At a recent conference, Bill Andrews of Sierra Sciences announced a forthcoming collaboration with BioViva, currently pushing regulatory boundaries to develop gene therapies as treatments for aging. A new company will be formed, BioViva Fiji, to offer gene therapies that can compensate for some of the aspects of degenerative aging via medical tourism in Fiji. The principle focus, given that this is Sierra Sciences we are talking about here, is telomerase gene therapy, but BioViva is also working on a follistatin gene therapy, and it is worth bearing in mind that in this age of CRISPR rolling out any single target gene therapy that has some background work in the research community isn't the huge technical undertaking it would have been in past years. All of the time and cost goes into a reasonable level of testing, and the only real hurdle left from a technical point of view is proving that a therapy can reliably introduce genes into a large enough number of cells to produce benefits. We're going to see a lot of work on gene therapies in the next few years - this is just the start and the tip of the iceberg.
Fiji, like many countries in the Asia-Pacific region, has been taking steps in recent years to make itself attractive as a destination for medical tourism, and thereby encourage the growth of high-end local industries that benefit from the wealth of larger and more prosperous countries. It makes a lot of sense as a long-term plan, and competition between regions for medical tourism will hopefully prevent these countries from falling into the overregulated repression of medical development found in the US and Europe, a state of affairs that slows development and that gave rise to medical tourism in the first place. Fiji is the destination for this particular effort, but it could equally have been any of a number of other choices.
"Sierra Sciences and BioViva - Liz Parrish - have now joined forces. We have started a new company, called BioViva Fiji, on Fiji island, and we are now building a large-scale production facility and a clinic to soon be able to provide a gene therapy approach towards curing aging."
Bill Andrews is, as many of you will recall, an enthusiast for telomerase and telomere length as a key to aging, and he is in full sales mode above. The goal of Sierra Sciences before the company floundered was to build a viable treatment along these lines, but they ran out of funding and then turned to selling herbal nonsense. That was a sad end for a group that was at the outset working on interesting science. Interesting, yes, but from where I stand age-related reduction in average telomere length is a marker of aging, not a cause of aging. Telomerase gene therapies most likely extend life in mice through increased stem cell activity, counteracting some of the decline in stem cell populations that occurs with advancing age. It was surprising to find that this doesn't raise the risk of cancer, as those stem cell populations become damaged by age, and their decline is generally through to be an evolved defense against cancer in later life. It may be that the general enhancement of cell activity extends to the immune system, and better immune surveillance and clearance of cancerous cells is enough to offset that raised risk due to pushing damaged cells back to work. This or any other thesis is far from proven at this point, and telomerase gene therapies in humans still seem overly risky on this count to my eyes.
I believe based on the evidence to date that telomerase gene therapy should be classed as a compensatory treatment. It is pushing a damaged engine to do more, and it may well be the case that in humans as well as mice the balance of factors brings a net improvement in the same way as do stem cell therapies, another field associated with a prospering medical tourism industry, but that is yet to be nailed down and proven. Follistatin or myostatin gene therapies are similarly compensatory. They do not address the damage that causes aging, but they compensate partially for one its effects, in this case by adding extra muscle tissue to offset that lost over time to the mechanisms of aging. Is this all useful? Yes - if you think that stem cell therapies are worth it, then you should also think that this sort of gene therapy is worth it. I'm pleased to see Bill Andrews working on something that doesn't make me sad for the waste of potential it signifies, as was the case for the end of Sierra Sciences as a legitimate scientific venture.
We should not forget, however, that telomerase therapies cannot cure aging. A lot of people would like to think that they do, but it simply isn't the case. They don't treat the causes of aging, they instead adjust a lot of factors to paper over those causes just a little bit better than the papering over that the present mainstream of medicine can achieve. Undergo a telomerase gene therapy and you may benefit in a very similar way to a stem cell treatment, but in both cases you are still aging and still damaged. You still have mitochondrial DNA damage, lipofusin in your long-lived cells, cross-links stiffening your arteries, and so on and so forth, and all those things are still killing you.
View the full article at FightAging
