Bill Andrews – Anti-aging
telomeres are the very tips of your chromosomes your chromosomes are where your genes are there encoded on a molecule called DNA what DNA is like a long string of beads and think of these long string of beads as a shoelace the beads are called bases and a typical chromosome is about a typical DNA molecule inside a chromosome is about a hundred million bases in length well there’s think of that as a shoelace as i said the caps on your shoelaces are the same as the telomeres on your chromosomes so on this long string of bees the very tips of these things are called telomeres and they protect your your chromosomes the same way that the caps on your shoelaces protect your shoelaces now the size of these telomeres is about fifteen thousand bases remember I said the chromosomes the DNA in the chromosomes about a hundred million bases in length the telomeres are only fifteen thousand bases in length and that’s at least how long they are when you’re first conceived and here’s where all the problems begin that’s it’s all because every time your cells divide those tumors get a little bit shorter and shorter and shorter and shorter so as I said when you’re first conceived your telomeres about 15,000 basis but there’s so much cell division that’s needed to be to make a newborn baby that after all these cell divisions your tumors are shortened down to 10,000 bases that’s okay I mean the telomeres are still long enough to protect your chromosomes but the problem doesn’t in there as you start to grow up here you have more and more cell division your telomeres continue to get shorter and shorter and shorter and when they get down to about 5,000 basis then all kinds of havoc is wreaked because your chromosomes start falling apart they start having mutations and these short telomeres cause yours you your cells to siness and that’s typically when you die of old age when you Chalmers get down to 5,000 basis we know from scientific literature on human cells and future dishes we know from taking tissue samples from people at different ages that when telomeres get down to five thousand bases and cells lose the ability to function and they die and you die of old age so that’s what we have to do we have to find a way to keep them from shortening and actually real eng thin them wait I had mentioned that every time your cells divide your children’s get a little bit shorter there’s nothing we can do about that yet as the cells just lack the ability to duplicate the very tips of the chromosomes every time chromosomes need to be duplicated during cell division but there are things you can do to accelerate that shortening if you are somebody that thinks you’re not aging fast enough and these are anything unrelated to an unhealthy lifestyle the things because the lot of things you do cause the generation of free radicals or cause inflammation and these things accelerate the rate of your telomere shortening things you can do to prevent that so so I call that accelerated telomere shortening things you can do to prevent the accelerated telomere shortening or one is endurance exercise running swimming biking anything related to endurance as long as you keep it like fun and adventurous that kind of endurance exercise actually decreases the rate of that accelerated telomere shortening it’s amazing how many people in their 80s are out there running long ultra marathons and looking like teenagers it’s it’s just amazing how much endurance exercise can slow down the rate of telomere shortening and and aging but those out the only things you can do their supplements vitamin D mega three fatty acids antioxidants these things have always always been already been shown in scientifically peer-reviewed journal articles to decrease the rate of shortening people who take these things have longer telomeres and their friends that don’t and it’s not because they are lengthening their telomeres is their decrease in the rate of that accelerated telomere shorten reducing stress reducing depression being optimistic all these things have been shown to decrease the rate of accelerated telomere shortening but two things that are really important are smoking and obesity cause accelerated telomere shortening so quit smoking and and lose weight these are really good ways to keep your telomeres as long as possible but nothing that i just mentioned will lengthen your chillers and that’s what i really want to do i want to find a way to lengthen the tail on earth so that we can make ourselves younger and healthier again well we started off with discovering that as i mentioned every time our cells divide our telomeres get shorter but that’s not true in our reproductive cells our reproductive cells cell divides the tumors don’t get shorter and we discovered this enzyme called telomerase long race is produced in our reproductive cells and what happens every time the cell divides tumors do get a little bit shorter but then tell Amish read lengthens it back to the original length long story short we have found that if we over produce telomerase in cells we find that the tumors actually start getting longer which was the first hint that we actually had discovered a way to possibly reverse human aging and declining health so we took this enzyme and we put it into normal skin cells members only produced in a reproductive cells but when we took put in normal skin cells we found up these cells stopped aging and actually became younger by every method of measurement we you can imagine we also took skin cells that were treated with too long race and the skin cells that weren’t treated with tomorrow’s grew them on the skin into skin on the back of a mouse student these are human cells grown into skin on the back of a mouse we found out that the old cells treated with telomerase to lengthen tumors grew into young skin whereas the old cells not treated what farmers grew into old skin well this was exciting this was like 20 years ago this is the first time we’d ever actually seen any type of organ actually get rejuvenated by lengthening tumors but I think the most significant support of the concept that that lengthening telomeres can reverse aging was done just a few years ago by dr.
Rhonda Pennell at Harvard where he engineered mice so that he could turn to long race on and off and the cells when plumbers is encoded by a gene and you have the ability to turn genes on and off just like a light switch so he was engineered him so he could turn to la Mary’s on and off like a light switch in these mice he let them get really old with this switch turned off okay he got really old tumors got really short the mice got really old and then he flipped the switch on by feeding him a certain supplement and it turned on too long rice and all the cells in the mouse or the mice and the mice they’re chill Amir’s all got water and these mice became physically younger by every method of measurement you can imagine and so that’s what we are trying to do with humans we are trying to repeat this kind of same kind of experiment with humans looking for some kind of chemical or natural product did you kind of supplement that you can take that will get inside of all your cells turn on the gene for too long race and make your children’s longer well we’ve been working now since 1999 so it’s been what 16 years now and what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to look for chemicals and natural products and practically anything that will get inside of human cells in a petri dish and turn on the gene for telomerase we have tested what we first developed a very high throughput screening assay that we could test cells with so we can test like 4,000 different chemicals a day looking for something that would when add it to human cells in a petri dish and then let the cells incubate for 24 hours then the next day break open the cells and ask to those cells produce to lommers we have an assay that allows us to do this four thousand times a day all robotic and stuff and so we started testing all kinds of chemicals at random we tested over 300,000 different chemicals actually found 900 of them would actually induce the production it’s long race at low levels and we were able to then look at the structures of all these chemicals or at least our medicinal chemists looked at the structures of all these chemicals and we’re able to design new chemicals well from just a random 300,000 random we we ended up our strongest hit was something called c0 576 84 which was the 57,000 680 fourth chemical that we tested and we we found that that produced enough to long race inside of a cell to be about five percent of what we thought we needed to actually stop gilmer shortening and if we do that so that would be like a hundred percent if we go higher than one hundred percent that would be actually lengthening and reverse telomere shortening the strongest one we found with c 057 684 was about producing was producing about 5% as much too long race as we needed well that’s that’s a lot it’s still not anywhere near what we needed but we then started doing the medicinal chemistry looking at the structures of all these camel and in a very short period of time we end up finding stuff there at least one chemical that was sixteen percent we found a lot there were like ten percent twelve percent one was sixteen percent of what we need and we called that Tam 818 telomerase activating molecule 818 and that’s our strongest that in fact it’s the strongest chemical on the planet right now for inducing telomers we plan on doing a lot more research to even go higher than that as soon as we get more funding to do that and I anticipate that we could be at a hundred percent within about a year after we get the funding we need to do that research the only the only one we’ve been able to really compare it to is ta-65 ta-65 has published data showing how and how strong how much too long race is produced when added to human cells in a petri dish we’ve been able to compare that published data with Tam 818 and we estimated somewhere between 80 and 300 times more potent than ta-65 data is not available to compare the other things that are on the market well the global financial crisis of 2008 hit everybody pretty hard including the investors that we had we were spending close to a million dollars a month doing the research and suddenly we didn’t have any more funding and it’s been since 2008 has been very very difficult to find investors so we started thinking well maybe we have can take some of the discoveries we’ve already made and possibly make revenue from those things to fund our research and we were very fortunate and I love the fact that a company in New Zealand called the chase life extension foundation actually licensed our strongest chemical from us that one that I mentioned before tam a 18 and they have been successful at putting it into a skin cream that has been shown in clinical studies to actually be safe and efficacious and as a result they are now going to be they put it on the market and we are now getting royalties from the sales of those things and those royalties are all going into our research and I’m looking forward very much to the fact that in just a few months from now we expect a little oil to be enough to fund all the research that we need and we can get back on track again it had been kind of frustrating because we were looking all over the world for somebody to be interested in in marketing one of these products even though they aren’t potent enough to actually reverse human aging there plenty prout enough to slow down the aging process and we thought at first that people would be excited about this all over the world but I really don’t understand maybe people just didn’t believe it just seemed too good to be true but I’m really glad that the people in New Zealand actually licensed this and you know because I think it would be absolutely wonderful if the cure for aging actually came out of the land of the hobbits
