Can ageing be delayed, stopped or even reversed? BBC News

please parish believes she has a fatal illness but she is trying to develop her own cure the disease growing old I'm on a mission I'm on a mission to help people live a full and healthy life without the diseases of aging and complex disorders and le's is in the only person on a mission a growing number of respected scientists think we definitely can and should fight aging my view is that anyone who tells you that aging is beautiful and something to embrace is either being dishonest with you or dishonest with themselves I see no beauty if you love somebody and you see how they aged and if you feel that you might lose them you want them to be eternally healthy and happy but is not only scientist excited by this idea there is a growing number of true believers who think that we could live for hundreds of years [Applause] this is about more than staying feet and healthy into all age with a good diet and exercise this is the pursuit of a much longer healthier life span using science and genetics to achieve it and who hasn't dreamed of staying young but how far will you be prepared to go to achieve that dream Lise Parrish believes she has found a way to defy aging but she's not a scientist she's a businesswoman who in 2013 turned to the Internet after her son was diagnosed with diabetes type 1 what I did is I started to go online to search for deeper treatments for disease and I ran into genetics and to me this looks to be the cure for not only childhood disease but all of the things that Ellis she thinks she's found a method that can reverse aging so the idea is to not make people older longer it's actually to help them be as youthful as possible for a long period of time in order to do that two years ago Lise performed an experiment on herself never before tried in humans she took a therapy only tested previously on Mars designed to lengthen the telomeres of her chromosomes one of the building blocks of our DNA we can save it some of the cells in my body by the length of the telomeres are up to 20 years younger and how do you feel well I feel great I mean I wish my whole organism was was marked in my 20s but we still have a ways ago we haven't solved the problem yet I don't think aging is a disease is the cause of diseases so we see then more important than being a disease is actually the origin of the disease and therefore that's why I'm interested in understanding Aging to try to find out more about Lisa's project I've come here to Madrid to meet Maria Blasco director of the Spanish National Cancer Research Center even though they don't know each other Liz parish's self experiment was inspired by the results of Maria's work so you know we are made of cells here so it still has a nucleus and inside the nucleus there are the these things called chromosomes so the chromosomes have all the genetic information what we are and at the end of the chromosomes at each one of the ends are the Timmers and one interesting scene of these telomeres is that they shorten as we age and where the telomeres get critically short so these results in the death of the other cell this is one of the basic mechanisms of aging the question is if we could lengthen telomeres can we slow the aging process in 2008 Maria Blasco tried to find out she set out to lengthen telomeres in mice using a specially developed enzyme called telomerase the results were eye catching the mice lived on average 40 percent longer than their usual lifespan of course what an amazing feeling because we realize where I realized that we actually had you know manipulated one of the basic mechanisms of why we age and this could lead to you know important applications in the future but there was a catch the therapy would almost certainly have increased cancer rates in the mice had the animals not been genetically modified to be cancer resistant something that cannot be done in humans so Maria and her team refined the process and in 2012 they carried out a second experiment so these might actually live twenty percent longer and cancer was also delayed so this showed that it was possible to delay aging and aging associated pathologies including cancer with telomerase exciting though the results we're a one-off experiment in mice doesn't mean it will work in humans but that has not deterred Lise Parrish who set up her own biotech company by Aviva to replicate the experiment on herself well if we're sitting on the cure for biological aging in complex disease it would actually be a crime against humanity to not move forward and find out somebody needed to step forward to do this to show the world that it's safe and that come on we should probably get involved in this technology and start eradicating the diseases that are plaguing us now Lisa's blood tests show some of her telomeres have lengthen but she's here to have the results independently verified in fact her experiment is a long way from a proper clinical trial and taking an untested gene therapy is potentially dangerous it's not going to be very very useful and it is risky because if you want to try some new therapy this has to be done through the regulatory agencies so you can check whether it is toxic but it has any but effects and you can also see whether it is useful or not it's really been effective if I could pay to expand my years of youth I don't know I'm still very young so I guess it this is more for like older people to answer younger forever would be pretty nice yes still young for like an immortal like like a vampire of course yeah who wouldn't want to do that where is it also to be the first to sign up you ready my name is James Stroh I'm the director of the Coalition for radical life extension and co-founder for people unlimited I'm Brenna Dean and I'm co-founder of people unlimited so we were the creators of rad Fest which is the event we're at right now rad Fest revolution against aging and death the biggest gathering of longevity enthusiasts on the planet being physically in mortal it's in my blood these yearly festival in California offers a mind-boggling array of clean anti-aging treatments my team developed the theraph eye device essentially you could cool it like a human battery charger every cell of the body needs a certain frequency of voltage for it to be healthy so I'm not sure if you were to put fruit here and come back in two years time that fruit would still be very very healthy we're doing thermal imaging analyzing the skin and how the skin is correlated to every muscle organ and gland by addressing inflammation lymphatic congestion the precursors to disease is going to help you live longer we do medical engineering the optimization of vitality and for Giovani that way you can become the best version of you we like to say you perfected it rad Fest is kind of a special opportunity because it's people who already are very interested in stopping biological aging statistically in developed countries people are already living nearly twice as long as a century ago but these people don't want to stop there and there is money in it investors are starting to come to these type of conferences because they're getting excited about this technology I believe that business will start to happen at these type of conferences soon but there's a lot of difference between starting a conversation with an investor and finishing an event these festival this disease the most award has not seen that but it actually is and if will cure aging there will be a domino effect that will cure most many other diseases age-related diseases down the line it's going to happen despite the optimism attract the promise of eternal youth still a fantasy but along the west coast the idea of extending life is being taken very seriously scientists are looking at many possible ways to slow down aging not just telomeres if you love somebody and you see how they age and if you feel that you might lose them you want them to be eternally healthy and and happy health and fitness fanatic Steve Horvath is a professor in human genetics and biostatistics here things were still the foothills of understanding what causes aging I believe there's a passivity it actually measures the state of yourselves it doesn't cause things to deteriorate it just keeps track of a mechanism that actually does cross at it so there's some mechanism we just don't understand yet I call it one of the root causes of Aging [Music] if we're ever going to reverse aging he argues we first need to understand this mechanism called the epigenetic clock it all starts with the DNA molecule as you know most cells of the human body contain a DNA molecule that encodes for different letters a C T and G now in this model the yellowstone's correspond to the letter C as you carefully look at the molecule you will see there are some dots that are black these are modifications of the letter C epigenetic modifications of the letter C by counting the number of black dots at certain locations we will be able to estimate the passage of time that occurred in a cell it is these epigenetic modifications which Steve believes are a strong candidate to be the root cause of Aging the good news about these age-related epigenetic changes is that they are reversible you know you know so in principle one can come up with treatment maybe a drug that could reverse these epigenetic changes so that you restore the cells and therefore the tissues and organs to a more youthful state if epigenetic changes are important does Steve believe telomeres also play a role we have to acknowledge that the telomere interpretation of aging has been disappointing many people in the anti-aging field enamored with the idea that if we overexpress telomerase for example which would lengthen our telomeres you know that that would be a viable anti-aging therapy you know but the depressing news is that if you overexpress telomerase and end up with longer telomeres you actually increase your risk for cancer you know so there's this paradoxical finding if your telomeres are too long you actually have a higher risk of developing cancer but are you biased because your area of expertise is epigenetics and therefore you think that's the answer no I wouldn't interpret it that way you know because my purpose in life is to defeat aging I would do whatever it takes to get there just to be clear I think they are an important contributor to aging just don't think of it as the Fountain of Youth you know [Music] even though there is not yet a consensus on the causes of aging up the coast in San Francisco billions of dollars are being poured into biotechnology startups in search of an answer so far anti-aging has been roughly eight billion dollar industry of stuff that doesn't work but if you could actually produce things that prevent multiple is related diseases then you could take about ten billion dollars that people are spending on one particular disease like Alzheimer's and multiply that by as large a number as you want rollerskating enthusiasts job vets like Rock is a scientist and entrepreneur who has raised millions of dollars from venture capitalists like PayPal founder Peter Thiel he thinks the answer to longer lives lies in preventing age-related diseases he is also the founder of health extension a community that brings together scientists and entrepreneurs to create startups in the aging industry how much money have you raised for your companies for us I think I can say it's you know in in late 30 millions oh yeah in the mid I guess yeah around 14 million but I can't say for our fun particular but our companies and total heart rates in the order of a couple hundred million between them Wow where do you find these investors there's a trend that I'm really excited about in Silicon Valley where a lot of people with tech money are getting interested in in biology and not just not just biology but also aging well especially where biology sort of intersects with technology and you're using robotics are using machine learning correct me if I'm wrong but they seems to be a growing interested in this industry what why is that what interesting things is really been you know when I first came out here the reason I wanted to work in the space was I you know been in a couple labs and just been so surprised that investors weren't coming to us every day knocking on the door and being like hey what do you have you know we just kind of sit there with great science and then nobody would show up and it was like what's what's wrong here you know I think then the fascinating things has been that's really flipped around the past couple of years it's been like you know if folks are now very actively going out and saying what's happening and aging I want invest in an aging company let's invest in that yeah I think the science is pretty exciting now I think there's things that we discovered in the past ten years that are that are new we have drugs and we have genetic mutations that can make mice live a lot longer and if those translated directly to humans then we could add basically ten to twenty years of healthy human life suddenly in the last few years people have found some things that actually extend lifespan in mammals and and so now they you can just tell that it's right on the precipice of it's time to bring in any into people but that's that's a very challenging process so what is it about animal studies mammals in particular that has got investors and scientists excited one thing that's interesting is that small horses tend to live longer than large horses well it turns out that the hormones that we discovered affect lifespan they also affect size and if you turn these hormones down the whole life the animal will be small and live long if you just turn them down in the adult there won't be small but they'll still live long as far as we know for every species has been tested turning down this hormone system extends lifespan Cynthia is not just any old horse lover she's head of Google's calico one of the best funded biotech companies in the United States calico is also very secretive we've been granted a rare interview but weren't allowed to ask detailed questions about what they are working on calicos idea is to have a better understanding of Aging in all its forms and maybe a better understanding of how you can intervene in animals and increase lifespan in a healthy way and also at the same time in parallel try to devise interventions for people you know so calico is kind of a little microcosm of the bigger field of Aging Cynthia made her name with a bit of pioneering research on a type of worm known as C elegans in the early 90s by partially disabling a single gene call Daffy to Cynthia's team managed to double the lifespan of these animals so in just one fell swoop the whole animal lives twice as long and age is much more slowly than normal so that was really stunning because it's not supposed to happen because then people go oh my god if you can do it for these little worms maybe you could do it for other animals and sure enough you can other people later they showed you could do it for fruit flies you could do it for mice and maybe maybe people we don't know whether this is something calico is looking at we can only guess they do say they want to have a better understanding of how and why we age in order to intervene and increase people's healthy lifespan so most diseases like cancer Alzheimer's disease diabetes type 2 diabetes happen to the elderly mostly to there age-related and turns out when you slow down aging in these animals you also postpone these diseases and when they do occur they're milder so the same molecular machinery that could keep us young could also keep us free of age-related diseases for a longer time so in other words if you could hit aging target aging maybe you'd have a drug that just one pill that could have effects on many diseases all at once Google clearly believes this is science worth investing in but how close the since you really think we are from delaying Aging in humans if people are like animals in the sense that if they're aging machinery is still susceptible to intervention the way the animals are it might be really close it might be really really close but if we're different somehow or if we've already kind of maxed out then it might be a long time I think we'll be able to do it I really do [Applause] aging is a very good thing for me I currently have good health I take care of myself and life is beautiful as you age life experiences I think I don't want to live forever because you wouldn't be so appreciative of life and of the little things and you wouldn't have so much urgency to go and do the things that you want to I don't see myself super old just because I feel like they have more problems more health problems and I don't want to become a burden to anybody if I become ill or I need somebody to take care of me oh it's horrible yeah no I think it would be much better if we didn't need along with calico the other Silicon Valley venture with deep pockets is unity biotechnology it was founded by multi-millionaire Nathaniel David who is motivated by more than just the chance to make money I watched my stepfather died of Alzheimer's there was nothing dignified or beautiful about that and you know he forgot who he was he forgot who we were and my view is that anyone who tells you that aging is beautiful and something to embrace is either being dishonest with you or dishonest with themselves yeah I see no beauty his work focuses on a specific type of cell we at unity while we believe their multiple mechanisms of aging we choose to focus on a particular mechanism that we think is uniquely amenable to making drugs to impact it and this mechanism is called cellular senescence and it works like this at conception you're a single cell that's you and over the arc of your life you this cell will divide as many as 50 times and as you the cell approach 50 cell divisions you'll encounter some form of cellular stress and you will pull an emergency brake and stop dividing forever this non-dividing cells are called senescence cells they play an important role in preventing cancer but they also drive features of aging so unity were able to eliminate these cells in lab mice to see what would happen and we did this something astonishing happened these mice had a profoundly extended period of something called health spin this is the period of time that these animals live free of chronic diseases of aging they had increased heart function they had increased bone deposition they had reduced arthritis they had reduced cataract formation they even behaved like younger animals into advanced age oh and as a side effect yes they did live longer but we think that's the boring part the really cool part is the fact that a bunch of these things that you think of is inescapable aspects of Aging they didn't occur in order to develop this treatment they first had to find molecules that could selectively eliminate senescence cells in specific age-related diseases but unity says in the next 12 to 18 month they are planning to run their first clinical trial on patients with osteoarthritis our animal and modeling suggests that the removal of senescence cells will relieve pain and also allow the cartilage which no longer heals in patients with osteoarthritis to actually heal again so how awesome would it be if you could go to an old person who's on a cane and inject them and three days later doesn't hurt and then three months later they've actually generated new cartilage with the United States spending an estimated 2.3 trillion dollars per year on age related diseases it is easy to see the economic potential if it were possible to slow down aging think about this most biotech products treat a disease you've never heard of that someone you do not know suffers from everyone you know suffers from aging everyone Unity's approach is just one among the many possible causes of aging being investigated nathaniel david likens the various theories about aging to a tree no one knows yet whether their particular specialities are the roots trunk branch or leaves of that tree the question is which of the competing theories underpins everything else when I think about the tree I think that cellular senescence if we're very lucky is probably a nice branch I don't think it's drunk and I certainly don't think it's roots if I were to speculate that what could dwell in the trunk or the roots could be a peach you know the clock I think that's a that's a potentially powerful one and I think in the next five to ten years we're gonna learn whether or not you can do some major alteration of the epigenome and make an animal ages 1/2 the speed how awesome would that be please meanwhile is betting on telomeres she says she has raised millions in investment and plans to start offering clinical trials next year we'll start with a low-hanging fruit of a gene that's already been in humans and in all the animal models that are acceptable to show data and then we'll move to the stronger gene therapies like the telomerase inducer to lengthen your telomeres although it is a trial patients will need to pay if they want to take part well initially they'll be very expensive therapies they'll be in the hundreds of thousands some of the therapies will be over a million but we're coming up with strategic ideas how to treat localized areas of the bodies and then moving towards full body treatments Lise will have to conduct hair trials outside the US to date in the state there have been no human clinical trials of drugs to slow down aging that's because the regulatory body the FDA only allows testing of drugs that will combat diseases and aging is not classified as a disease but is that about to change there's a lot of excitement around aging right now I mean we've been studying this process for 25-30 years in in the laboratory and we've learned a great deal about the aging process and why aging causes diseases like Alzheimer's Parkinson's various cancers and so on Gordon let go at the buck Institute for research of aging in California has been working in the field for more than 25 years so we're a point right now where were seriously talking for the first time and I've been doing this is you said for a long time though we're talking for the first time about clinical trials with drugs that could slow down the aging process as an incredibly exciting and something I didn't really expect to see in my life the drug in question is metformin which has been used for more than 20 years to treat diabetes researchers have noticed that patients taken metformin tend to outlive diabetics taking other drugs but strikingly they also appear to be less likely to suffer from age-related diseases such as cancer Alzheimer's and dementia the plan is to recruit 3,000 patients over 80 year-old for a trial to test whether the drug does slow the aging process and delay age-related diseases however it will be a long road and the results will take at least five years and even if successful no one is expecting a miracle cure I don't imagine that we're going to have one magic bullet that slows down aging dramatically in humans I think that we actually don't really know how complex aging is in humans we have a lot more work to do before we can really say is this one process or is other process metformin has been safely prescribed to patients for years but Lisa's telomere experiment has not undergone the usual clinical trials I wanted to know how she could justify the risk of AfriNIC to the public when we bring patients in we do have a liability we have a liability to them and the world to ensure that what we're doing is safe we we don't want to give a bad reputation to gene therapy so it's it's a very serious time as much as we're excited you know where we are definitely thinking about all ends on the other side you as the CEO of bio vive how where are you of that risk and that responsibility when anything goes wrong it will be my wrist ability in in many ways being the CEO of the company and I will have that conversation we've looked at the research we've looked at the animal data we've looked at the human cell data and I've taken the therapies myself so I mean that's less that's more than then the average biotech might do to ensure that a drug was safe before they gave it to patients there are many more competing theories about what causes aiding so after all these what have we learned after speaking with scientists and self experimenters I can say two things one is that there is real conviction we can delay the aging process and the other one is that there is serious money being invested in that idea my prediction is that people might their median lifespan will probably be like if you were an American white male rather than being 79 might be a hundred and three and many people you know rather than dying at age 83 demented catheterized in their bed muttering to themselves they would die at 106 on the tennis court while winning or killed by a jealous lover at 113 certainly I think is something that is going to happen that we are going to be not only living longer which we are already living longer but live longer without diseases and this is the goal as interesting as the science sounds nobody really knows when or if this research will produce results in humans but in the meantime Gordo let go has some sound advice the most amazing anti-aging medicine that we know about right now is is exercise exercise is really incredible we'll be a long time before we come up with a drug or some other intervention as good as exercise nutrition is also important we know that at least in the laboratory if you reduce the number of calories lifespan is extended and also disease pathology is suppressed so so those choices of exercise and diet are really important now today this is something we can do today Lee says she doesn't have time to exercise but she's happy to put her trust in her proposed experiment she is a very expensive human guinea pig who I can definitely say I wear my jewelry on the inside I'm an expensive test subject this is what you're gonna do until you die well I actually intend on solving this problem but right now let's just say this is my life mission and and if I died doing this I would be a happy person [Music] [Music] you

Channel: BBC News

Views: 2,819,507

Rating: 4.5908823 out of 5

Keywords: documentary, bbc documentaries, bbc, bbc news, news, forever young documentary, documentaries, Gabriela Torres, Elizabeth Parrish, Silicon Valley, Google, Cynthia Kenyon, Forever young, ageing, disease, dying, living, life, youth, science, scientific, science news, experiment, liz parrish, bioviva, gene therapy

Id: p_4UPdFqgIQ

Length: 34min 40sec (2080 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 11 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/EnclG4me]

Aging is, sure.

But the effects of gravity and oxygen are pretty brutal over time.

[u/acrediblesauce]

Fuck that I already want to die and I’m only a third in

[u/StitchedUpCivic]

Saving this for a later watch. I'm so interested in life-extending technology. I have really heard anything new about it since watching The Science Channel a few years ago. Fingers crossed they get it figured out, and maybe it won't cost a super-fortune for the average Joe.

[u/ItsOkayToBeAmerica]

For anyone who cares, this is the basis for almost every crazy conspiracy theory. The wealthy want to live forever but overcrowding will occur so you need to depopulate the earth and enslave the survivors. But first you need to disarm the citizenry and throw their governments into disarray.

[u/MaroonCrow]

Every time I hear about this I can't help but feel frustration that I will probably die of old age just before this becomes reality.

I also feel sadness that it is almost certain that my parents will not be able to benefit from this.

Implications of this becoming reality would be huge. But I'm not sure how much I should regard it the same way we can regard (albeit with hindsight) predictions made in previous decades of flying cars and cities on the moon by the year 2000.

[u/[deleted]]

If it will help me live another 1000 years, maybe by then they will finally release Half-Life 3.

[u/omegakill]

Initially I think I'd like to live forever but I'm sure after a couple of thousand years I'd consider dying as I would have experienced everything and would more than likely be bored by then. I fantasise about being able to live until I choose to die and I really hope it's achieved during my life time.

[u/Kh444n]

Aubrey de Grey

[u/DredNeck45]

I can’t wait until the rich and privileged to get to live longer. I’ll be happy for them.