First Real Anti-Ageing Treatment a Few Years Away ?

I've talked about how we'll be able to eventually live forever in other blog posts and videos and as I write my book I have also interviewed one of the foremost scientists that has spent most of his professional career working towards giving humanity just that:  Eternal Life.

During my interview with Dr Aubrey de Grey, it became clear that doing this will be a complex multi-step process.  However, according to his and other's research, there are really only 7 major steps to conquer, all of which have reasonably identifiable treatment potential.

Watch the complete video of Aubrey de Grey's 2005 talk at TED discussing this to get a better idea of the challenges behind the project.  

Here is the list of 7 problems that need to be tackled to completely eradicate the body's deterioration due to the ageing process:

1. Cell loss / atrophy
2. Death-resistant cells
3. Nuclear mutations and epimutations
4. mtDNA mutations
5. Protein crosslinks
6. Junk accumulated inside cells
7. Junk accumulated outside cells

Now, these problems are not simple issues to tackle but they are identified which is a great start.  Recently though scientists and clinicians have been able to find techniques allowing us to tackle 2 of those elements, namely the Nuclear mutations and epimutations and the mtDNA mutations.  Well, at least part of the way.

I spend a bit more time on the consequences of this in my Youtube video below:

In a nutshell, thanks to modern research on gene editing, how DNA behaves, how the body's natural DNA repair mechanisms work and how epigenetics works, we may have stumbled upon a very cheap treatment that would allow humans to live longer in the next few years.

The treatment involves giving NMN (nicotinamide mononucleaotide) to a person, possibly simply ingested periodically.  NMN transforms itself into NAD (nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide), which ultimately keeps our body's DNA self-repair mechanisms active. NAD is normally produced by the body naturally, but the production decreases with age and without it, our mitochondrial DNA and nuclear DNA just gets more and more damaged, causing all sorts of problems, including increased chances of cancer and other cellular diseases attributed to the ageing process.

The researchers that are prime workers on this treatment, from Harvard Medical School and the University of New South Wales, have tested this fully on mice with great results.   The teams are hopeful that human clinical trials of this NMN treatment will start within the next 6 months.

Make no mistake, this is not the only team working on DNA repair or manipulation treatments of all kinds.  The search for eternal life has started to draw recently significant funding from very famous deep pocketed investors recently.  So we'll hear more and more about real anti-ageing treatments over the next few months and years, most definitively.

As mentioned in other blogs, we've started in 2016 doing some initial DNA type treatments using gene editing already, with the most recent successful story being what seems to be a highly successful treatment for sickle-cell disease, a currently hard to treat disease that affects 100,000 people in the U.S. alone.

So let's continue to encourage these treatments, our understanding of DNA and cell functions as well as fundamental research, and we'll soon all have the option to live forever without any age-related handicaps, if we so choose!