Spin off: Hard Subject...The "aging?" population...The near future

quote:

---

Beyond 120
Ideas from the father of modern stem cell biology, Irving Weissman, are starting to blossom into a future where we get old slower—and live longer

By Ted Mann

---

quote:

---

If you think this progress seems to be happening very quickly, you’re correct, and there’s a reason why this is so. George Church, professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and Professor of Health Sciences and Technology at Harvard and MIT and one of the world’s foremost geneticists, wrote in a recent forward to a lab manual on synthetic biology, “The elephant (or mammoth) in the room—’Exponential Technologies.’ The rate of change in biotechnologies (about eightfold a year) has exceeded even the super rate of Moore’s Law for electronics.

---

quote:

---

Blood is data soup, a rich broth of encoded information that dynamically orchestrates the interaction of every cell and organ system in the body, an intricate liquid network of great beauty and enormous complexity, a continuously flowing, ever changing, interacting, interdependent skein of looping metabolic pathways throughout the body.

---

quote:

---

We don’t intuitively grasp exponential rates of change. It’s hard for us to handle and examine them with our imagination because we have little or no experience of them in daily life. Exponential growth in knowledge creation is what’s happening, and this is not merely new knowledge being created faster than before.


As computational techniques and technologies become more deeply integrated into all the sciences, as Deutsch predicts, what we are currently seeing is a rapid change in the rate of creation of new, objectively true knowledge.

Yet our existing social institutions and our legal and regulatory structures date in many cases to the 1700s and before. Legal, political, and economic structures were intended to accommodate a much slower, arithmetical, additive, rate of change. The absence of trained reporters at the science desks of major networks and news organizations is also huge problem and a direct consequence of the decay of our traditional news outlets, which were rooted in 16th-century technology and flattened by the digital age.

Thanks to vast increases in computational power, we have the ability to reverse aging and cure diseases that otherwise threaten our economic and social order. Yet our regulatory and political systems prevent new technologies from ever reaching us, and the decay of our traditional information gathering and distribution systems means we never hear about them and never know what we, as a species, are now capable of. The future is not delivered to us, we must choose it, said Erwin Schrodinger; but before we do we must know what is available to us.

---

quote:

---

Brock Reeve, director of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, says, “Alzheimer’s is a ticking time bomb for society. It’s going to totally shoot the healthcare economics of this country.” In 2015, America’s total payments for healthcare, long-term care, and hospice for people with Alzheimer’s and other age-related dementia are estimated to be $226 billion. Medicare: $113 billion; Medicaid is $41 billion; insurance deductibles and out-of-pocket payments: $44 billion; and $29 billion “other,” meaning payment sources including private insurance, health maintenance organizations, managed-care groups, and uncompensated care. When what health care professionals call “the silver tsunami” hits, healthcare costs will increase astronomically. By 2050, 88.5 million Americans will be over 65, and estimated costs for Alzheimer’s care alone will run from $1 trillion and upwards. As USC’s Dana Goldman explains, “Medicare spending alone is projected to double as a share of gross domestic product, from 3.7 percent in 2012 to 7.3 percent in 2050.” The number of treatments to slow or stop the relentless progression of Alzheimer’s disease now available is zero.

---

quote:

---

Although the scientists hoped to trace changes in some areas, they were by no means expecting to see the pronounced and dramatic effects that they saw. The results of the meticulous experiment demonstrated that exposure to young blood’s “systemic environment” revitalized “aged progenitor cells” (akin to stem cells, but more specific), confirming the hypothesis “that there are systemic factors that support robust regeneration of tissues in young animals and/or inhibit regeneration in old animals, and that these factors act to modulate key molecular pathways that control the regenerative properties of progenitor cells.” In other words, the young blood serum restored aging progenitor/stem cells to youthful levels of functionality. The result, the Rando-Weissman joint lab’s paper reported, was the rejuvenation or regeneration of both muscle and liver tissue.

---

quote:

---

In the wake of the 2005 publication of “Rejuvenation of aged progenitor cells” in Nature, scientists at Stanford, Harvard, UCSF, University of Maryland, and at many other research institutions, foundations, and pharmaceutical companies around the world have been scrambling to identify the factors in blood plasma that are responsible for rejuvenation as well as the “pro aging” factors that are implicated in biological decline. Amy Wagers, now professor of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology at Harvard Stem Cell Institute, working with Richard Lee, a Harvard Medical School professor and a cardiologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, has identified a protein, GDF11, found in young plasma and largely absent in old. GDF11 has proved to be sufficient when injected to reverse signs of aging in the hearts of old mice.

In another experiment, Wagers, working with Lee Rubin, also at Harvard Stem Cell Institute, showed that GDF11 has a similar rejuvenative effect on muscles and brains of old mice. Wagers emphasizes the significance of these findings in a 2014 story available on the HSCI web site: “Prior studies of young blood factors have shown that we achieve restoration of muscle stem cell function, and they repair the muscle better. In this study, we also saw repair of DNA damage associated with aging, and we got it in association with recovery of function, and we saw improvements in un-manipulated muscle.” When I asked Wagers how long the effects persisted, she told me, “In muscle […] you can still see improved regeneration 3 weeks later, but that is as far as we have tested it.”

---

quote:

---

At the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Jeanne Loring, a researcher with dual competences in stem-cell biology and genetics, reprograms cells from patients with Parkinson’s disease and turns them by stages into dopamine-producing neurons, the brain cells Parkinson’s sufferers lack. Loring and her clinical partner Melissa Houser M.D., director of Parkinson’s Disease and Movement Disorder Center at Scripps Clinic, are applying to the FDA for permission to implant the cells in Parkinson’s patients, a process that Loring estimates will take two to three years. She is optimistic about the possibility of success because “a similar procedure was successfully done in the 1990s using fetal tissue, and now, about 20 years later, some of those people have died and their brains examined; the cells that were transplanted were perfectly healthy and the patients had had no Parkinson’s disease symptoms for the rest of their lives.”

---