General / Off-Topic The Lipofuscin Problem

[Robin of Spiritwood]

Spoiler: Old Skin

Here is some old human skin. Go ahead, look, it's not so bad.

See all those spots? That's a compound called "Lipofuscin", and it's not just a cosmetic problem.

Spoiler: Heart Muscles

In this slide, there are Orangey brown lumps of Lipofuscin stuck inside the heart muscle cells too. As you can guess, that is NOT a good thing.

What is this stuff and why do we get it then?
Imagine you get a newspaper delivered to your house every day. It's rolled up and tied with a bit of string. Everyday, you pop off the string and read it. Then you use the paper for wrapping stuff, or painting, or start fires with it, or just toss it out.

But you strangely decide to just keep the string.

70 years later, your house is full of this damned string. Now, you can't get down the hall anymore. String. The bathroom? String.
You get the idea.

The compound clumps up around cell nucleus locations. You can see it by the purple dark ones in the heart muscle slide. This happens in every major organ system, the eyes, brain, the skin, etc. It causes a slew of old age diseases. And we have no treatment for it whatsoever.

This is an example of what we in the business call a "deposition" disease. It's one of many.
Any effort to extend lives will run up against these things. So solving them is a big, big deal for the longevity research people.

 

[Patrick_68000]

The human body is so wonderful when all is well, and so sad when it degrades.

 

[Robin of Spiritwood]

So how might the deposition disease problem be solved?
Let's stick to just Lipofuscin, for now, and lesve out Amyloid etc. We don't even have to work out how we make lipofuscin, and how to block that.

When a dead body decomposes, no Lipofuscin is left behind with the bones. That means germs can break it down. So the biological machinery to get rid of it already exists- we do not have to invent it from scratch.

We need microbiologists to identify which germs are doing this. Then biochemists have to work out the pathway, and find the enzymes. Geneticists have to identify what genes get used, and figure out the control system.

Finally we have to clone and modify those genes, implant them into test animals and see if the lipofuscin is safely removed. We probably would need to get the enzymes into lysosomes specifically.

And finally the gene treatment might be ready to test in humans.

Normally we'd sigh and say well there goes 60 years of research into it, who's paying? But this problem might get solved faster than we think. If a half wit like me can see how to do it, actually smart people would do it better.

Of course, once this gets fixed, the humans with the new genes will no longer be Original Humans. They will be Ver 1.1 or something, and so will their offspring.

 

[Morbad]

Finally we have to clone and modify those genes, implant them into test animals and see if the lipofuscin is safely removed.

...or if the animal just digests itself!

 

[EUS]

I believe that the research into nanotech will take care of this, and many other types of these problems, and I believe it won't be long before the tech will be available.
Unless there's a drawback into removing Lipofuscin.