One of the many possible future banners for applied longevity science is to call these treatments capable of extending healthy life span simply "regenerative medicine." In past years, regenerative medicine has referred to the output of the stem cell research community: ways to manipulate and transplant cells in order to create regrowth and healing to a degree that would not normally occur. But why not broaden the usage to include repair of damage within cells, and removal of metabolic waste in tissue structures between cells? It isn't such a leap. The stem cell research community is presently largely focused on building treatments for the old, and thus these researchers will have to solve many of the issues affecting old cells one way or another in order to render their therapies effective.
Looked at this way, "regeneration" and "rejuvenation" are really not so different in meaning. Aging is a matter of accumulated damage that is beyond the capacity of the body to heal, and regenerating old tissue by removing some that damage might as well be called rejuvenation. Such a treatment would remove some of the differences between old tissue and young tissue, and would aim to restore function to a point closer to that of a youthful, healthy individual. In isn't hard to think of aging as an illness, a progressive medical condition, when looking at things in these terms, and that seems to me to be a good viewpoint on the situation if it inspires more people to help do something about it.
Here is an enthusiastic two part piece that mentions regenerative medicine, advanced research such as the SENS programs, as well as other work on immunotherapies and clearance of senescent cells. All of this is in the context of looking ahead to the near future of new therapies and improvements in maintenance and restoration of human health:
Can Regenerative Biotechnology Extend Our Productive Lives?
"It's obvious to me that university laboratories can't do it alone," says University of Southern California professor of gerontology and biological sciences Caleb Finch. "Big Pharma can't do it alone. A marketplace of ideas has to be developed. Those of us who come to these meetings have an increasingly broader set of professional alliances. You get a high table of very smart people around you who represent different disciplines and technologies.""Disease-modifying cell therapy is very quickly becoming a reality," declares Stephen Minger, chief cellular scientist at GE Healthcare in the United Kingdom. "We're all piling on this now. Until recently, pharma and biotech had no interest in the field - now everybody and his brother is setting up a cellular therapy program. There are a lot of Phase I and Phase II trials under way, with patients getting benefits. We're progressing very rapidly. A lot of money is being pumped in."
"Chronic diseases of aging account for the vast majority of health care expenditures," points out biochemist Judith Campisi, of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Buck Institute for Research on Aging in Novato, Calif. "Traditionally, medicine has dealt with them by specializing. But people who study cancer, or neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's, or painful osteoarthritis, or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease or congestive heart failure ... they don't talk to each other. The evidence in medicine is growing, however, that old age is malleable. It may not be inevitable. There are underlying basic processes, and if we could intervene [at that level], no longer treat [separate diseases] but treat aging processes like cellular senescence, it would totally transform medicine." Campisi has been experimenting with a recombinant drug that successfully flushes senescent cells from elderly transgenic mice - a far cry from proving efficacy in humans. And even the lifetime of these mutant lab mice is extended by only another 20 to 25 percent, she notes.
The Big Breakthrough in Rejuvenative Medicine
Immunotherapy is a revolutionary "personalized" medical technique by which blood is harvested from a patient; and the genetic machinery of its T cells - the body's potent main defense against most pathogens but normally unreactive to cancer cells - is altered by introducing an inactivated, genetically modified HIV virus. The souped-up blood is reinfused. The patient's own T cells now can detect signature proteins on the cancer cells and swarm to destroy them.Several immunotherapeutic approaches such as chimeric antigen receptor therapies are under active investigation for a variety of cancers. Results in initial trials have been highly encouraging - in some instances, astonishing. Moreover, notes Stephen Minger, major pharmaceutical companies and niche startups are "piling on this now." "Individualized cell therapy is at the inflection point," he maintains. "It's going to change fundamentally the way we treat cancer ... [but it also holds promise for] orthopedic indications, repair of bone and cartilage ... organogenesis ... autoimmune diseases like multiple sclerosis, lupus, inflammatory bowel disease and Crohn's disease, where there's been very little therapy available and patients are sick all the time and in a lot of pain ... .
"We're starting to see clinical benefits from targeted immune therapies that spare normal tissue and are completely curative," he summarizes. "It's not just a niche. We're looking at treating very large patient populations to whom we've had very little to offer before. Now we have to address how to deal with millions of them a year. There's a huge amount of excitement around this. We're all ecstatic. But the hard stuff is ahead of us. It's going to be totally, totally disruptive."
View the full article at FightAging
