Investigating Synergies And Conflicts Between Existing Rejuvenation Interventions For Age Control

Thursday - October 5 2023, 09:25 UTC - 1 year ago

Aubrey de Grey is leading a Rejuvenation Mouse Program to identify and study potential synergies and conflicts between existing treatments for age control. Early results show that a combination of all four treatments (rapamycin, stem cells, telomerase gene therapy and navitoclax) provide the best survival rate. However, the group is still collecting and analysing data to understand the correlation between the treatment and glucose tolerance with biological age.

There is clear evidence for the rejuvenation of specific biological functions is now available in model organisms for a growing range of treatments. Achieving full medical control of aging, however, will certainly require the use of not just one, but an arsenal of longevity therapies. Aubrey de Grey explained how the Robust Mouse Rejuvenation program under way at LEV Foundation has been designed to identify synergies – and conflicts – between existing interventions with a credible path to clinical translation, thus laying the groundwork for future multifactorial therapy in humans.

The early results seem to indicate all four treatments (rapamycin, stem cells, telomerase gene therapy and navitoclax) in combination provide the best survival rate. However there is still a lot of noise in the study and we need to wait some months to get better confirmation. The other thing is to see if the survival rate is over one year beyond the expected one year remaining life without treatments.

Aubrey is getting ready for a second round of robust mouse rejuvenation studies. This will study a different batch of promising antiaging therapies.RMR Update 8 released the fist the survival curves. With each month that goes by it’ll become more and more tempting to extract conclusions from the data, but for now I want to make very clear that nothing whatsoever can yet be concluded. Even the conspicuously high mortality of “no-mTERT” males may be just noise.

The other thing Aubrey wanted to include today is a taster for the data they are collecting when a group’s survival curve reaches a particular mortality rate, which for the first such point is 20% dead. As you see from the curves, among males only the “no-mTERT” group has got there, while for females they are there there with four groups. The analysis takes time, plus they are still putting the finishing touches to their database where everything gets stored.

Also, honestly, for this data he says that it means nothing yet, because it even LOOKS boring. First off, here’s the glucose tolerance data for the three groups that reached 20% mortality a few weeks ago, compared with baseline. It’s very much what one would expect – all groups show a delay of maybe half an hour before glucose starts to decline from its peak, as compared to the baseline response when the mice were four months younger, but there is no obvious difference between the groups. The point when this will get interesting is when a few more groups hit 80% mortality at a few months older, because then we will see whether the glucose tolerance correlated better with chronological age or with biological age as estimated by mortality.

Next time Aubrey releases data will be in another month. He is hoping to provide a much wider range of the “cull point” data.