How to live forever (or die trying)
Plus, the Omicron update. And the secrets of the microbiome.
Hello! How are you?
Another year is about to end. I hope you are well. I’ve been fortunate not to have had COVID-19 yet (or at least that I know of), but after two years of the pandemic, I certainly look and feel much older.
I’ll get to the topic in the newsletter title a little bit later, but first I wanted to provide a quick update on Omicron.
The Omicron update
I wrote a very long and detailed piece on Omicron about three weeks ago for Mint. All of the points in the piece are still relevant and accurate. You can read it (PDF) here.
Since then (as predicted) some early studies on all current vaccines tested have detected lower antibody levels in laboratory experiments for Omicron.
Many experts have recommended the use of a booster dose of the current vaccines to raise antibody levels. I also mentioned this in my piece above as a process to “top-up” antibody levels. The thought here is that higher neutralizing antibody levels will lead to lower chances of transmission and milder infections. We may need to wait for field experiments for confirmation and, as I noted in my piece, field-experiments take much more time.
T-cell immunity is still thought to hold up well to prevent severe COVID-19 if you’re vaccinated with two doses of any approved COVID-19 vaccine. Experts like Dr. Paul Offit think that this is why we should get everyone access to two doses first before rolling out boosters to all but the high-risk groups.
Omicron is more transmissible than Delta, as predicted.
We do not know yet definitively whether Omicron causes less severe disease.
At this time, this is essentially all you need to know about Omicron.
News-cycles comes fast and furious. Bench science takes time.
The Fountain of Youth in blood and poop?
If I saw a headline like this, my skeptical radar would immediately start beeping because it sounds like a very New Age-y kind of concept. But to be fair, evidence-based aging research has also advanced a lot. This isn’t as crazy as it would’ve sounded a few years ago.
Anyone above the age of 40 knows the tell-tale signs of aging. Suddenly the text on your smartphone looks smaller. Once you’ve been sitting in one place, it can hurt to just get up. Workouts take more recovery time. It takes more time to “boot up” in the morning. And then there are the gray hair and the wrinkles.
It turns out nature does not care for you after you’ve fulfilled your biological objective.
To use an analogy from technology, aging is nature’s take on planned obsolescence. In-built in the hardware of your body are features that cause precipitous decline at certain biological ages. (Your actual biological age can vary from your chronological age by quite a bit, and finding reliable markers of the former is big business these days).
Can science extend healthy life (healthspan) into more advanced years?
A rising number of researchers think not only can we identify inbuilt checkpoints that lead to obsolescence (i.e. aging), but we can also reconfigure the hardware to last longer. Like a battery going through multiple charge-cycles and getting degraded, our bodies will undergo physical degradation over time. But unlike batteries, our bodies can be replenished and refreshed because they are organic living entities with many different inputs and feedback loops.
The new, more optimistic take is that we can keep cells youthful, clear out zombie cells, and regenerate new cells and that doing so might help us live longer (or at least stay younger and healthier on the inside for most of our lives).
This new thought process has been aided by a number of discoveries made over the past few years.
The first, which won its discoverers, the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2012 is the identification of induced pluripotent stem cells.
You can take a single source of mature cells that have one job and get them to divide indefinitely and create new cells with other jobs for all tissues in the body.
The second huge leap in our understanding is that neurons in the brain do get created well into adulthood.
When I was growing up, the conventional wisdom was that after a certain point in life, you had a certain number of neurons in your brain which you were stuck with for the rest of your life. This is not true. The brain “grows” new neurons and new connections that make it plastic all throughout life.
But bad news here is that with aging the capacity to renew neurons and form connections diminishes (and this is tied to cognitive, memory, and movement issues).
There are a lot of aspects of aging and many directions of anti-aging research. I’ve covered two new exciting studies in mice that relate to improving memory and muscle-mass with advanced age in my latest column for Hindustan Times. The work presented in the column provides evidence that there are youthful factors and signals in the blood and poop of young mice that can rejuvenate some of the signs of aging. There are obvious caveats to extending these results to people:
Translating studies of young faeces and blood samples in mice to clinical products in humans is a long and arduous path. How long the anti-ageing effects last and whether these procedures cause an actual reversal of ageing or slowing down of certain steps will require further investigation.
With these caveats in mind, these are important studies that provide clear future directions in anti-ageing research. Faecal transplants and blood transfusions in people may not be practical or advisable for age-related declines. But they represent an important step in figuring out why these declines occur after all. This could then lead to more targeted drugs for people.
All said and done, it an exciting time to study aging and healthspan in mice and in people.
Go with your gut!
Last Sunday, there was a discussion of the secrets of the gut microbiome at the India International Science Festival 2021 in Goa. The festival was held in hybrid mode with some of us joining online from our computers. It was a fascinating chance for a general audience to learn more about a cutting-edge area of health research.
I was tasked with providing some perspectives on modifying gut microbiomes through diet, a topic very close to my own gut (and heart and brain, as recent research shows).
Dr. Sharmila Mande, Chief Scientist at TCS Research & Innovation provided an overview of work that her team is doing in identifying microbes associated with non-infectious diseases through their genetic signatures. This could make its way to diagnostic labs in the next few years.
Dr. Yogesh Shouche, Principal Investigator at the National Centre for Microbial Resource summarized work that his group is doing in characterizing microbiomes of Indian populations. In fact, there isn’t one single Indian gut microbiome because there is huge diversity in lifestyles, dietary preferences, and access to nutritious food across the country. We all eat and live differently.
Dr. Vineet Sharma of Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Bhopal presented details of work his group has been doing on characterizing some of the genetic and chemical markers of microbiomes. His team has found that one particular group of bacteria is prevalent in many sampled Indian microbiomes compared to ones tied to western diets.
The last speaker of the evening, Dr. Mahesh Desai, Group Leader of the Eco-Immunology and Microbiome team at the Luxembourg Institute of Health presented work supporting his hypothesis that if gut microbes are not fed properly through diets, they turn on their hosts. These microbes then eat up the mucin lining the colon, a process that has been linked to many immune disorders including inflammatory bowel disease.
I’ve said this before (and will say it many times in the future). Microbiome research is one of the most exciting areas of science right now!
(All of these studies are published, and so I have no hesitation in mentioning them in my newsletter).
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That’s it for now.
Age well,
Anirban