A group of researchers claims that they may have cracked the secret to breaking through the limits on human lifespan.
A team of experts in biology and biophysics presented results of a detailed analysis of trends in aging and lifespan, and they believe they have found a way to break the natural limits on human longevity. The research team of Gero, a Singapore-based biotech company in collaboration with Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center in Buffalo, NY, published their findings in Nature Communications.
“Aging in humans exhibits universal features common to complex systems operating on the brink of disintegration. This work is a demonstration of how concepts borrowed from physical sciences can be used in biology to probe different aspects of senescence and frailty to produce strong interventions against aging,” said Peter Fedichev, co-founder and CEO of Gero.
The researchers postulated that aging is not so much a factor of biological age – but is the result of an increasing loss of cellular resilience that occurs over time. They defined resilience as the body’s ability to recover from sickness, injury, or disease. The scientists’ analysis found that overall human cells are quite resilient, and outside of external factors, could easily live to 120 to 150 years.
Their research indicates that if we can develop interventions – both lifestyle changes and novel therapeutics – that can mitigate the factors that lower resilience, we could radically increase lifespan.
The aging model presented in this work may guide the development of life-extending therapies with the strongest possible effects on healthspan. Healthspan is defined not as the number of years you live in total but the number of years that you can enjoy a high quality of life at optimal health.
“This work by the Gero team shows that longitudinal studies provide novel possibilities for understanding the aging process and systematic identification of biomarkers of human aging in large biomedical data. The research will help to understand the limits of longevity and future antiaging interventions. What’s even more important, the study may help to bridge the rising gap between the health- and lifespan, which continues to widen in most developing countries.” – says Brian Kennedy, Distinguished Professor of Biochemistry and Physiology at National University Singapore.
Defining the aging process as the longitudinal loss of resilience explains why even the most effective prevention and treatment of age-related diseases could only improve the average but not the maximal lifespan unless true antiaging therapies have been developed,” said Andrei Gudkov, Ph.D., Sr. Vice President and Chair of Department of Cell Stress Biology at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center, a co-author of this study.
Gero has recently launched an API called GeroSense, which is aimed at health and fitness apps so they can tap up its AI modeling to offer their users an individual assessment of biological age and resilience.
