Nestled on an unassuming business park in south east England is a multi-million laboratory bank-rolled by billionairre Jeff Bazos that is on the hunt for eternal life.
Just off the A11 in Cambridgeshire, Altos Labs has amassed $3billion in funding, with a number of Middle Eastern oil states also said to back the firm. Its 51,000 sq ft laboratory sits on Granta Park, home to Cancer Research, US biotech firm Illumina and drugs giant Pfizer.
It is a field where early work into extending life appears to have yielded some success. Scientists, working across the UK and Singapore, have created an anti-inflammatory drug that has extended the lifespan of mice by five years, reports the Times.
Human trials are now said to be underway, so it seems there could be a breakthrough as record amounts are pumped into anti-aging. Meanwhile Altos research labs are said to have been recruiting world-leading researchers in recent years, luring them with “sports-star salaries”.
The work to try and extend life began in the 1990s, an American scientist Cynthia Kenyon discovered you could double the lifespan of a nematode worm by changing a gene. It may have only been for a couple of days, but it sparked a new beginning for lab-based ageing.
There are dozens of different approaches being explored to extend the lifespan of people. One of these is being investigated by Dr Delphine Larrieu, who is looking at a condition called progeria – which sees children experiencing symptoms akin to old age.
Research on progeria cells has found the membrane around the nucleus, known as the envelope, is deformed. As the DNA accumulates damage, the entire cell becomes fragile.
Dr Larrieu told The Times: “In normal ageing, we see similar dysfunction in the same envelope structure, but to a lesser extent.
“We identified several genes. They had no known connection with progeria or with ageing. But when we knock them out, the nuclear envelope of the progeria cells looks like that of one of the young cells again. There is a kind of cellular rejuvenation.”
She hopes this research could help understand “normal” ageing. While other scientists at Altos are looking at “reprogramming” – adding proteins to cells to attempt to regress to a state of youth.
According to The Times, researchers at the Altos laboratory have been able to refine a version of programming in a way that helps mice survive normally lethal dose of painkillers. While previous attempts to “reprogramme” mice have made them seem biologically younger. There were however some side-effects.
While the average lifespan has naturally increased, people do now often die from one of three things, cancer, cardiovascular disease and dementia. Which are proving tough for scientists to overcome.
Anti-aging could be key, as simply getting older is a big risk for all three. At 70, you’re 80 times more likely to develop cancer than you were in your twenties.
Another option to reverse the signs of ageing, scientists say, would be to disable the genes in cells that contribute to issues such as dementia and cardiovascular disease. Although work into this field remains at a very early stage.
Ultimately however, they hope to create a drug that would combat disease that is associated with ageing. And while scientists seem to think they won’t be able to extend human life forever should we tackle the major issues facing people, they say the goal for now is to make it so people “die without suffering”.
