TASTY RED to the rescue:
TIM PALMER: The search for the fountain of youth has pre-occupied medical researchers for as long as they’ve had microscopes and white coats.
Now, an international team led by an Australian has published research that carries the promise of a whole new class of anti-ageing drugs within five years.
And as Ashley Hall reports the spark for the new drugs is red wine.
ASHLEY HALL: For more than a decade, medical researchers have looked at red wine as a potential source of anti-ageing drugs. They’ve been particularly focussed on a molecule called resveratrol and how it interacts with an enzyme, known as SIRT 1.
And now, a breakthrough:
DAVID SINCLAIR: I think this is the most significant discovery that my team’s made in those 10 years.
ASHLEY HALL: David Sinclair is a professor of genetics at both the Harvard Medical School and the University of New South Wales. And he led the study that’s been published this morning in the journal Science.
DAVID SINCLAIR: What we’re showing for the first time is that you can activate an anti-ageing protein in our bodies and there are real questions around whether it was even possible to do this. So this is the first time we’re really proving that it’s possible.
….ASHLEY HALL: So what sort of diseases and conditions can be targeted by this?
DAVID SINCLAIR: Well this is the big challenge actually because the pathway that we work on, at least in animals such as mice, seems to be effective against such a wide range of diseases from Alzheimer’s to cancer and heart disease, diabetes. So that the question is where can we first apply this technology.
….He says the benefits of the drugs in development will be widespread.
DAVID SINCLAIR: We may find that a drug to treat diabetes ends up protecting people against cancer and heart disease and Alzheimer’s and that would be one way to extend people’s life span. I think eventually the dream here is that most people could take these molecules, if they’re safe enough, to prevent most diseases.
BUT…..
If you can’t wait David Sinclair says there’s no pointing raiding the wine cellar for an anti-ageing head start.
DAVID SINCLAIR: You’d need to have such large amounts from red wine that you’d probably kill off your liver and be drunk most of the time. So I wouldn’t recommend trying to get it from red wine though there is pretty good evidence that a glass or two in moderation is healthy in the long run, but I don’t think that you can take red wine to treat diseases which is really what we’re trying to do here.
Full report: http://www.abc.net.au/am/content/2013/s3710800.htm