{"id":2856,"date":"2015-03-26T00:00:56","date_gmt":"2015-03-26T00:00:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/news.truthjuice.co.uk\/index.php\/get-tomorrows-anti-aging-therapy-available-today-outside-the-u-s\/"},"modified":"2015-04-13T17:55:58","modified_gmt":"2015-04-13T17:55:58","slug":"get-tomorrows-anti-aging-therapy-available-today-outside-the-u-s","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.truthjuice.co.uk\/index.php\/get-tomorrows-anti-aging-therapy-available-today-outside-the-u-s\/","title":{"rendered":"Get Tomorrow\u2019s Anti-Aging Therapy \u2014 Available Today Outside the U.S."},"content":{"rendered":"

\"bioviva\"For people who have a few hundred thousand dollars to spend and are willing to take on the risks of an \u201cearly adopter\u201d and travel to South America, options are now becoming available that were inconceivable just a few years ago. A new company is leapfrogging over the time-consuming process of testing and regulatory approval, and offering the best-established and most promising experimental anti-aging technologies in the near future. This is a new vision for combining research with treatment, for treating diseases that have no proven therapies, and for aging itself.<\/i><\/p>\n

(This column begins with a couple of pages of background. \u00a0If you want to cut to the chase, scroll down to BioViva<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

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You only have to read Time Magazine<\/a> to notice that this is the year anti-aging medicine is coming of age. \u00a0Promising life extension technologies are being debuted, with potential for preventing many diseases at once, adding decades to the human life span, and restoring youthful function to an aging body. These include telomerase therapies, stem cell therapies, epigenetic reprogramming, removal of senescent cells, plasma transfer, and hormonal therapies inspired by gene expression changes between young and old.<\/p>\n

Inevitably, this has brought a surge in the number of companies eager to jump the gun and offer treatments to consumers based on early lab research, before the technology has proved \u00a0safe and effective in humans. \u00a0In an age of wildcat capitalism, we are well-advised to approach all claims with a skeptical eye, and assume that hucksterism is rampant. \u00a0Anyone who considers signing on with a new company that is offering a promising but unproven anti-aging technology had best start with a foundation of second opinions and broad considerations of risk and rewards.<\/p>\n

But I stop short of saying, \u201cstay away\u201d. \u00a0The field is too important, with too much at stake for us individually and as a human community, to sit on the sidelines, to wait for the research to be sorted out. \u00a0Political control of medical research has protected us imperfectly, and has held back life-saving treatments, sometimes for decades. \u00a0The system serves pharmaceutical profits<\/a> more effectively than the public of medical consumers. \u00a0Too often, the treatments that are approved are not those that offer the best risk\/reward ratio, but those that are patentable and owned by someone who can afford to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in scientific advocacy<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The standard path to regulatory approval respects individual human life, and is \u201cconservative\u201d in the Hippocratic sense of \u201cfirst do no harm\u201d. \u00a0But it is far from the most effective way to move science forward, and probably is not the most efficient way to save the most lives, even in the short run. \u00a0Many libertarians, anti-aging enthusiasts and ordinary citizens who find themselves with a condition for which there is currently no effective medical treatment want the freedom to participate in experimental medicine, and experimental medicine certainly wants to try to help them and to learn from successes and failures.<\/p>\n

For people who see their options for an active and creative life being closed by age-related disabilities, for people who are willing to take personal risks to help move the science forward, for people who are bold and adventure-seeking, the choice to try experimental anti-aging technologies can be a rational decision.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n

The Promise of Telomerase Therapies<\/b><\/p>\n

In my opinion, the best-validated and most promising of the experimental therapies is the direct delivery of telomerase through gene therapy. \u00a0This is a technology pioneered in mice by Maria Blasco<\/a>\u2019s lab in Madrid, with stunning results. \u00a0In a ground-breaking 2012 paper<\/a>by Blasco\u2019s student Bruno Bernardes de Jesus<\/a>, ordinary lab mice were given gene therapy with an \u201cextra\u201d telomerase gene spread to their cells by a genetically-engineered virus. \u00a0the mice lived 13-24% longer, and the experimenters reported \u201cremarkable beneficial effects on health and fitness, including insulin sensitivity, osteoporosis, neuromuscular coordination and several molecular biomarkers of aging.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some strategies work better in mice than in humans, but there is theoretical reason to believe that this technique should work (even) better in humans than in mice. \u00a0Untreated mice already have plenty of telomerase, and the telomeres of lab mice are at least 3 times as long as humans\u2019, with shorter life spans in which to lose their telomeres. \u00a0Before the above experiment, it was reasonable to think that telomere length was a primary aging clock in humans, but not in mice. \u00a0Mice can live up to six generations<\/a> after their telomerase gene has been knocked out (no telomerase at all), whereas people exhaust their telomere endowment in a single generation.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve written in the past<\/a> about telomere length as one of the body\u2019s primary aging clocks. \u00a0Very little telomerase is expressed in human adults. \u00a0As our stem cells divide during a lifetime, telomeres get progressively shorter with age. \u00a0Some results include the most important symptoms of aging:<\/p>\n