The legendary synthetic biologist Dr. George Church and team at the Wyss Institute at Harvard University took a first steptowards cracking the ultimate question of anti-aging research. They combined three gene therapies, each linked to a health problem associated with aging, into a single vaccine-like shot and gave it to ailing mice. The combination treatment reversed diabetes and obesity while improving heart and kidney functioneven when those organs had already begun failing.

If you hit enough specific diseases, youre getting at the core aging components that are common to all of them,saidChurch.

Rather than genetically modifying the mice, the team used a virus to encode genetic material that fine-tunes the activity of all three genes, but leaves the genome alone. In this way, the team explained, the combination therapy is far more easily applicable to humans in the long run.

Gene therapy gives you a testable therapy at scale in mice. And we can move from mice to dogs and then to humans. Were focusing on the reversal of age-related diseases so well be more healthy and youthful later in life, said Church.

Read full, original post: How Much Can We Delay Aging? A Gene Therapy Trial Is About to Find Out

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Trio of gene therapies seeks to reverse age-related diseases to make us 'healthy, youthful later in life' - Genetic Literacy Project

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