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Ancient viruses embedded in human DNA revive and promote aging

2023-01-06T16:30:03.478Z


The scientist Juan Carlos Izpisua believes that eliminating harmful viral particles from the blood could improve the course of many diseases and delay old age


Reading is passing the eye through a writing identifying the words.

Deciphering implies going further.

For example, the beginning of

Don Quixote

, "En un lugar de La Mancha...", hides more information than it seems.

A philologist will know that the place name La Mancha probably comes from the Arabic

mányà

, “high plain”.

The phrase "in a place in La Mancha" already places the reader in an immense plain that at some point was conquered by the Arabs.

The same is true of the human genome.

Each cell, whether it is a muscle cell in the heart or a neuron in the brain, has within it a text of more than 3,000 million chemical letters, with the necessary instructions for its operation.

8% of this manual has been written millions of years ago by some unexpected authors: viruses that infected humans or their ancestors, embedding viral genetic material in their DNA.

A new study now suggests that the resurrection of these relics of immemorial viruses plays "a fundamental role in aging", according to the scientist Juan Carlos Izpisua, co-author of the research.

Izpisua was born precisely in a place in Castilla-La Mancha, in Hellín (Albacete), 62 years ago, but today he lives in the US city of San Diego.

There he directs one of the three institutes of Laboratorios Altos, a multinational that was born last year with an astonishing budget of 2,700 million euros, with four Nobel winners on the payroll and with the declared objective of trying to make human beings live many more years. with health.

Izpisua is forceful.

"It is clear that many of these sequences [of viruses integrated into human DNA] begin to get out of control throughout our lives and are associated with most diseases: cancer, neurodegenerative, cartilage, muscle," warns the scientific.

These relics of past viruses are called endogenous retroviruses.

The authors of the new work have focused on the last virus to be incorporated into human DNA, less than a million years ago: HERV-K (HML2).

Researchers have observed—in monkey organs and in human tissues—that this authentic genetic fossil can be reactivated and cause the formation of retrovirus-like particles within the cells responsible for aging and cancer.

These particles, the authors warn, are a transmissible message that reaches other younger cells and causes them to age, according to their experiments with cells in the laboratory.

The new work is published this Friday in the specialized magazine

Cell

.

Izpisua believes that suppressing these harmful particles "could help both improve the course of many diseases and promote healthier aging."

The scientist proposes a procedure already used in hospitals: plasmapheresis, in which an external machine filters the patient's blood to eradicate harmful substances.

“The blood of the elderly or sick person would pass through a blocking filter with antibodies, which would eliminate the particles of the organism.

Obviously that would produce an improvement, I am convinced.

Applications like this are relatively easy and are already in the clinic, which is why we are quite excited,” Izpisua says by videoconference from San Diego.

The main known promoter of High Laboratories is Yuri Milner, a Russian-Israeli physicist who became a billionaire by initially participating in Facebook and Twitter.

He ranks 309 in the list of the richest people in the world compiled by

Forbes

magazine , with about 7,000 million euros.

Another of the financiers is the American biologist Robert Nelsen, owner of a fortune thanks to his investments in successful biotechnological companies.

Izpisua denies that the tycoon Jeff Bezos is also behind Altos, as published by the

MIT Technology Review

magazine .

The new multinational has recruited some of the most prestigious scientists in the world, including two of the last Nobel Prize winners in Chemistry: the Americans Jennifer Doudna, who developed the CRISPR technique to edit human DNA, and Frances Arnold, who invented a new way to create molecules

Laboratorios Altos has also hired half a dozen Spaniards.

The latest to join was the biologist Pura Muñoz Cánoves, a professor at Pompeu Fabra University who last year received the National Research Award in Spain.

In the new study, Izpisua and her colleague Concepción Rodríguez have collaborated with researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, led by aging expert Liu Guanghui.

Izpisua explains the objective of his company.

“In medicine, up to now, what we have done has been to identify the cause of a problem and try to solve it.

For example, fixing the mutation in a gene so that a disease does not occur ”, he explains.

“What Altos is trying to do is improve the resilience of our cells.

It is a very different way of understanding medicine”, says the researcher.

Izpisua defends that diseases are a process of cellular deterioration and that this mechanism is reversible.

In his opinion, within two decades there will be cell rejuvenation tools.

The American geneticist Barbara McClintock, in the year 1950, was the first person to realize that there were jumping genes, to the general disbelief of her colleagues.

McClintock, born in 1902, faced merciless criticism, laced with machismo, but she ended up winning the 1983 Nobel Prize in Medicine for the discovery of these mobile genetic elements, also called transposons.

Endogenous retroviruses are just one example.

In August, Izpisua's team observed in genetically modified mice that other transposons are involved in accelerated aging processes, such as Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome.

“We saw that these DNA sequences were out of control in almost all cells.

We lowered their activation and it seemed that we had given the mice a magic potion,

because they lived longer, up to 30% longer, and all their cells functioned better”, says Izpisua.

"It is one of the interventions that has most extended the life of a mammal."

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Source: elparis

All news articles on 2023-01-06

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