Two significant advances in anti-aging therapies in one fell swoop. The first was made by a team of researchers at the University of New South Wales, Australia, coordinated by David Sinclair, who, as told on the pages of Science, has identified the molecular processes that allow cells to repair damage caused to DNA , precisely, from aging and radiation. The second, however, is the work of a group of scientists from the Erasmus University Medical Center in the Netherlands, which have developed - and successfully tested on laboratory mice - a treatment that can lead to suicide older cells. Details of the discovery were published in the journal Cell.

A mechanical for dna
Let's start from the study published in Science: the employment authors conducted a series of experiments on mice by identifying a crucial step in the molecular process that allows cells to repair DNA damaged by aging and radiation. The cells of the body, in fact, have the innate ability to repair the DNA - they do, for example, every time we expose ourselves to the sun - but this characteristic declines with age: the team found that Sinclair a metabolite, Nad +, plays a vital role in the whole process.

Mice treated with a precursor of Nad +, in fact, showed a higher capacity than the other in repairing damage to DNA caused by radiation exposure or aging. "The cells of old mice," said Sinclair, "were, after one week of treatment, virtually indistinguishable from those of young mice. We believe we are very close to an effective and safe anti-aging drug. If the next experiments should be fine, the drug could reach the market in five years already ". Perino NASA has expressed an interest in research, especially in view of future human missions to Mars, as necessary will protect astronauts from harmful radiation of space.

Cells elderly farewell
The authors of the study published in Cell, however, followed a different approach, studying the mechanisms by which the body gets rid of senescent cells, those that have stopped reproducing. These cells accumulate with age, play an important role in the healing of wounds and the arrest of tumors and release chemicals that cause tissue inflammation. The researchers, led by Peter de Keizer, have developed a drug - a peptide - that selectively induces these cells to suicide, by acting on the budget of the substances present in them.

The treatment has been tested on different groups of laboratory mice: the first consists of older animals (with an age equivalent to human ninety), the second compound from animals genetically modified so as to grow very quickly, and the third from animals prematurely aged for chemotherapy effect. And the results seem to be encouraging: in different animals has in fact observed a recovery of liver functions (which tend to decline with aging) and the doubling of the distance traveled on the running wheel. Keizer, however, admitted that he also observed less significant effects, suggesting that the treatment has yet to be perfected, and had not observed side effects, "although it must be said that mice can not speak."

From Wired