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Japan’s anti-aging vaccine looks promising in mice
- Jansen312 5y agoBasically, they created anti-aging vac for mice. Human-wise remain to be seen. We are creating a super mice species. Better pray they don't screw up and release this to the wild. I already have hard time containing cockroaches and ants in my home. I don't want to add mice (or woest rats) to that list.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- dado3212 5y agoCan anyone with a scientific background chime in on why this is nonsense that will never come to viability?
- hobofan 5y agoIt's very hard to critique an article that has the quality of GPT-3 generated blogspam and doesn't contain a link to better sources.
- bostonpete 5y agoI usually look to r/science for this sort of skepticism. This particular thread doesn't seem especially negative... https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/ren6cc/japanese_scientists_create_vaccine_for_aging_to/ https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/ren6cc/japanese_sc...
- varelse 5y ago
- bee_rider 5y agoFor lots of people, making it to 120ish would let them compare the two turn of the century celebrations, which would be neat. Weird that we're 20% of the way there already. 120 at mid century would seem to give anyone under, like, 40 now quite a bit of runway. Probably a good time to start living a little healthier...
- varelse 5y agoNah. The thought of being ruled over by a cabal of ageless billionaires offering to resettle you on some poorly managed terraforming project that will take centuries to complete and utterly negate the value of your increased longevity makes me long for the dirt nap as a better alternative when the time comes. And I say that as a 1%er who will choose instead to redistribute my wealth in a final decade of hedonistic YOLOing to the same people who will end up the subjects of this dystopic narcissist oligarchy. You want to be a fungible pair of hands with a longer lifespan because it's cheaper to use disposable fungible you than an expensive heavier to lift out of a gravity well robot? You do you and I'll do me.
- jcims 5y agoSounds like you have some resources. Maybe go offline for a few months and get centered. If you’re in the US there are folks in Kentucky that could use those fungible hands of yours to help unwreck their shit from some major tornadoes. Running a chainsaw and shovel all day can be calibrating.
- varelse 5y agoFor now I make charitable donations, a lot of them. It's amazing how much we could do to elevate people up Maslow's hierarchy if we made that a priority. And Kentucky might even be a great idea if we didn't have such divergent politics over the pandemic. But you're absolutely right about chainsaws and shovels though. Wielding power tools and long walks with my dog are the best form of therapy I've ever encountered.
- carbonguy 5y agoReading the abstract for the paper (thanks to skybrian for providing the link) it seems that the phrase "anti-aging vaccine" is a gross exaggeration in this context rather than the science itself being flawed. Broadly, the abstract seems to be describing a particular cell-surface marker found to be associated with senescence ("seno-antigen") which can be targeted by a therapy ("genetic ablation") which accelerates removal of cells with that marker. Doing so improves the lifespan of mice so treated. Thus, as the abstract concludes, "...vaccination targeting seno-antigens could be a potential strategy for new senolytic therapies."
- almmoip 5y agoKilling senescent cells is one thing. Making sure they actually get replaced with new cells instead of scar tissue is another. Until that’s resolved, killing the wrong kinds of senescent cells will kill you much faster than leaving them alone, so even highly targeted killing of senescent cells can’t “rejuvenate” all your organs. https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131(20)30241-2?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS1550413120302412%3Fshowall%3Dtrue https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131(20)...
- coding123 5y agoShouldn't science be the standard? Why implicitly be doubtful?
- AnimalMuppet 5y agoHistory? Given N "advances" that you hear touted based on mouse trials, how many turn into real human therapies? (Curing aging in mice isn't really the advance we're looking for.) How many turn into real human therapies that live up to the breathless announcements that were made based on the mouse trials? I don't have hard evidence, but my gut estimate is 10-20% actually deliver. So, yes, while waiting for the science, there is some empirical grounds to have a default stance of doubt (or, if you prefer, skepticism).
- siver_john 5y ago1) The original linked article is not a link to a scientific work. Therefore it's credence should be taken with a grain of salt as news articles need clicks more than they need boring sounding article titles. 2) In science often abstracts or intros open with grand ideas before settling into a much smaller scope. 3) The rise of predatory journals, not to mention people citing pre-print arXivs means even if something looks likes a reasonable article, it's good to get the opinions of other experts. 4) Just because something works doesn't imply how practical it is for actual deployment. (I've been to plenty of chemical talks about fantastic polymers, I've only ever seen one turn into anything of value.)
- Symmetry 5y agoSenescent cells are only one factor in aging. You've also other mitochondrial DNA damage, accumulating nuclear DNA damage leading to cancer, gunk building up inside lysosomes, gunk building up elsewhere, etc. If I were to try to rank them senescent cells would probably be second or third on the list. Potentially a really big deal but not at all synonymous with aging in general. That is, if this actually pans out.
- skybrian 5y agoPaper is here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43587-021-00151-2 https://www.nature.com/articles/s43587-021-00151-2
- Thoreandan 5y agoCame to comments to share this, thanks. Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/882/ https://xkcd.com/882/
- spywaregorilla 5y agoPosting that comic without any particular context seems distracting. Do you see any evidence that the authors paid no attention to FPR corrections?
- jacquesm 5y agoPosting xkcd is the smart persons equivalent of reaction GIFs.
- mikhailt 5y agoIt seems odd this is perceived as anti-aging rather than removing "zombie" cells from our body as a preventative measure that could be turned against us. This wouldn't stop the cell from "aging" and we still have aging-related issues like with memory degradation and other stuff that is not related to the zombie cells.
- more_corn 5y agoRebranding it an anti-zombie vaccine would be metal.
- mkaic 5y ago"Yeah, stopped by for my Anti-Zombie booster shot at CVS on the way home today, feeling a little ill but looking forward to surviving the apocalypse. How was your day?"
- codeddesign 5y ago“Sponsored by Monster Energy Drinks”
- kingcharles 5y agoWhat kind of metal? Zinc? Nickel? Hassium?
- hinkley 5y agoI'm worried we're going to find an epigenetic time bomb in destroying all senescent cells. These cells aren't just old, they remember our old life. Some adaptations to past trauma save us from further trauma. Others are more maladaptive. If this vaccine causes the immune system to 'forget' by killing off B cells, then you may have to get a booster shot for every vaccine you've ever had. That may not sound like a big deal but that creates a class division for longevity treatments. I could afford to take a month off, quarantine myself and get twenty booster shots. Some of my neighbors can't, so either they risk getting sick or they don't take the treatment at all. Science fiction has always asserted there would be class divisions in these sorts of treatments, so perhaps that's not a surprise.
- swader999 5y agoFisetin does the same thing.
- yodon 5y agoAnti-aging is an economics problem more than a medical one. If you radically extend lifetimes, those who have been alive the longest have had the most time accumulate capital. There's very little chance for someone 200-300 years younger to have any way to match the economic means of their seniors, resulting in a highly destabilizing permanent economic hierarchy. If you think gen z are pissed at boomers, slip another 200 years of differential in and things start to look really bad.
- collias 5y agoI wouldn't say it's more of an economics problem...it's still a medical impossibility as far as we know. Everyone develops cancer given a long enough timeline. If we can somehow defeat that, or give everyone robot bodies after their biological one fails, we still have a wide array of brain diseases to defeat.
- spywaregorilla 5y agofwiw, robot body with human brain would almost certainly be severely immunocompromised. Organs are important.
- JohnWhigham 5y agoYup, while societies do have momentous occasions of revolution, they are rather rare. It's more so people of a generation dying off allowing newer blood to come in. I have no doubt that societies would eventually stagnate if such anti-aging mechanisms become widely available enough. And they will only be available to the rich and in-power at first, mind you.
- cblconfederate 5y agoeconomy is downstream from technology, economy adapts But more importanly, this isn't necessarily about extending lifetimes but making them worth it (and possibly productive until the last minute)
- jquip 5y agoI do believe that economics itself will take into account increased lifespans, UBI and other measures of normality... Here's a take, if people get to live so much longer, then money is not the variable to be optimised for humanity in general... Also, rates of labour, skill, energy expenditure and so many variables will undergo a change in definitions. I would like to see everyone make it... I believe so would everyone else, if increased lifespans are on the line.
- jacquesm 5y agoIn mice.
- dang 5y agoOk, we've inmiced the title above. Thanks!
- Eyght 5y agoThe contention that mice are the most intelligent beings on the planet seems more plausible every year.
- cblconfederate 5y agoThey certainly coopted humans to solve all their problems
- cblconfederate 5y agoIf it was in humans you wouldn't read about it anywhere
- pengaru 5y agoSo is this a similar anti-aging mechanism to autophagy triggered by fasting?
- datavirtue 5y agoThat's what it sounds like to me as well.
- pezzana 5y agoThe usual caveat applies: > Does it work? It does and it works quite well. Tests have shown that the preparation developed by the scientists forced the production of antibodies in the bodies of mice, which through the white blood cells attacked the aging cells in their bodies. The average lifespan of laboratory rodents that took the preparation extended by 15 percent relative to the control group, and individuals suffering from arterial stiffness saw a significant reduction in the damaged areas of these blood vessels. Results in mice will probably not track to humans, assuming this treatment even makes it to that stage. The development time for most vaccines is on the order of 10 years or more, so even if it does make it (again, unlikely), it would be at least 10 years before this becomes available to humans. And there's a lot that can go wrong along the way. The biggest problem is that mice are not humans, and as far as animal models go, they're not even a good one. Regarding that 15%, without some error bars (which can be quite large) it will be hard to say how "promising" this actually is.
- pcthrowaway 5y agoNow that we have precedent to fast-track vaccines based on impact of the thing they treat, maybe we can apply this to aging which kills more people per year than pre-vaccine COVID did.
- codeddesign 5y agoHaha.. Why test when we can fast-track and test on live people! Great analogy and made me laugh ;)
- optimalsolver 5y agoI'm annoyed to have been born early enough for biological life extension to not be available, but late enough to actually consider it a possibility.
- orang2tang 5y agoWhat are you afraid of?
- RivieraKid 5y agoHe said "annoyed" not "afraid".
- w0m 5y ago'death' answering the question you mean; if not the one you asked.
- mindcandy 5y agoWhen the day comes that it becomes really real and everyone from now on gets to live for a few hundred years. But, not you. You are already too old for it to work. Maybe if you led a much more healthy lifestyle. But, no. You get to grow progressively more decrepit while watching people younger than you not go through the same problems. Eventually you will die of it while they are still partying hard in their 80s and will continue to do so for two hundred more years. Good for them. Sucks to be you.
- spywaregorilla 5y ago> Eventually you will die of it while they are still partying hard in their 80s and will continue to do so for two hundred more years. Good for them. Sucks to be you. yeah, but you don't have to spend centuries toiling away as a slave for the Immortal Dictator
- after_care 5y agoI do wonder how an economic system would function if people worked for 50 years and then had 200+ years of retirement. Perhaps the production/consumption ratio will work out as automation/ai/robots increases labor productivity. Of course it’s wildly optimistic to hope for this outcome, and some sort of wage slave or indentured servitude arrangement is more likely for the masses.
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- yob28 5y ago
- mamcx 5y agoGreat. One step closer to raise our mice overlords.
- 0xDEEPFAC 5y agoSeems odd to call this a "vaccine" isn't this more like "gene therapy"?
- glouwbug 5y agoDo the Japanese need it? They have excellent genetics already