An old age pill: a search algorithm
At the end of April, the Russian media spread the news: "Scientists from Russia plan to extend human life up to 150 years." However, it turned out to be a duck – in fact, biomedical companies in the USA and Hong Kong received funding from the Deep Knowledge Ventures International Foundation for the application of their methodology (see the note "To get to the origins of genetics/epigenetics of aging and longevity" with a retelling of their article in the journal Cell Cycle). Another article by the same group of researchers – Signaling pathway cloud regulation for in silico screening and ranking of the potential geroprotective drug (in open access) was published in the journal Frontiers of Genetics, and a press release was published on the MIPT website.
MIPT scientists have developed an algorithm for finding medicines for old age
MIPT specialists have presented an algorithm that can help in the search for drugs that slow down the aging process. The researchers, whose work is presented in the journal Frontiers in Genetics, compared the activity of genes in the cells of young and elderly patients.
Scientists – Alexander Zhavoronkov, Anton Buzdin, Andrey Garaza, Nikolai Borisov and Alexey Moskalev – based their research on a technique they had previously developed for studying cancer cells. Each cell uses certain patterns of molecular interactions, which physiologists call intracellular signaling pathways.
The signaling pathway is several sequential interactions between specific molecules, due to which the cell reacts to a particular stimulus. Hormone molecules, for example, first interact with the receptors of the cell membrane, the receptors react with molecules inside the cell, and those, in turn, transmit a signal inside the cell nucleus. In the nucleus, the nature of the interaction of certain proteins with DNA changes and the activity of genes changes, which leads to changes in the synthesis of RNA responsible for the production of new proteins.
Drawing from an article in Frontiers of Genetics
Every event in the life of cells, both normal (reaction to hormones or cell specialization in a growing organism) and pathological (rebirth into a cancer cell), is accompanied by a restructuring of the activity of signaling pathways. At the same time, what is especially important, the same series of reactions can be used in completely different processes: there is no separate "cancer cell formation protein" or "long-term memory protein".
A team of specialists from MIPT and other organizations from Russia and the UK (the full list is presented in the article of scientists) proposed to compare the features of activation of signaling pathways in young and old cells. This information is then supplemented with known data on the effects of various substances on signaling pathways. As a result, the proposed algorithm makes it possible to predict how the profile of molecular interactions in the cell will change under the action of a particular drug. In their article, the scientists write that their proposed algorithm "can help in a quick and inexpensive search for drugs that can minimize the difference between cells from young and elderly patients." And this means that it will be possible to speed up and reduce the cost of the search for life-prolonging drugs, and not at the expense of combating specific diseases, but due to the complex impact on the mechanisms of aging.
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