Could it be? A drug that reverses cognitive decline?
Could this be true?:
Just a few doses of an experimental drug can reverse age-related declines in memory and mental flexibility in mice, according to a new study by UC San Francisco scientists. The drug, called ISRIB, has already been shown in laboratory studies to restore memory function months after traumatic brain injury (TBI), reverse cognitive impairments in Down Syndrome, prevent noise-related hearing loss, fight certain types of prostate cancer, and even enhance cognition in healthy animals.
In the new study, published Dec. 1, 2020, in the open-access journal eLife, researchers showed rapid restoration of youthful cognitive abilities in aged mice, accompanied by a rejuvenation of brain and immune cells that could help explain improvements in brain function.
“ISRIB’s extremely rapid effects show for the first time that a significant component of age-related cognitive losses may be caused by a kind of reversible physiological “blockage” rather than more permanent degradation,” said Susanna Rosi, PhD, Lewis and Ruth Cozen Chair II and professor in the departments of Neurological Surgery and of Physical Therapy and Rehabilitation Science.
“The data suggest that the aged brain has not permanently lost essential cognitive capacities, as was commonly assumed, but rather that these cognitive resources are still there but have been somehow blocked, trapped by a vicious cycle of cellular stress,” added Peter Walter, PhD, a professor in the UCSF Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. “Our work with ISRIB demonstrates a way to break that cycle and restore cognitive abilities that had become walled off over time.”
However, my caveat is that a great many drugs that seem to work in mice do not work in humans.
Instapundit linked to a story about this recent research, and in the comments there I saw the following quip: “Trump should recommend this therapy to ensure that nobody tries it out on Biden.”
That would be agreeable. My gut tells me that this sort of medical research bally-hoo almost never pans out. What you eventually get is some incremental improvement in available treatments. The increments add up over time, so the increments are to be welcomed.
The data suggest that the aged brain has not permanently lost essential cognitive capacities, as was commonly assumed, but rather that these cognitive resources are still there but have been somehow blocked, trapped by a vicious cycle of cellular stress.
Cellular stress is just the worst.
In the new study, researchers led by Rosi lab postdoc Karen Krukowski, PhD, trained aged animals to escape from a watery maze by finding a hidden platform, a task that is typically hard for older animals to learn. But animals who received small daily doses of ISRIB during the three-day training process were able to accomplish the task as well as youthful mice, much better than animals of the same age who didn’t receive the drug.
I hate that underwater platform test too.
I doubt ISRIB could be the solution to all cognitive decline, but it might be a magic enough bullet like penicillin when it first emerged.
Fingers crossed.
huxley:
That water/maze/platform test sounds like a sort of Room 101 for mice.
Did you ever read this story by Ursula Le Guin?
The problem with using this on Biden would be that it only restores previous function. He was on the short end to begin with.
That being said, I’ve forwarded the link to my daughter, who works with TBI and ALS patients and others with cognitive difficulties.
Whether it is this one, or the next one, age reversal and regenerative therapies are coming.
Ray Kurzweil, the most successful of all prognosticators of future technology has predicted pysical immortality by the year 2045. That is a mere 25 years from now.
Meanwhile, for those of us interested in catching the train, therapies such as this will help us bridge the gap.
This class of drugs is also be studied for treatment of glaucoma.
https://www.brightfocus.org/glaucoma/grant/targeting-er-stress-treatment-steroid-and-myocilin-glaucoma#:~:text=The%20proposed%20study%20will%20directly%20test%20the%20therapeutic,of%20glaucoma%20that%20faithfully%20replicate%20the%20human%20disease.
Ray Kurzweil, the most successful of all prognosticators of future technology has predicted pysical immortality by the year 2045. That is a mere 25 years from now.
Snooze
Sounds promising but yes, never count your chickens before they hatch.
Roy N.
“Ray Kurzweil, the most successful of all prognosticators of future technology has predicted pysical immortality by the year 2045. That is a mere 25 years from now.”
As a number of scifi authors have pointed out, physical immortality would prove to be a case of the “cure being worse than the disease”. Physical immortality would have a barely imaginable impact upon inheritance, effectively end upward career mobility, lead to an unsupportable and unsustainable logarithmic increase in population, result in severely declining resourses… etc. and would lead to either societal collapse or a societal stasis so restrictive as to make prewestern contact China look progressive.
Perhaps we should settle for a bit less by accepting that there comes a point when it’s time to turn in the old chassis for a new model. Or at least wait until we can get off this mudball with the means to spread out to other worlds.
“You do not ‘have’ a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.” George MacDonald, mistakenly attributed to C. S. Lewis
“Don’t take life too seriously. You’re never going to get out of it alive.” comedian Steven Wright, stealing a great line from Elbert Hubbard
Geoffrey Britain: Immortality is only part of Kurzweil’s Singularity scenario. He calls it the Singularity because no one on this side of it can know where we come out on the other side.
Kurzweil is not talking about immortality and everything else stays more or less the same. He is talking about a future in which we not only conquer aging and disease but also become vastly more intelligent and head out into the solar system, then the galaxy and potentially become the consciousness of the universe.
Why not? Someone has to do it!
Of course, it’s science fiction — for now — but Kurzweil in “The Singularity is Near” starts with a recap of how far evolution (not just biological) has gone from the Big Bang to Today and makes a case, which I find persuasive, that trajectory has to go somewhere bigger and better.
If you were somehow present 60-odd million years ago and you were told that tree shrews would evolve into a species which would conquer the planet, invent calculus and fly to the moon and back, that would sound insane. Yet it happened and here we are.
Kurzweil is merely arguing that process is not over.
Geoffrey Britain,
Such technologies would, no doubt, lead to innumerable social and moral issues. However, virtually every new technology has created problems that needed to be solved. In some cases, they completely upset existing social orders. This is the nature of progress.
In any case, it won’t come all at once. It will come little by little and we will adjust to it the same way. By the time it is realized, most people will take it for granted that it was coming. No doubt some will consciously refuse therapies, preferring to age and die “naturally”. Personally, I will welcome and embrace each new therapy that extends and improves the quality of my life.
Roy Nathanson:
Everything has it’s cost and tradeoffs. It is easy to predict what you will do when you are not faced with those unknown costs and tradeoffs. Such is the faith in “progress.”
Charly. Saddest story I ever read.
I say it’s a bad omen – we were just talking about Flowers for Algernon a few weeks ago.
om,
The thing about progress is that it will happen whether we choose it or not.
The only thing we can control is how we deal, ourselves, deal with it.
Roy Nathanson:
“Faith in progress,” time passes, sometimes things get better, sometimes they don’t. But time passes none the less. Consider the 20th century and the 100s of millions of unnecessary deaths caused in part by “progress” brought about by the various “isms” and their wars, famines, and genocides.
Confusing the passage of time with “progress” is almost a religion it seems. Face facts and deal with it.
Richard Aubrey, Philip Sells:
I was thinking about Charly in re: Joe Biden… The Singularity may be too late for him.
Yeah, you could give it to Biden and he still couldn’t find his own ass with both hands and a map.
There’s never much good in making confident predictions about future technology. If you read much science fiction from the “Golden Age,” you’ll see we always get it wrong: overestimating the difficulty of some breakthroughs and underestimating the difficulty of others. When I was in school, we didn’t even know about plate tectonics, or imagine what could be done with DNA manipulation. Computers were barely on our radar, the internet not imagined, minimally invasive surgery and transplants scarcely hoped for.
Texan99 (expanded) … and Heinlein’s spacemen astrogated with slide rules.