Scientists Discover The Secret Of Aging
From the Financial Times:
One of the biggest puzzles in biology – how and why living cells age – has been solved by an international team based at Newcastle University, in north-east England.
The answer is complex, and will not produce an elixir of eternal life in the foreseeable future.
But the scientists expect better drugs for age-related illnesses, such as diabetes and heart disease, to emerge from their discovery of the biochemical pathway involved in ageing.
The Newcastle team, working with the University of Ulm in Germany, used a comprehensive “systems biology” approach, involving computer modelling and experiments with cell cultures and genetically modified mice, to investigate why cells become senescent. In this aged state, cells stop dividing and the tissues they make up show physical signs of deterioration, from wrinkling skin to…
Can We Engineer Immunity on Demand?
Caltech scientists have already engineered stem cells into B cells that produce HIV-fighting antibodies – and an NIH researcher engineered T cells that recognize tumors which has already had promising clinical trials again skin cancer. Now a microbiology professor now asks: could we just genetically engineer all the antibodies we need?
Describing “Immunity on demand, he writes “…there’s a good chance this system, or something like it, will actually be in place within decades!”
“Our best hope may be to cut out the middleman. Rather than merely hoping that the vaccine will indirectly lead to the antibody an individual needs, imagine if we could genetically engineer these antibodies and make them available as needed?”
Scientists Solve Mystery Of How Old Cells Become New
From Cordis News:
Researchers have discovered how old and damaged mother cells are able to produce healthy new daughter cells, a process which has been a mystery to scientists until now. The ground-breaking research was partly funded by the EU and is published in the journal Cell.
The team’s results revealed how yeast cells use a conveyor belt mechanism to offload damaged proteins into the mother cells before dividing into new cells, a process known as mitosis.
‘This ensures that the daughter cell is born without age-related damage,’ said lead researcher Professor Thomas Nyström from the department of cell and molecular biology at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. Professor Nyström’s research team has published many previous studies of cell ageing, but the new research is the key piece of the…
