/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/prisa/34VDHFBST5DFLDSXFEQEZRVRBI.jpg)
In 1974, Sydney Brenner published a paper dedicated to the genetics of a worm,
Caenorhabditis elegans
, which founded a new field of study.
That tiny animal, just one millimeter long, became a surprisingly reliable model for understanding the genetic regulation of a multitude of processes, including aging.
Despite the millions of years of evolution that separate us, it has been proven time and again that many of the mechanisms observed in the worm are conserved in flies and also in mice, the favorite animal of biomedical research.
American researcher Coleen Murphy became interested in these worms when she learned of the work of Cynthia Kenyon, who discovered how a single genetic mutation, in the daf-2 gene, doubled the lifespan of C.
elegans
.
First as a postdoctoral student at Kenyon and later as director of the LSI Genomics Institute in Princeton (USA), she has used worms to understand how aging affects learning, memory and reproduction.
Recently, he has published
How we age: The science of longevity
, a book in which he reviews in detail the latest advances in the science of longevity and proposes how they can serve to prolong life. healthy, also in humans.
More information
Pura Muñoz, biologist: “It is possible to reverse aging, go back in time”
Ask.
What is the objective of aging research?
Answer.
There are people in the field of longevity concerned about extending life, but that is not the reality of most people, who consider slowing down the onset of diseases that come with age, neurodegenerative disorders, cardiovascular diseases or some types of cancer.
It's about keeping people healthy for as long as possible.
Q.
Is it possible to treat aging as a disease?
A.
The FDA [the body that regulates drug approval in the US] does not consider aging a disease, for this reason, progress in the development of anti-aging drugs has been slow.
There is a trial by Nir Barzilai and others who are trying to do that type of trial with metformin [a drug used for diabetes].
Metformin is one of those things that could slow down aging and you should be able to do a clinical trial that shows if metformin slows down at least the biomarkers of aging.
Another way to approach the problem of testing an anti-aging drug is to use diseases related to that process as an indicator of aging.
That's smart because you can prove that a drug is safe or has an effect on a disease and it's faster than testing the effects on longevity.
There are several companies that are using this approach, with diseases such as osteoarthritis or macular degeneration.
Q.
Millionaires in the technology industry are financing laboratories that seek to delay aging and even take all kinds of supplements to prolong their lives.
What do you think?
A.
I'm not a doctor, so I can't give medical advice, but a doctor in this field told me that everyone who works in longevity is taking metformin.
They prescribe it to themselves.
That can be done because metformin is quite safe, it is very proven, it is an old drug.
In general, I am excited about companies that are seriously doing clinical trials, because this thing about a person taking a drug and deciding if it works or not is not how science should be done and it is not going to give us interesting information.
It is also important for companies that do clinical trials to tell us whether drugs work or not.
Q.
Is it possible to achieve treatments that have an effect if they are started when one is already very old or is aging something that must be combated from a very early age?
A.
That's an important question that, for a long time, I think the longevity field ignored.
They did experiments on young mice and saw if it prolonged their life, but no one wants to take a drug from the time they are 20 years old for the rest of their life.
The question is whether we can start taking a drug when we are 60 or 70 and still have positive effects.
I think it will be achieved in the end, but you have to try it.
When I was in Cynthia Kenyon's lab, she and others discovered that you can modify mitochondrial genes and prolong the life of worms, but you could only do it when they were larvae, basically like treating teenagers.
If you did it too late, there was no positive effect.
On the other hand, when they did the same type of experiment, reducing the activity of the insulin signaling pathway, it was seen that you could achieve effects on longevity until much later.
That's an example of a pathway where, if you had an analogous situation in humans, you could take a drug and change the metabolism late in life and it would have positive effects on aging.
Q.
Do you think there is a limit to life extension?
A.
We have managed to increase life expectancy by changing things, such as infant mortality or sanitation, that have nothing to do with aging.
We are reaching a point where it could be increased by other means.
I think there is a limit to life expectancy without assistance, and there will be another for people who start taking the drugs we are taking now.
I think we are not going to exceed 200 years, that is not realistic.
But for me the question is not so much how long you are going to make people live, but how many people are going to be able to live many years with health, also in the final part of life.
We are going to see more very healthy 85-year-olds who will not be in the hospital.
That is the real goal for most of us.
Q.
Can we learn something from people who are over 100 years old?
Many do not eat particularly healthy diets and even smoke.
A.
They are not a good example, because they have won the genetic lottery.
But we can learn about the genes related to their longevity and they are the same genes that we see when we study
C. elegans
.
The insulin signaling pathway, the FOXO gene, are modulated in a particular way in centenarians that we also see in worms.
The idea would be to modulate these genes in the same way that we see in centenarians.
Taking the diet of one of them as an example is not very helpful.
Q.
Can you give some basic advice to live longer from the knowledge you show in the book?
A.
There are things that we know that slow down aging or the appearance of problems that come with age, but they are things that people know, a bit boring.
People want me to give them a really easy magic trick, like eating twelve blueberries a day, but I don't have it.
The data tells us that things like not eating too much or the Mediterranean diet are positive.
I think exercise may be the most overlooked thing because people focus on diet.
Exercise has many beneficial effects that we are now beginning to understand and I think it is going to be what helps people the most.
I also don't know an exercise that can be done to live forever, it's not the work I do.
When we study aging in the laboratory, we try to understand what happens in cells when you do certain things to better understand the process;
Exercise does this and calorie restriction does that.
That's what we're trying to understand.
Q.
In the book you give an interesting fact about the most extreme fasting diets, that for every 21 men who do them there are only four women.
What are these differences due to?
A.
It's something I've been thinking about lately, and about GLP1 agonists, like Wegovy, Ozempic or Mounjaro.
We cannot ignore brain chemistry.
Oprah Winfrey has said that she always thought she was to blame for being overweight, and it is interesting that people who have taken these drugs talk about how they change the way they think about food, that they can stop thinking about it all the time.
I think that for many women it is more difficult to diet and change their eating habits, and I think it may be hormonal, driven by evolutionary needs, because our metabolism was not made to starve us.
In general, it is easier for some to eat less and I think we are beginning to understand that this is not a moral decision.
That is why new drugs for obesity are so interesting, because they do not just change the metabolism, they change the impulses for food.
Q. Could
these drugs, which also seem to prevent cardiovascular problems, be the first anti-aging drugs?
A.
I think that people who may have problems with obesity or their metabolism will be able to live longer thanks to these drugs, but are statins [taken to control cholesterol levels] a drug for longevity because Do they prevent premature deaths?
It seems that to call it a longevity drug it has to be something magical, and when we explain the mechanisms it is something else.
You can follow
EL PAÍS Salud y Bienestar
on
,
X
and
.