Regenerative Medicine and Ageing
As well as increasing illness, old age often brings severe reduction of physical and mental abilities for ‘healthy’ people.
Everything from no longer being able to play that killer game of tennis or handle the crossword before breakfast to not daring to step outside your door in case you fall, or cannot remember the way home again. If regenerative medicine aims to repair the body in disease, why not repair the problems of ageing as well?
This is the idea that Aubrey de Grey proposed in the 1990s, and that the SENS Foundation is seeking to implement. I do not believe that this will be a ‘cure for ageing’. The decline of our bodies with age involved every single cell, and is a complex of interconnected chemistry and biology that could only be ‘cured’ by rebuilding the body from scratch. But there are several areas where specific, chemical aspects of aging are both potentially tractable to treatment and are being largely ignored by mainstream medicine. This is where my work focuses.