Crack the Aging code
A scientist from Russia told how to create a "pill for old age"
A scientist from MIPT and the biological company Gero has developed a strategy that allows using physics methods and "big data" from the world of biology to create drugs that slow down or stop aging. His ideas were published in the journal Frontiers in Genetics (Hacking Aging: A Strategy to Use Big Data From Medical Studies to Extend Human Life).
"Among the most promising targets for the first drugs are molecules circulating in blood plasma, since their key role in the aging process is supported by the results of experiments on transfusion of young plasma," says Pyotr Fedichev, head of the laboratory at MIPT and scientific director of Gero, whose words are quoted by the press service of the university.
In recent years, a debate has been revived among scientists about what is the aging process and the death of humans and animals. Some biologists and evolutionists believe that this process is not random, and that it is controlled by a kind of "death program" – a certain set of genes that causes the body to become decrepit and die, giving way to a new generation of their own kind.
Other scientists believe that aging is an absolutely random process of accumulation of mutations and random breakdowns in cells. This leads to the accumulation in the body of so-called "elderly" cells that stop participating in the vital activity of the body due to the appearance of mutations in their DNA or reaching the limits of division. The removal of such cells from the body of worms, as experiments have shown, significantly prolonged their life and improved their vital functions.
The existence of naked diggers and other "immortal" animals, as noted by Fedichev, makes his team assume that the aging program should still exist. Accordingly, scientists believe that it can be "hacked" by using certain medications or by changing the work of the genes associated with it.
How do I find this program? Fedichev and his colleagues have developed a strategy that makes it possible to find its "traces" in the data collected today by the largest genomic data banks and monitoring projects, using the concept of critical dynamics used to describe processes in the physics of complex systems.
By this word, scientists understand a set of mathematical tools and ideas that allow us to calculate the behavior of a large number of complex objects, whose interactions almost unpredictably affect the behavior of the entire system as a whole.
These ideas, as Fedichev notes, can be applied not only to study how various chaotic processes "work" in inanimate nature, but also to search for relationships in complex biological systems, for example, between human lifespan, mutations in his DNA, diseases and the presence of different protein molecules in his blood and cells.
Using these principles, scientists from MIPT have recently created an artificial intelligence system capable of calculating the biological age and the probability of premature death of a person according to data from a fitness tracker.
In addition, they have already managed to prolong the life of nematode worms by 20-35% with the help of drugs that mimic the effects of gene therapy, as well as create a set of RNA molecules that increased this indicator by 30%.
The analysis of the work of these genes and molecules using the methods of physics of complex systems, as the scientist noted, indicated that they change the work of the body in approximately the same direction. This allows us to hope that a single "aging program" still exists, and that it can be "hacked" in the future.
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