Telomerase-activating compound may help reverse aging

Researchers have discovered a telomerase-activating compound which could eventually be used to reverse aging in humans.

Specifically, a naturally derived compound known as TA-65 has been shown to activate the telomerase gene in humans. The researchers, a collaboration of scientists from Sierra Sciences, TA Sciences, Geron Corporation, PhysioAge, and the Spanish National Cancer Research Center, discovered that activating this gene could prevent the shortening of telomeres at the ends of chromosomes, thereby slowing or even stopping the cellular aging process.

While TA-65 is probably too weak to completely arrest the aging process, it is the first telomerase activator recognized as safe for human use.

"We are on the cusp of curing aging," said William Andrews, Ph.D., co-author of this study and President and CEO of Sierra Sciences, LLC. "TA-65 is going to go down in history as the first supplement you can take that doesn't merely extend your life a few years by improving your health, but actually affects the underlying mechanisms of aging. Better telomerase inducers will be developed in the coming years, but TA-65 is the first of a whole new family of telomerase-activating therapies that could eventually keep us young and healthy forever."

As excited as I am by this discovery, I believe Andrews's statement is considerably overstated. We are still quite a ways off from having interventions that will "keep us young and healthy forever," and it will unlikely be accomplished through the exclusive use of telomerase-activating therapies. Aging is a multi-faceted process that will inevitably require a cocktail of therapies. Moreover, as healthy life span is continually extended, new and unanticipated age-related diseases will crop up.

It's worth noting that, in addition to slowing the cellular aging process, the researchers hope that TA-65 may also help treat diseases which attack the immune system such as HIV/AIDS.

Press release.

Human stem cells restore motor function in mice with spinal cord injuries

A recent study at UC Irvine has demonstrated that human neural stem cells can restore mobility in cases of chronic spinal cord injury, suggesting that a human-specific application may be around the corner. About 1.3 million people in the United States live with chronic spinal cord injury; this latest study indicates that human neural stem cells may be a viable treatment in the near future.

Previous studies have focused on the early stages of spinal cord injury when drug treatments are still effective in helping restore some functional recovery. But the UC Irvine study, led by Aileen Anderson and Brian Cummings of the Sue & Bill Gross Stem Cell Research Center, is important because the therapy has restored mobility during the later chronic phase—the period after spinal cord injury in which inflammation has stabilized and recovery has plateaued. As is stands, there are no drug treatments to help restore function in such cases.

The team transplanted human neural stem cells into mice 30 days after a spinal cord injury caused hind-limb paralysis. The cells then differentiated into neural tissue cells and migrated to spinal cord injury sites. After three months of this treatment, the mice demonstrated "significant and persistent recovery of walking ability" in two separate tests of motor function when compared to control groups.

"Human neural stem cells are a novel therapeutic approach that holds much promise for spinal cord injury," said Anderson, associate professor of physical medicine & rehabilitation and anatomy & neurobiology at UC Irvine. "This study builds on the extensive work we previously published in the acute phase of injury and offers additional hope to those who are paralyzed or have impaired motor function."

According to Dr. Stephen Huhn, vice-president and head of the central nervous system program at StemCells Inc., the strong preclinical data that has been accumulated to date will enable the transition to a clinical trial, which they plan to initiate in 2011.

Source.

Artificially fabricated cornea integrated with human eye

A new study from researchers in Canada and Sweden has shown that biosynthetic corneas can help regenerate and repair damaged eye tissue and improve vision in humans.

"This study is important because it is the first to show that an artificially fabricated cornea can integrate with the human eye and stimulate regeneration," said senior author Dr. May Griffith of the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute, the University of Ottawa and Linköping University. "With further research, this approach could help restore sight to millions of people who are waiting for a donated human cornea for transplantation."

Dr. Griffith and her colleagues began developing biosynthetic corneas in Ottawa, Canada more than a decade ago, using collagen produced in the laboratory and moulded into the shape of a cornea. After extensive laboratory testing, Dr. Griffith began collaborating with Dr. Per Fagerholm, an eye surgeon at Linköping University in Sweden, to provide the first-in-human experience with biosynthetic cornea implantation.

Together, they initiated a clinical trial in 10 Swedish patients with advanced keratoconus or central corneal scarring. Each patient underwent surgery on one eye to remove damaged corneal tissue and replace it with the biosynthetic cornea, made from synthetically cross-linked recombinant human collagen. Over two years of follow-up, the researchers observed that cells and nerves from the patients' own corneas had grown into the implant, resulting in a "regenerated" cornea that resembled normal, healthy tissue. Patients did not experience any rejection reaction or require long-term immune suppression, which are serious side effects associated with the use of human donor tissue. The biosynthetic corneas also became sensitive to touch and began producing normal tears to keep the eye oxygenated. Vision improved in six of the ten patients, and after contact lens fitting, vision was comparable to conventional corneal transplantation with human donor tissue.

"We are very encouraged by these results and by the great potential of biosynthetic corneas," said Dr. Fagerholm. "Further biomaterial enhancements and modifications to the surgical technique are ongoing, and new studies are being planned that will extend the use of the biosynthetic cornea to a wider range of sight-threatening conditions requiring transplantation."

Source.

Organs on-demand

It won't be long before surgeons routinely install replacement body parts created in the laboratory:

Anthony Atala works in the body shop of the future. He is the director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and he and his colleagues use human cells to grow muscles, blood vessels, skin and even a complete urinary bladder. Much of the work is experimental and hasn’t yet been tested in human patients, but Atala has implanted laboratory-grown bladders into more than two dozen children and young adults born with defective bladders that don’t empty properly, a condition that can cause kidney damage. The bladders were the first lab-generated human organs implanted in people. If they continue to perform well in clinical tests, the treatment may become standard not only for birth defects of the bladder but also for bladder cancer and other conditions.

Link.

Scientists one step closer to mimicking caloric restriction with anti-aging drugs

A team of University of Michigan scientists have discovered how a gene's action may help explain why restricting diet lengthens life in animals. The results offer promising early evidence that scientists may succeed at finding targets for drugs that someday could allow people to live longer, healthier lives.

Specifically, they found that suppressing a newly discovered gene lengthens the lifespan of roundworms. We've long known that significantly restricting food intake makes animals live longer, but the goal is to find less drastic ways to achieve the same effect in humans someday.

To find possible avenues for future anti-aging drugs, many scientists are focusing on signaling pathways in cells that sense nutrients. The one examined by the Michigan team, the target of rapamycin pathway or TOR pathway, is so named because its activity can be influenced by the drug rapamycin. Recent results from a large federal study being conducted at U-M and elsewhere have shown that in mice, rapamycin is effective at mimicking the anti-aging effects of dietary restriction.

Research in the last 25 years has shown that animals, including mammals, live longer and have lower levels of certain measures of age-related decline when scientists have restricted their food intake. It's highly suspected that the same effect hold trues for humans, hence the caloric restriction life extension movement.

When calories or certain nutrients are restricted, scientists detect less oxidative damage in animal cells and a slower decline in DNA repair, a decline that normally occurs with age. It's thought that limiting oxidative damage and slowing the decline in DNA repair could help postpone or avoid many age-related diseases.

That said, scientists know relatively little about why reducing food intake causes these effects. In the last 10 years, they have made progress in identifying genes and associated proteins that are suppressed when diet is restricted. By learning more about the cell processes involved, they may be able to discover targets for future drugs that could delay aging without the need to restrict food intake.

Drugs tailored to block specific genes or proteins involved in nutrient-sensing pathways would have much more appeal than reducing what one eats. To achieve anti-aging benefits, it's thought that people would have to restrict food intake by 30 to 40 percent, a grim prospect. In addition, drugs might be designed to avoid other disadvantages of this level of dietary restriction, which include reduced fertility.

C. elegans is a tiny roundworm, a nematode whose two-week lifespan is a great advantage for scientists studying aging. The 1-millimeter-long transparent worms have other advantages, too. C. elegans exhibits many age-associated changes observed in higher organisms. "Many genes identified in C. elegans to control the speed of aging turned out to be evolutionarily conserved, meaning that you can find them in other animals, too. And many are very similar to those found in humans," Ao-Lin Allen Hsu says, lead researcher of the Michigan team.

Hsu and his team created different mutant strains of roundworms, some with drr-2 genes silenced and others in which the gene was over-expressed. They wanted to learn whether inactivating drr-2 is essential for TOR to influence longevity, and found that it was. Other newly discovered genes may affect TOR signaling as well. But Hsu's team has found a promising lead for anti-aging drugs of the future: They were able to show that silencing drr-2's action alone was sufficient to make worms live longer than wild-type C. elegans used as controls.

"It is known that reduction of TOR signaling in response to a change in the environment or genetic manipulation triggers a cascade of cellular signals that alter cell growth, metabolism, and protein synthesis, and decrease the pace of aging," says Hsu. "Our recent studies have shown that drr-2 might play a pivotal role in the TOR signaling network to control protein synthesis as well as longevity."

Nanoscale DNA sequencing to spur revolution in personal health care

Researchers at the University of Washington have devised a method that works at a very small scale to sequence DNA quickly and relatively inexpensively. The process could eventually open the door for more effective individualized medicine. It's hoped that the method will, among other things, provide blueprints of genetic predispositions for specific conditions and diseases such as cancer, diabetes or addiction.

"The hope is that in 10 years people will have all their DNA sequenced, and this will lead to personalized, predictive medicine," said Jens Gundlach, a UW physics professor and lead author of a paper describing the breakthrough.

The technique creates a DNA reader that combines biology and nanotechnology using a nanopore taken from Mycobacterium smegmatis porin A. The nanopore has an opening 1 billionth of a meter in size, just large enough to measure a single strand of DNA as it passes through.

The research team placed the pore in a membrane surrounded by potassium-chloride solution and a small voltage was applied to create an ion current flowing through the nanopore. The current's electrical signature changed depending on the nucleotides traveling through the nanopore. Each of the nucleotides that are the essence of DNA (namely cytosine, guanine, adenine and thymine) produced a distinctive signature.

The delay is measured in thousandths of a second, which is long enough to read the electrical signals from the target nucleotides. "We can practically read the DNA sequence from an oscilloscope trace," said Gundlach.

The work was funded by the US National Institutes of Health and its National Human Genome Research Institute as part of a program to create technology to sequence a human genome for $1,000 or less. That program began in 2004, when it cost on the order of $10 million to sequence a human-sized genome. The new research is a major step toward achieving DNA sequencing at a cost of $1,000 or less.

Ultimately, it is hoped that these experiments will outline a novel and fundamentally very simple sequencing technology that can now be expanded into a mechanized process.

Scientists successfully use human stem cells to treat Parkinson's in rodents

Researchers have successfully used human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) to treat rodents afflicted with Parkinson's Disease (PD). The research, conducted at the Buck Institute for Age Research, validates a scalable protocol that the same group had previously developed. It may eventually be used to manufacture the type of neurons needed to treat the disease and paves the way for the use of iPSC's in various biomedical applications.

Researchers in the lab used human iPSCs that were derived from skin and blood cells and coaxed them to become dopamine-producing neurons. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter produced in the mid-brain that facilitates many critical functions, including motor skills. Patients with PD lack sufficient dopamine; the disease is a progressive, incurable neurodegenerative disorder that affects 1.5 million Americans and results in tremor, slowness of movement and rigidity.

"The studies are very encouraging for potential cell therapies for Parkinson's disease," said Alan Trounson, Ph.D., the President of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine. "The researchers showed they could produce quantities of dopaminergic neurons necessary to improve the behavior of a rodent model of PD. We look forward to further work that could bring closer a new treatment for such a debilitating disease."

Source.

Hughes: What are reproductive rights?

IEET executive director James Hughes has posted some of his responses to a journalist’s questions about reproductive rights. Highlights:

Do you really think there will be equal access for this technology? Why wouldn’t it create a caste system of the enhanced and the non-enhanced?

Equal access to any technological enablement is the result of ongoing political struggle. Societies with stronger civil liberties, trade unions and social democratic parties will provide better universal technological access, from sewers to the Net to gene therapy. In other more unequal societies genetic therapies may exacerbate inequality. The difference in outcomes will be determined by the strengthen of democratic movements and parties, however, not by policies governing the access to technologies. Because of the growth of medical tourism banning access to a technology will simply restrict access to the wealthy, and will not stem the emergence of a two-tier society.

Why do you dislike the term “designer babies”?

“Designer babies” impugns the motivations of parents, who are generally trying to ensure the best possible lives for their children. If parents provide food, exercise and education for children to ensure that they are smart and healthy we praise them as responsible. When they try to ensure the same goods for their children with reproductive technology we imply that they have twisted, malign, instrumental values.

Even in the case of reproductive choices which are cosmetic, such as eye or hair color, we do not slander parents for how they dress or groom their children, but we do if they exercise a simple cosmetic choice before birth. We should stop using the term.

Totally agree with J's point about rooting out the 'designer babies' term. It totally trivializes and demeans the pending practice. In its place I've been using the term 'human trait selection.'

More.

Regulating access to our own genome data

Trouble brewing: The FDA is looking to put its paws on the nascent direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic testing industry. The Association feels that some of the genome services are marketing their products as medical tests, and therefore should provide evidence of their efficacy. Since then, both Congress and the Government Accountability Office have looked into the DTC market, raising the prospects for direct government intervention in the market:

On the most basic level, government intervention in this market has the scent of an invasion of privacy. Shouldn't any citizen have the right to know about the contents of his or her own genome? But it's difficult to separate that basic level of knowledge from the medical implications it has, which is where safety, accuracy, and privacy issues—and government enforcement of them—come in.

Link

Quebec government to fund in vitro fertility treatments

The ongoing normalization of biotechnologies continues. As is the notion that fertilization therapies are just that, therapies that should be covered by the healthcare system.

Quebec is going ahead with a plan to fully fund in vitro fertility treatments for women. Health Minister Yves Bolduc says the province will fund up to three cycles of in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatments by the end of the spring.

Aside from the humanitarian element, Bolduc believes it will save the province up to $30 million a year on money being spent to treat premature babies born as a result of fertility treatments.

Link.

Dog gets osseointegrated prosthetic

Osseointegrated prosthetics, artificial limbs that fuse to the bone, have been touted as the future of prosthetics -- and rightly so. There are a number of possible benefits, both for humans and animals, including prosthetic limbs that attach without chafing or irritation and limbs with more natural ranges of motion.

Pictured is a male German Shepherd mix named Cassidy -- the first canine to receive the pioneering surgery. Cassidy was born with a defect in his left hind leg. Much of this work is being performed by the Carolina State University's School of Veterinary Medicine.

Mass produced artificial skin to replace animal testing

Doctors have been using synthetic skin for grafts and repairs for years now, but the process to create synthetic skin is expensive and time-consuming.

Now, a team from Germany's Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft science institute have created a way to mass-produce artificial skin (complete with blood vessels) that can be used for grafts, plastic surgery, or even cosmetics testing.

Indeed, in addition to providing new skin to burn victims, these swatches of artificial skin can take the place of animals in medical and cosmetic testing. And since the swatches can be made to contain blood vessels as well as skin cells, scientists can run circulatory as well as skin-related experiments on them.

The system is fully automated, with computers controlling the solution that the skin grows in, monitoring the vats for infection, guiding the blade that cuts the swatches, and even testing the quality of the final product.

The basic skin production system, which may be available as early as next year, can produce 5,000 swatches of human skin a month, for a total of over 600 square inches of mass-produced tissue. Each 0.12-square-inch section of skin would cost around US$49 to produce -- considerably less than the current cost.

More.

Bailey to Vatican: "Is Suppressing Scientific Research Sinful?"

So, the Vatican has declared "experiments [and] genetic manipulation" as "violations of certain fundamental rights of human nature."

Reason science correspondent Ronald Bailey has put a delightful spin on this and wonders if scientific ignorance and the suppression of vital biotechnological research is the true evil at play here:

First, the Vatican has not spoken with clarity on the issue of genetically improving crops. Back in 2003, the London Times reported that the Vatican would soon come out in favor of biotech crops as part of the solution for world starvation and malnutrition. A year later, a message from Pope John Paul II expressed reservations about biotech crops. Last year, Filipino Archbishop Cardinal Gaudencio Rosales warned that "genetically modified crops and food products could be very harmful to the environment and to human beings." The Archbishop is factually wrong about the alleged dangers of current biotech crops. What are the divine penalties for the sin of scientific ignorance?

The Roman Catholic and generally free market think tank, the Acton Institute, notes that some religious thinkers believe that it might be all right with God for us to modify plants, but not animals. The distinction is based upon the idea that while God commanded Noah to save animal lineages, the Almighty said nothing about preserving plants on the Ark. As evangelical biologist Calvin Dewitt explains, "These lineages are creations of the Creator, and they are... gifts to the whole of creation."

However, the Creator doesn't seem to be much of a steward of His Creation, since an estimated 99.9 percent of all species that ever lived are now extinct. And of course, argument against genetically modifying animals overlooks the fact that the genetic lineages of all domesticated animals have been dramatically modified by people over the millennia. Perhaps the souls of some of our ancestors are roasting in the infernal abyss for the sin of turning wolves into dogs and aurochs into Holsteins.

This is a great article and I suggest that you read more.

New audiocast episode posted

My latest audiocast has been posted here. You can subscribe to this feed.

In this episode I discuss in-world terrorism in Second Life, our neugenic nation, and how China is moving from the third world to a brave new world.

150 years of enhancment

Think human enhancement is something new? Hardly. We are by definition the tool making species and have been overcoming our biological limitations for quite some time now.

Take, for example, the British Medical Journal's assessment of the greatest medical advancements since 1840. They listed 10 different breakthroughs, most of which have a definite 'enhancement' quality. Listed below are the advancements along with my commentary:

Sanitation: cleaner, safer environments create stronger immune systems and healthier humans

Antibiotics: giving people the capacity to better fight bacterial infections

Anesthesia: allows surgeons do to more intense and invasive work on their patients while the patients themselves are spared intense physcial pain and psychological anguish

The double-stranded structure of DNA: human genomics for the purpose of eliminating genetic diseases and for eventual work on genetic modification

Oral contraceptive pill: to bypass our reproductive processes and convert the sex act into a recreational activity

Germ theory (the idea that micro-organisms cause disease): knowing how disease spreads changes human habits and therapeutic approaches

Vaccines: creating superhuman immune systems

Development of imaging techniques: human have x-ray vision to peer inside the human body; with fMRIs, humans can see the active parts of the brain

Immunology: the study of diseases for the purpose of treating and tracking them, and to eventually eradicate them

Computers: to disseminate knowledge and expertise, to link experts together, inform patients, run simulations, crunch numbers, archive deep databases -- all to further the medical sciences

Doomsday clock moved ahead due to climate and biotech

Now that even an enviroskeptic like Ronald Bailey is convinced that climate change is happening, it should come as no surprise that the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (BAS) has turned their attention to global warming. For the first time in history the infamous Doomsday Clock was moved ahead for environmental reasons; climate change now joins nuclear annihilation as one of the greatest threats to face humanity.

The clock was incremented by 2 minutes and now stands at 5 minutes to midnight.

The decision to do so was reached by a number of experts, including BAS directors and affiliated scientists such as Sir Martin Rees and Stephen Hawking. Kennette Benedict, executive director of the Chicago-based BAS, noted that "When we think about what technologies besides nuclear weapons could produce such devastation to the planet, we quickly came to carbon-emitting technologies." Rees added that "Humankind's collective impacts on the biosphere, climate and oceans are unprecedented." Stephen Hawking released a video statement in which he makes similar warnings.

Specific fears included rising sea levels, heat waves and desertification. It is also feared that there will be new disease outbreaks and wars over arable land and water.

The BAS Board notes,

Global warming poses a dire threat to human civilization that is second only to nuclear weapons. The most authoritative scientific group on these issues, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has concluded, “Most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities.” Carbon dioxide, principally from fossil fuel burning, has been accumulating in the atmosphere, where it acts like a blanket keeping Earth warm and heating up its surface, ocean, and atmosphere. As a result, current levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are higher than at any time during the last 650,000 years.

Also added to the list of threats are those posed by the emerging life science technologies, such as synthetic biology and genetic modification.

While the risks associated with global warming are severe, I am unconvinced that they qualify as extinction risks. More problematic would be a feedback and runaway greenhouse gas effect in which rising temperatures would move beyond human control. It is feared that such a catastrophe would convert the Earth into a Venus-like planet where temperatures would exceed 400°C. And indeed, the BAS did note this grim possibility in their review.

Historic and unprecedented as it is to include climate and biotech, it is my opinion that the BAS is still ignoring or underestimating a number of potential catastrophic risks. While I can understand their reluctance to include technologies that do not yet exist, the mere theoretical possibility and burgeoning development of such things as molecular nanotechnology, anti-matter weapons, and artificial superintelligence should at the very least be acknowledged.

It's never too early to start planning and formulating potential prescriptions for threats that may result in the extinction of the human species.