Aubrey de Grey has stated that aging is caused by seven problems:

1. Cell loss, cell atrophy

2. Junk outside cells
3. Crosslinks outside cells
4. Death-resistant cells
5. Mitochondrial mutations
6. Junk inside cells
7. Nuclear mutations that cause cancer

Each of these problems got a chapter in Aubrey’s new book Ending Aging. In each chapter de Grey explained the problem and then outlined the most promising methods for conquering each. Although the book was only released a couple of weeks ago, at least two chapters already need major revisions – chapter 12 on cancer, and chapter 6 on mitochondrial mutations.

That’s how fast the state of the art is moving now. I’ll bet Aubrey de Grey couldn’t be happier. Both of these developments were announced at de Grey’s own SENS3 conference last week.

Attendees at SENS3 heard first-hand about an extremely exciting approach to cancer treatment that has not yet hit the scientific literature or the press. In 2003, Dr. Zheng Cui and his colleagues at the Comprehensive Cancer Center of Wake Forest University reported the discovery of mice with immune cells that rendered them invulnerable to cancer: they had been intentionally giving mice cancer by injecting them with virulent cancer cells as part of a separate study, when they discovered a single mouse in the colony that was completely immune to the invasive cells.

His curiosity piqued, Dr. Cui went on to show that it could resist multiple rounds of such injections, and were so impressed that they used him to father a whole colony of mice, all of whom shared this remarkable invulnerability to cancer. Based on that ability, he calls them spontaneous regression/complete resistance (SR/CR) mice.

I’m glad Dr. Cui put that mouse out to stud. And not just because his decendents may help us cure cancer. That mouse earned it. I’m reminded of the plot to Unbreakable.

Amazingly this ability to fight off cancer is transferable to normal mice with a simple transfusion. It both prevented cancer and fought off cancer that had already started. And a single dose is sufficient to give a lifetime – a mouse’s lifetime anyway – of cancer protection.

Then Dr. Cui went looking for these special immune system cells in humans. He found them.

…there appears to be a classical bell-shaped distribution of cancer-killing ability in the granulocytes of people in the population: a few people have white blood cells extremely weak cancer-killing activity, the great majority have an ‘average’ competence, and a very small group of outliers have the kind of overwhelming search-and-destroy activity (at least in a test tube!) that is seen in the SR/CR mice.

Dr. Cui now has FDA approval for human testing of his proposed “GIFT” (Granulocyte InFusion Therapy). He will transfuse granulocytes from cancer resistent people to people who are battling cancer. He just needs funding.

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Next post: why the mitochondrial chapter of Ending Aging needs an update.

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UPDATE:

Aubrey de Grey has just published an excerpt from Ending Aging at KurzweilAI:

Bootstrapping our way to an Ageless Future

It appears that old guys hooking up with younger women may be a key to increasing human lifespan:

Women often lose their reproductive capacity around age 50, but if men can still reproduce into their 70s, Darwin would say it’s advantageous for males to live longer lives providing they can hook up with a woman capable of reproducing. Natural selection should favor longevity-boosting genes, which would get passed down from fathers to both sons and daughters. So women would benefit as well in future generations, the scientists say.

Result: Over time, the older-guy-with-younger-gal lifestyle would lift the lifespan ceiling for both men and women in the next generations and so on.

“By increasing the survival of men you have a spillover effect on women because men pass their genes to children of both sexes,” said Cedric Puleston, a doctoral candidate at Stanford University.

At a mere 12 years older than my bride, I’m apparently not doing that much to help. It turns out that a 5-15 year age difference within married couples has been the norm in traditional societies throughout history, so Suraya and I are just normal (or perhaps old school).

Anyhow, this probably isn’t going to prove a very effective means of extending human lifespan going forward — seeing as we have more direct methods available — but it might explain how we got here.