinking about increasing the retirement age today.

Accordingly, issues concerning centenarians affect not only residents of Japan and other regions with the longest-lived people in the world, but all of us, at least those who have three meals a day and live more or less normally in a country where there are roads and electricity. At least we need to adapt to this reality, to the age of 80, and only then think about a hundred years or more. We have just made a big leap, but so far there are no biological mechanisms that would allow us to reach the milestone of 140-150 years.

Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru 08.11.2016