Can Aging Be 'Treated'?

Interviewer: Dr. De Grey you talk about aging and explain it's a disease, most people think it's just a part of life or the end of life. Can you  explain the difference there?

Dr. Aubrey de Grey, Ph.D.: Well, I don't exactly call aging a disease, first of all. Whether you call aging a disease or not depends on your definition of the word disease, and people have different definitions. What I do say however, is that aging is a legitimate and foreseeable Target for medical intervention. What aging actually is, is the collection of early stages of all of the diseases of old age. So the collection of precursors of those diseases if you'd like. The reason why a disease is a disease of old age, it doesn't affect young adults, is simply because it is some aspect of the latest stages of something that goes on throughout our life, and that is aging.

Aging can be described in another way, as the accumulation of molecular and cellular damage in the body. Damage, which is called a simple side affect, of the bodies normal operation, which the body is set up to tolerate a certain amount of, which is why aging is basically harmless until middle age or a little older, but eventually the amount of damage exceeds the threshold that our body is set up to tolerate and that's when the disease is a disability of ike age emerged. So what that means is that treating aging is not a science-fiction concept at all. It's absolutely simply preventative geriatric, preventative medicine for the diseases and disabilities of old age.

Interviewer: In a simple form, how do we do that? How do we treat aging?

Dr. Aubrey de Grey, Ph.D.: At the moment the problem is that aging is really complicated. There are a lot of things that go on through our life and they lead to a various number of different disabilities and diseases of course, late in life. So the question is, how can actually tackle this? At the moment the short answer is, we can't. At the moment the simple interventions that we have, supplements, dietary regimes and so on, can only do a very small amount to postpone the ill health of old age. Unless of course, somehow you are unlucky, you're aging in some at a particularly rapid rate. If you're already normal, better than normal, you're doing well for your age, then the things that are available today, there's no evidence that we can really do anything at all. That's why we need therapy (?) and that's what Sens Foundation works on.

We're working on developing medicine that really will tackle aging properly. Here's the big thing, we're intersted in medicines that don't nearly slow downturn the clock of aging, the accumulation of this damage, that actually repair the damage, so they genuinely rejuvinate people. They will be able to take people who are already in middle age or older and actually fix them up so they don't only look, but also feel and function exactly like a young adult as a result of these therapies. Of course that sort of therapy can be applied periodically, so there's no reason for any on how long one can stay truly youthful when these therapies exist. I don't think they're all that far away, I think that we have at least a 50/50 chance of developing truly comprehensive rejuvination medicine of the sort within the next 20 to 25 years. All it really needs is for us to get on and really do the critical proof of concept Biomedical research that Sens Foundation is pursuing, and other people are pursuing as well in certain cases, and to get that to happen as soon as possible.

At the moment, I can't deny, that it could be going a lot faster if there were more resources attached to this. In other words, if people understood what I've just been telling you, about aging being something that can be, in principle, postponed and reversed by medical intervention. 

Interviewer: What are some of the potential therapies that you're talking about, that can rejuvenate the different body parts?

Dr. Aubrey de Grey, Ph.D.: We're talking here about regenerative medicine in a broad sense. So regenerative medicine means, of course stem cell therapy, which replace cells that have not been automatically replaced, when they die, and normally, of course, cells are replaced by the division of their cells. That sometimes doesn't happen, Parkinson's disease is a fine example of a disease of aging that's caused by the loss of cells in a particular part of the brain. There are stem cell therapies and clinical trials already for addressing Parkinson's disease and there are those days, sometimes they work sometimes the don't, but when they do, they work spectacularly. So this is undoubtedly going to be the way Parkinson's disease is cured in the future. Regenerative medicine also includes tissue engineering, creation of artificial organs in the lab that can then be transplanted into the body to replace a diseased organ, an aging organ maybe, just as if the organ had come from a donor. This is going to be a big part of regenerative medicine as well, but beyond that, there are aspects of regenerate medicine that don't get so much air time, they're really in the early stage of development, which will be very relevant to the treatment of aging. One is the removal of cells. When you've got too many of a particular type of cell, that happens of course in cancer when cells divide when they're not supposed to. It also happens in the immune strength and other places where cells don't die when they are supposed to, so they accumulate. 

Finally the really important family of categories of molecular regenerative medicine, where instead of replacing a whole organ or replacing the cells within an organ, we actually repair the cells. We actually go into the cells and restore their internal structure by removing molecular garbage that they haven't been able to digest for example, and that can also happen in the space in between cells what we call the 'extra cellular space.' Then these things like hypertension, which are caused by the stiffening of the extra cellular putative proteins called the 'extra cellular matrix'. This matrix has elastic and it gets that elasticity from the way it's put together, the way the proteins that it's made up of are linked. There are additional links that form spontaneously throughout life as a result of chemical reaction with sugar and we need to get rid of these links. 

So all of these things are being pursued aggressively by Sens Foundation and by other organizations and the more aggressively we pursue them, the sooner these therapies will come along.