How to stop aging

Interview with a scientist who is trying to prolong youth

Peter Fedichev The ideologist of the biotech company Gero. Graduate of MIPT. Postgraduate studies at the Amolf Institute. He received his PhD at the University of Amsterdam, continued his studies at the University of Innsbruck from 2001 to 2004.

Diseases are the consequences of aging

When dealing with age–dependent diseases, it is difficult not to catch yourself thinking that the general aging process is killing a person, and specific diseases are already private manifestations of this large process. Most diseases occur already against the background of the aging process, as a consequence of it.

A few years ago, I had a revolution of consciousness: I was shown a graph with the causes of death of people of different ages – and it turned out that if we cured all cancer tomorrow, then the average life expectancy of people would increase by only three years. Because those who didn't die of cancer would have died of something else.

An increasing number of people understand that for the hundreds of billions of dollars that have been spent on fighting cancer, we have not made the most significant progress and, perhaps, it is time to look for therapy not against a specific disease, but against the aging process as a whole, although there is no such name for the disease as "aging" yet. But by all indications, this is a genetic disease, and the fact that 100% of people suffer from it does not change anything in fact. After all, if the entire population of the Earth suddenly gets sick with the flu, we will not stop calling it a disease – on the contrary, we will say that we are dealing with an epidemic. More and more leading scientists in the field of aging are demanding early official recognition of aging as a disease at the WHO level. Until this is done, the doctor will not tell you "You have a problem – you are getting old", but he should.

How to increase the stress resistance of the body

There are different risk factors affecting aging: radiation exposure, stress, poor ecology and food. A young body copes well with such external stress, and with age, stress resistance decreases sharply. Our goal is to develop a therapy that will slow down the reduction of stress resistance and slow down or turn off the aging process. Of course, the possibilities of the body are not unlimited, we can say that roulette will continue to be played every new year of life and a small risk of getting cancer will remain, but aging will be partially taken under control.

We know that a person at the age of 30-40 is quite immune to both external and internal stress factors, and then his ability to resist them drops significantly. And it happens about the same for all people. This process is programmed in our genetics, and we need to learn how to influence this process in such a way as to keep a person in a workable and viable state for as long as possible.

If you treat a particular disease, you solve one problem, and if you increase the capabilities and stress resistance of the body, then you increase its ability to resist a large number of problems at once. It's like a symptomatic treatment – if you can't cope with the reason why a person has a decrease in stress tolerance, then you, having solved one problem, will not solve the problem as a whole.

For example, there are many successful experiments to increase the life of mice. The leading cause of death in mice, as in many other rodents, is breast cancer. If we prolonged the life of a mouse through anti-aging interventions (calorie restriction, taking rapamycin, etc.), this means that breast cancer appeared later and killed her later. In addition, all other possible causes of death were also pushed back.

How can you be so sure that this is even possible

Our team wouldn't be looking into these issues if we didn't know that there are mammals that age so slowly that it just doesn't look like aging: more scientifically, it's called "negligible aging." There are a number of animals, including mammals (for example, bowhead whale, naked African digger, Brandt's bat, etc.), whose risk of death from various diseases does not grow or grows extremely slowly or even decreases with age. Whereas in humans, mice, flies, and in general in most animals, the risk of death increases exponentially with age.

People have such an anthropocentric view of nature that we believe that everyone lives, ages and dies just like ourselves. At the same time, people are almost not interested in death and aging. Death doesn't always happen to you. If people saw those who were cured of cancer, then no one saw those who escaped death. Therefore, they are more interested in cancer. Freud wrote about this: the thought of death visits a normal, healthy person at the age of 6, causes trauma in him, which most people heal so much that the second time a person no longer thinks about it.

In 2005, the first article appeared, telling about mammals with a different aging regime. And even we, as physicists, found it interesting. Together with our colleagues, including Professor Robert Schmuckler Rice from the USA, who extended the life of worms 10 times (this is a world record today), we managed to develop new theoretical ideas that the "non-aging" mode, or slow aging, exists and, most likely, it is possible to control it pharmacologically and therapeutically. The main thing we want to achieve is to make the aging rate of a laboratory animal (and eventually a human) so small that, looking at it, it would be impossible to understand how old it is. This would give a person the opportunity to maintain protection against age-related diseases at the level of a young organism, maximizing healthy life expectancy and life itself.

How will the economy change if people stop aging

The state system in developed countries, one way or another, is built on the principles of humanism. If a person has lived to a certain age and has earned some diseases, we consider it our duty to provide him with the most effective ways to treat them. And since all these methods are very expensive, it requires huge financial investments. And if a person has lost his ability to work, then this is a huge burden on both relatives and the economy as a whole.

According to calculations recently provided by Professor Nir Barzilai, people who die in their 60s and 70s get sick a lot and the cost of their treatment is quite high. And people who live to be 90-100 years old get sick a little and die suddenly. The cost of their treatment, the burden on society and the social system is less than in the case of those who died in 60-70 years, despite the fact that they live longer.

We do not know how events will develop, because the technology has not yet been created, but we can predict that if nothing changes in the near future, we will face a situation where the social security system for the elderly will be impossible to maintain. Now people are losing their ability to work too quickly, retire and stop earning, while the cost of their treatment is growing. Very soon, the remaining young people will simply not be able to earn enough money for the elderly to treat themselves. And if life expectancy increases, then people will be able to earn more: in most countries, medicine is insured, so the more a person works, the more pillow he reserves in order to cure himself. Therefore, extending the productive age is actually a huge economic task, and not just a whim.

In the coming years, a person will learn to live in very aggressive environments – with environmental conditions deteriorating, space exploration – a person will need the ability to adapt, to get superhuman capabilities. Moreover, if we don't do it, in a few years, a few decades at most, others will do it. The field of anti-aging includes both new scientific groups and large companies like Calico, created by Google, and others. This is one of the impending revolutions in technology, business and public life.

If we could stop the increase in the risk of death at the age of 30, then we could talk about prolonging life at times. And there are no scientific principles that say that it is impossible to slow down aging. For example, with antibiotics, people have doubled their average life expectancy. I don't see any reason why we can't do it again.

What are the cures for old age today

Everyone has their own approaches, and it's hard to say how it should be arranged. Some teams of scientists are testing existing drugs on animals. If it is known about one of them that it prolongs the life of flies, yeast, nematodes and mice in laboratories, then it may be able to prolong the life of a person.

At the moment, research is mainly conducted on animals, but the transition from animal to human is already beginning. Last year, Novartis conducted a test of an analogue of rapamycin (used to avoid organ rejection during transplantation. – Ed.) in public, claiming that the elderly taking it will be able to acquire immunity against the flu. This is an example of a drug acting against one of the age-dependent pathologies.

Another example is the drug metformin, used for diabetes. As a result of a meta-analysis of its long-term use by tens of thousands of people, it was found that diabetics taking metformin, on average, live longer than healthy people who do not take it. Currently, clinical studies of its effect on aging processes are being launched in the USA and Indonesia.

There is another approach, which is based on the fact that none of the already known drugs radically prolongs life. If some drug can increase life by 10%, then it does not extend life twice. Therefore, we need to look for a new tool. Our team rather belongs to this group.

The topic of aging has been getting better funded in recent years, although budgets are still not comparable, for example, with the amount of funding for cancer research or Alzheimer's disease.

Mathematical analysis of aging and targeted medications

Our team has developed ideas about the aging process and how it manifests itself in biological systems: we get huge amounts of data, study how different genes affect each other's work. As a result, we find the vulnerabilities of the aging process, those genes, those metabolites, those proteins that maximally affect the rate of aging. We simultaneously measure up to 100 thousand different parameters in animals and obtain models and specific targets for influencing the aging process.

If the experiment with mice shows a result, then such therapy will become a candidate for its transfer to humans. Along with therapy, biomarkers should also be developed so that it is possible to find out at what rate his biological age changes during therapy, and to understand whether it really helps him to slow down aging.

There is more and more talk around that medicine should be personalized. It is clear that one person is different from another and there are people on whom this medicine will have little or no effect at all. But first you need to find a drug that will help at least 60% of people or one person in 60% of his life situations, and then fight for an increase in this fraction to 100%. For example, two years ago, revolutionary cancer treatments appeared – the so-called immunotherapy. And we see that in some cases, in which previously the chances of survival were zero, now 25% of people survive. And this is a revolution! In 5-10 years, 25% will turn into 85%.

Yes, we will not help everyone at once. But in a world where life expectancy will be increased, this will be a huge technological and universal victory.

Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru  30.03.2016