Posted on Sep 11, 2018
That’s the slogan of a new Harvard University spinout that plans to put millions behind a hotly disputed rejuvenation discovery. A new anti-aging medicine is so hot even this controversial idea has investors. A startup invests in a way to keep people younger, despite doubts about its science.
A startup, Elevian, which is based in San Francisco, continues Karen Weintraub in the MIT Technology Review, says it intends to explore whether daily injections of a protein called GDF11 can promote “the body’s ability to restore itself” and eventually treat conditions including coronary artery disease, Alzheimer’s, and the muscle-loss condition sarcopenia.
The company builds on research findings several years ago that if the bloodstreams of young and old mice are connected together, it seems to rejuvenate the older ones.
A cofounder of Elevian, Harvard biologist Amy Wagers,with the Harvard Stem Cell Institute later concluded that a protein, GDF11, was the key “rejuvenating factor” in young animals’ blood that produced the effect.
What’s more, she and other Harvard researchers said levels of the protein declined in older people, suggesting that boosting it could counter some effects of aging.
Wagers’s discoveries drew wide interest, but when large drug companies tried to replicate the research, they couldn’t. In a 2015 study, for example, scientists at Novartis found that GDF11 levels do not fall with age and that the protein actually inhibits rather than promotes muscle regeneration.
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Image credit: Star child from Space Odyssey 2001
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