Fighting Ageing With A Pill
September 22, 2007
Researchers have found more ways to activate the body’s own anti-ageing defenses, perhaps with a pill that could fight multiple diseases at once.
Their study published in the journal Cell helps explain why animals fed very low calorie diets live longer. It also offers new ways to try and replicate the effects of these diets using a pill instead of hunger.
David Sinclair, a pathologist at Harvard Medical School, helped to lead the research said, “What we are talking about is potentially having one pill that prevents and even cures many disease at once.” He helped find a company that is working on drugs based on his research, Sirtris Pharmaceuticals. The key is a family of enzymes called sirtris. They are controlled by genes called SIRT1 and SIRT2 and so on.
Sinclair said in a videotaped statement, “These two genes, SIRT3 and SIRT4 make proteins that go into mitochondria. These are little energy packs inside our cells that are very important for staying healthy and youthful and as we age, we lose them and they get less efficient. They are also very important for keeping the cells healthy and alive when they undergo stress and DNA damage, as we undergo everyday during the ageing process.”
Sinclair and colleagues have found in other studies that even if the rest of a cell is destroyed, the nucleus and other parts, it can still function if the mitochondria are alive. His team found that fasting raises levels of another protein called NAD. This in turn activates SIRT3 and SIRT4 in the mitochondria of the cell and these help keep the mitochondria youthful.
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