From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@www.aeiveos.com)
Date: Fri Aug 27 1999 - 21:59:06 MDT
On Fri, 27 Aug 1999, Patrick Wilken wrote:
> FOR RELEASE: 26 AUGUST 1999 AT 14:00:00 ET US
> University of Wisconsin-Madison
> http://www.wisc.edu/
>
> Study details genetic basis of aging -- and how it might be delayed
>
> The Wisconsin team, led by Tomas A. Prolla, a UW-Madison professor of
> genetics, and Richard Weindruch,
I'm quite familiar with Dr. Weindruch, though not Dr. Prolla.
My first comment would be that I'm glad this work is being done
because it will provide the concrete information to show that
aging is really "treatable".
As a general comment I would say that the press release is a
bit misleading (what do you want for a press release?).
Using gene-chips will only uncover "known" genes that may play
a role in the aging process. It will not uncover the unknown
regulatory factors that control those genes. An example of
this would be recent evidence that leptin, the "hormone"
produced by adipocytes (fat cells) is actually the sexual
"maturation" hormone, i.e. it signals the brain that you have
enough "resources" to reproduce and should become sexually
mature. Now what we need is to know the maintenance and
repair "hormones" that leptin may be down-regulating (if
such exist) that switch you from "maintenence-and-repair"
mode (i.e. a child or calorie-restricted individual)
into a mature individual that ages.
As a second comment I would say that the idea is not novel.
We extensively discussed this idea at Aeiveos Sciences Group
for the differential display studies that I discussed at
Extro 3. We even went so far as to contact several of
the companies making the chips. The problems were that
at that time (1996-7), the companies wanted very high
prices "buy-in" ($500K+), and the genes required for
a "mouse-chip" were to a large degree unknown.
Given the second comment it will be interesting to see
if the patent they are applying for would be enforceable,
since two of the main criteria for patents are that
the be "novel" and "non-obvious".
Robert
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