It’s the Diseases We Get As We Age That Kill Us | Breakthrough

Researchers at the Buck Institute in Northern California are looking for ways to prevent the many diseases associated with aging by slowing the aging process itself. To discover drugs that will one day increase health in human beings, researchers start much lower on the evolutionary ladder, with single-cell organisms.

The nice thing about yeast is that we can keep billions of them in the laboratory very easily. If we're testing drugs, we can look at 20 or 30 drugs in a single week by looking at yeast cells. It's so fast! If a chemical compound works in yeast, they test it in more complex organisms.

Conditions seen in aging animals, like worms, have surprising similarities to serious diseases seen in aging humans. We've shown recently that during normal aging in worms, there is an accumulation of insoluble proteins, and we believe this material is toxic. And lo and behold, that's exactly what many people in the Alzheimer's field have been thinking about for years: the sticky stuff that we find in the brains of Alzheimer's patients.

The compounds that extend lifespan also reduce Alzheimer's disease proteins and Parkinson's disease proteins. If you target an aging process and you slow down aging, then you slow down all the diseases and the pathology of aging as well.