They're Not Kidding - Researchers seek to create 'fountain of youth'

PhysOrg.com - January 16 2009, by Jenn Watkins

The same principles that a Biodesign Institute research team has successfully applied to remove harmful contaminants from the environment may one day allow people to clean up the gunk from their bodies—and reverse the effects of aging. The Biodesign Institute, along with partner, the Methuselah Foundation, is working to vanquish age-related disease by making old cells feel younger.

“The mainstream approach to curing aging diseases is to delay them a little bit, which is great for pharmaceutical sales, but not so good for fixing people,” said John Schloendorn, a Molecular and Cellular Biology Ph.D. student who works in the lab of Dr. Bruce Rittmann, director of the Biodesign Institute’s Center for Environmental Biotechnology. “What’s different about the Methuselah Foundation is that their approach is to directly repair the damage that the passage of time does to our bodies and eventually causes disease.”

Their collaboration addresses age-related problems, such as heart disease, macular degeneration, and Alzheimer’s disease, by understanding the root causes of disease. A number of diseases that appear with age are primarily caused by a lifetime of accumulated debris inside of cells.

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