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A new type of drug is being tested and, if successful, it could become the first ever approved to slow or stop aging. The drug, known as an anti-necrotic, is being tested as a way to stop necrosis, or the premature death of cells and living tissue.
As the Cleveland Clinic explains, “When the cells in your tissues die, it can affect many different areas of your body, including your bones, skin and organs. Necrosis can occur because of illness, infection, injury, disease or lack of blood flow to your tissues.”
They also point out that “while dead body tissue can be removed, it can’t be brought back to good health.” That’s where this new drug comes into play.
According to recent research published in the journal Oncogene, necrosis “is a pivotal mechanism” in health problems such as cancer, as well as kidney disease, cardiovascular disease (including heart attacks and strokes), and neurodegeneration, including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. It is also untreatable. Or it was.
This new drug, the researchers state, “may also hold the key to preserving astronaut resilience and health on long-duration space missions, offering insights that could reshape human longevity both on and off the planet.”
The idea behind the anti-necrotic came from the study’s lead author Carina Kern, Ph.D., a former University College London geneticist and current CEO of the biotech company LinkGevity, according to a new report by Popular Mechanics.
Kern says she was inspired to find a way to treat necrosis when she was just a child and witnessed the death of her grandmother from an age-related illness.
“At the time, I could not comprehend how I was so easily cured of nearly any injury and I would be back to normal. But with her, the doctors just said ‘you can’t intervene — it’s just aging,’” Kern said.
Decades later, while working at the Institute of Healthy Aging at University College London, Kern developed what she calls the “Blueprint Theory” of aging. The theory investigates the ultimate origins of aging, and most importantly, the key areas where intervention can deliver the most health benefits. The inspiration for the theory’s structure comes from a technique in the world of finance known as “factor modeling,” a statistical method that can help understand driving factors of complex systems—whether money markets or, in this case, human biology.
“The crux of necrosis is loss of calcium-ion gradients,” Kern said. “Levels of calcium inside the cell are typically 10,000 to 100,000 times lower than outside. Calcium is a key signaling molecule, meaning it controls lots of different processes within your cell. And so upon stress, you lose this regulation and then you’re initiating multiple pathways in a heightened and really destructive manner within the cell.”
Before her research, medical professionals thought (and many do still think) there is no way to intervene and stop or slow necrosis. Kern’s team, however, has “managed to identify for the first time … that you can block necrosis, but you have to block more than one molecular target … when we did that, we’ve seen up to 90 percent of suppression of necrosis.”
Their first target for the use of this anti-necrotic is kidney disease, which affects nearly half of all people over the age of 75. Clinical trials of her anti-necrotic will begin later this year and will last for two to three years. Once that is complete, the world may find itself with a new drug that could actually treat something never-before thought possible: aging.