A scientist from MIPT and the biological company Gero has developed a strategy that allows using the methods of physics and "big data" from the world of biology to create drugs that slow down or stop aging. His ideas were published in the journal Frontiers in Genetics.
“Among the most promising targets for the first drugs are molecules circulating in the blood plasma, since their key role in the aging process is supported by the results of experiments on transfusion of young plasma,” says Petr Fedichev, head of the laboratory at MIPT and scientific director of Gero, whose words press service of the university.
In recent years, a debate has revived among scientists about what is the process of aging and death of humans and animals. Some biologists and evolutionists believe that this process is not random, and that it is controlled by a kind of "death program" - a certain set of genes that make the body grow decrepit and die, giving way to a new generation of their own kind.
Other scientists believe that aging is a completely random process of accumulation of mutations and accidental breakdowns in cells. This leads to the accumulation of so-called "aged" cells in the body, which cease to participate in the life of the body due to the appearance of mutations in their DNA or reaching the limits of division. The removal of such cells from the body of worms, as experiments have shown, significantly prolonged their life and improved their vital functions.
The existence of naked mole rats and other "immortal" animals, Fedichev notes, leads his team to assume that an aging program should still exist. Accordingly, scientists believe that it can be "hacked" by using certain drugs or by changing the way the genes associated with it work.
How do I find this program? Fedichev and his colleagues have developed a strategy that allows you to find its "traces" in the data that are currently collected by the largest genomic databanks and monitoring projects, using the concept of critical dynamics used to describe processes in the physics of complex systems.
Scientists understand this word as a set of mathematical tools and ideas that make it possible to calculate the behavior of a large number of complex objects, whose interactions almost unpredictably affect the behavior of the entire system as a whole.
These ideas, as Fedichev notes, can be used not only to study how various chaotic processes in inanimate nature "work", but also to search for interconnections in complex biological systems, for example, between a person's lifespan, mutations in his DNA, diseases and the presence of various protein molecules in his blood and cells.
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Using these principles, MIPT scientists recently created an artificial intelligence system capable of calculating biological age and the likelihood of premature death of a person using data from a fitness tracker.
In addition, they have already managed to extend the life of nematode worms by 20-35% using drugs that mimic the effects of gene therapy, and also created a set of RNA molecules that increased this indicator by 30%.
The analysis of the work of these genes and molecules using the methods of physics of complex systems, as the scientist noted, indicated that they change the work of the body in approximately one direction. This allows us to hope that a single “aging program” still exists, and that it can be “hacked” in the future.
