The Osaka Forever-Young Army
This is episode 18 of The French Tech Comedy by DNA cowgirl.
Episode 1: The Science of Sakura
Episode 2: Lost in Telomere Translation
Episode 3: Feel Flee to Donate
Episode 4: Pasteurising Tech With the French Touch
Episode 5: The Newborn Symphony Project
Episode 6: The Unknown 9% of the Human Genome
Episode 7: The Apple Tech Specs Conference
Episode 8: religA.I.on
Episode 9: Hiroshima is Japan’s World Trade Center
Episode 10: Mao’s Robots
Episode 11: Zazen in the Shinkansen
Episode 12: The Last (French) Samurai
Episode 13: To Humanity and Beyond
Episode 14: The Music of Genomic Origami
Episode 15: Direct-to-consumer Ikigami Genetics
Episode 16: Underground Science
Episode 17: Gene Karaoke Groove
Chinese giant TenBa’s founder Ken Ba, a zillionaire from Shanghai, was doing well. His cancer wasn’t back, Taka’s T-cell therapy or treatment (started in Fukuoka and Tokyo) seemed to be working. Of course, only time would tell. A middle-aged man with a Gandalfian beard and a pint of beer was talking in a British accent. Geronimo Faber PhD, a bioinformatician and bio-gerontologist, was pitching Ba, in this brand new conference venue they had just built right next to Osaka’s castle, for the Summer Olympics 2020.
“ — There’s a 50% chance human cloning will happen by 2050, and a 100% chance it will happen by 2080,” said Faber. Looking at China and South Korea’s demography, we will definitely need armies of forever-young people. Unless you’d rather see a market of illegal human cloning expand worldwide, with super high-tech ageing vats or tanks based, why not, in North Korea?”
Ba interrupted Faber.
“ — You’re saying genomic precision medicine is not the solution. Why not?”
Faber went on with the ranting. Wasn’t he famous around the world for his super efficient ranting?
“ — We need a comprehensive solution; not all the medical silos, with siloed diseases and patients and doctors. How to reverse the ageing process? It is a task for engineers; not for doctors as specialists of diseases. Preventative, periodic, comprehensive maintenance of cars for vintage cars. As a consequence, they still work perfectly well, though they were designed to last for a couple of decades only in the first place. This is nothing different from what we need to do with the human body. Repair and replace are two different ways of looking at the same thing. Maintenance of car for the human body. Spare parts for organ transplants.
Damage that the body is doing to itself can be seen as a consequence of normal functioning (not because of diseases!). Conventional medicine is saying ageing is not a disease. I am an engineer and say ageing is a disease. For this reason, treating ageing is about (car) engineering, not about doctors as specialists of diseases. At this point you could ask if the future of medicine is going to be about quantum mechanics and quantum biology instead of doctors and hospitals?”
Faber was going through his slides at the speed of light. He knew Ba already knew this stuff. The question was more about implementing and financing the ageing science.
“ — The 7 types or categories of damage. All based on this principle: maintenance of the human body + maintenance of a car. For each category, there is a generic category / way of combating this damage. We have 7 types of damage because there are 7 different types of therapies. Stem cell therapies are useful for several categories. They have a lot of things in common. We have to keep the overall load of cellular damage to a tolerable level (if the level of accumulated damage is too high-> ageing process will progress very fast = Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, diabetes, cancer).
- Cell loss: cells dying and not being replaced when they should be. When a particular type of neurones die in the brain we get Parkinson’s disease. They keep disappearing because of lack of dopamine, a neurotransmitter. This creates cell damage; of course the remedy here is stem cell therapy.
2) & 3) Too many cells. 2) cells dividing when they are not supposed to (cancer); 3) cells not dying when they are supposed to. Sometimes, it’s really important that a certain category of cells die, for example those in the immune system. For 2), treatment isn’t simple. For 3), treatment is not so complicated: override the cellular machinery thanks to some genetic engineering/design. Induce or make cells die even if they don’t intend to. This has been done in the lab, commercialization in progress.
Next 2 categories happen inside the cells. It’s not about the number of cells you have, but the health inside the cell itself.
4) Mitochondrial mutation. Chemistry of breathing. Extracting energy from nutrients is what mitochondria does, combining oxygen with nutrients. Mitochondria is fueling our cells with energy. Mitochondria, and this is quite unique in the organism, has its own ADN, coding for 13 proteins. Any mutation in these 13 proteins has drastic health consequences. If you get mutations to those genes, then it’s gonna end in a bad way. Those mutations happen rather frequently. Mitochondrial DNA is not protected from damage in an efficient way — nuclear DNA, or DNA inside the nucleus of cells, is way better protected. The problem of that DNA that isn’t in the nucleus: its location. Not in the cells, along the chromosomes, which is making it vulnerable! We’re trying to relocate this DNA: make backup copies that are located in the nucleus. We are closer than ever before to making that work. We are trying to create a back-up copy of the mitochondria, for when the original would malfunction or not be functional anymore.
5) Molecular waste product. Those are destroyed or excreted for most part. But some of it accumulates and evolution has not taken the trouble to invent mechanism(s) that would get us rid of 100% of this waste. Different cells make different waste products. We are trying to invent those mechanisms: introducing new genes, like the ones found in nature (bacteria). Turns out that bacteria are able to encode enzymes that break down these substances. As a result, we successfully eliminated toxic waste that triggers atherosclerosis. Oxidized cholesterol is accumulating in the organism — as a consequence of normal functioning of the organism. Those molecules need to be broken down — breakdown of oxidized cholesterol — to avoid atherosclerosis. Main problem: cells suffering from this accumulation. If they don’t suffer from this accumulation anymore, they’ll be able to function normally, and process the stuff they usually process, instead of being paralysed by accumulating and damaging and toxic stuff that is preventing them from working as they should normally.
Arteriosclerosis is the number one killer in Western World. As a result of garbage created by (normally functioning) metabolism. some of this garbage accumulates slowly but surely inside cells. Eventually they cause disease. existing treatments (stents etc) are very invasive, they have big side effects, don’t work very well.
The solution: we need to improve the ability of our own cells to break down these waste products. A type of oxidised cholesterol is a waste product causing atherosclerosis. A modified version of cholesterol, if you will. And the most important molecule we found so far to drive atherosclerosis, by poisoning white blood cells so that they no longer do their job.
The solution: we found bacteria that are able to break down this stuff. We found the genes and enzymes that they use to do that. Then we modify those enzymes, put them into human cells and they still function. White blood cells becoming full of fatty deposit: in cell culture, we gave these cells an engineered gene and the cells survived in the presence of a lot of this toxic modified cholesterol.
Now, there’s damage happening between cells, which causes the 2 last types of damage: 6) & 7)
6) Loss of elasticity of tissues, and of the walls of coronary arteries.
Molecular waste product causes tissues and walls (of coronary arteries) to lose their elasticity. You may be wondering how we could be getting inside of the cells? Well, you can do this by using vaccination. We had success in this for Alzheimer’s disease. Also, we could be rewiring the microbiome bacteria for effective treatments: the circuit is designed to first fabricate a cancer drug inside the bacterium. It then directs the microbe to slip into the interior of a tumour, carried by the blood stream, and self-destroy. When the microbe bursts apart, it releases its payload of drugs.
The elasticity of arteries is crucial to the good health of your heart. The gradual loss of it is leading to hypertension and a whole range of secondary effects, from severe hypertension to kidney failure and everything in between. As a reminder: kidneys are the most in demand transplant organs worldwide. The role of these major arteries: they are kind of a buffer — they have the elasticity of the buffer. We know that every ten minutes, another innocent life is added to the list of thousands awaiting transplant in China. Every day, 20 people on that list will die without ever having a chance to get a life-saving organ or treatment. We also know that China, not the US, is leading the way in xenotransplantation — humanised organs that are grown in pigs, to be transplanted into sick patients.
7) There are naturally occurring, spontaneous but unwanted and unnecessary nuclear bonds, that also cause the stiffening of arteries. We wanna break these bonds. Their cause: chemical reactions occurring between certain proteins and sugar that is circulating in the blood.We are trying to create antibodies and such that will bind to those unwanted bonds and break them.
To wrap this up, I’d say ageing is not a mysterious process, we should be able to fix it. It occurs as a consequence of normal functioning of the organism. We’ve got a long way to go before we implement all of this. But what we already know for sure: brains and their memories won’t get jacked in the process of trying to fix ageing — the 7 categories as explained.
Rejuvenation biotechnologies are based on repair and maintenance of that damage. Strategies for rejuvenating human bodies after the 7 types of molecular and cellular damage caused by normal metabolic functioning occurred. Cell loss, cancerous cells, mitochondrial mutations, death-resistant cells, extracellular matrix stiffening, extracellular aggregates, and intracellular aggregates.
Tissue engineering and 3D bioprinting for starters (3D bioprinting, engineering transplant organs in the lab). But the organ transplant surgery is highly invasive and risky — infection, organ rejection are the two main risks or post-surgery complications. We want to move away from it as fast as possible…” (1)
There was a rather long, awkward silence. Ba was reflecting. Then:
“ — When and how will we be able to engineer or re-engineer people to make them more resistant to pollution?”
“ — We are working on it,” answered Faber in a rather brisk tone, not willing to give too much detail.
“ — How long will it take?”
“ — You just know how these things work, don’t you? The more money we’ll get, the quicker we’ll get there.”
Faber continued:
“ — If you help us finance our research in ageing, I will have my labs concentrate on the use of genetic engineering to enhance the human organism in the context of highly polluted environments. Actually, this is the part I wanted to discuss with you today. Our agenda.”
“ — Now we are talking,” said Ba.
(1) This explanation of the 7 main damages caused to the body by ageing as a result of the normal functioning of the body was provided by Aubrey de Grey, the spearhead of the crusade against ageing.
Catherine Coste
MITx 7.00x, 7.QBWx, 7.28x1–2 certified
Member of the Walking Gallery of Health Care, founded by US activist Regina Holliday
