Rock Creek Pharmaceuticals Inc. (fka RCPIQ)

[Buddhahead]

Reducing NF-?B Activation Improves Aging in Patrick Cox's Tech Digest, March 6, 2015

Excerpt:
“It seems that with almost anything that activates NF-?B, if you reduce it, it improves aging,” says Paul Robbins of the Scripps Research Institute in this feature article “How We Age.” I’m personally glad to see this new area of research hitting a more mainstream audience, because I’ve been alone reporting these developments for too long. There have been lots of journal articles supporting this view that NF-?B accelerates aging, but for some reason, nothing in the journals seems to penetrate the public consciousness. The article in The Scientist, by the way, cites this great journal piece.

The reality is that NF-?B over-activation, which is autoimmune syndrome, is a major accelerator of the aging processes. Essentially, the body recognizes normal aging as signs of injury and invasion, prompting an emergency innate immune response. A cytokine storm ensues and aging accelerates.

One alkaloid, which I’ve talked about incessantly here, has been shown in animal as well as human studies to moderate NF-?B and the associated accelerated aging. It’s not on the market at present, but I’m confident that others will be soon simply because the gene target is now known.

My confidence is based on the increased pace of discovery resulting from Moore’s Law and its impact on biological tools. It is orders of magnitude easier today to screen potential molecules for therapeutic activities. If I were a young, smart molecular biologist, like my son, I’d be looking for molecules in nature that mimic the alkaloid known to moderate NF-?B. Another likely target for researchers, which may actually work via a similar mechanism of action, is a widely prescribed drug used to prevent transplant rejection: rapamycin. It also, however, has significant anti-aging impacts.

Pharmaceutical giant Novartis is studying rapamycin at its enormous cutting-edge Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research with an eye to applying for the first anti-aging drug. This would be historic if the company does, in fact, seek approval of rapamycin or a similar molecule for anti-aging, as opposed to a disease-specific therapy.

The rapamycin molecule, by the way, is naturally occurring in the soil of Easter Island. The name of the drug, in fact, comes from the Polynesian name of the island, Rapa Nui. I find it unlikely that other compounds similar to rapamycin, an antifungal produced by bacteria, won’t be discovered.

It’s possible, however, that rapamycin may work as a true immune suppressant, which could suppress immune reactions even when they’re needed. That’s not optimal, and it means that a compound that prevents over activation of NF-?B, preventing autoimmune inflammation but allowing proper immune responses, would actually be more effective as an anti-aging therapy. We’ll see, and probably pretty soon now that so many people are studying these molecules."

Article at:
https://www.mauldineconomics.com/tech/tech-digest/breakthroughs-in-anti-aging-science-appear-in-the-scientist