“In January 2023, diagnosed with numerous metastases of lung cancer in my brain, I felt that I must accomplish a mission. If everything happens for a reason, my cancer, in particular, I must find out how metastatic cancer can be treated with curative intent. This is my mission now, and the reason I was ever born. In January 2023, I understood the meaning of life, of my life. I was born to write this article. In this article, I argue that monotherapy with targeted drugs, even when used in sequence, cannot cure metastatic cancer. However, preemptive combinations of targeted drugs may, in theory, cure incurable cancer. Also, I share insights on various topics, including rapamycin, an anti-aging drug that can delay but not prevent cancer, through my personal journey.”
Keywords: lung cancer, brain metastases, capmatinib, resistance, MET
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“Here I discuss how combining rapamycin with other modalities may let us live long enough to benefit from future discoveries in cellular reprogramming and what needs to be done at Altos Labs to make this happen.” (Source: Blagosklonny, 2022)
Altos Labs
Funded by multiple billionaire investors, including Jeff Bezos and Yuri Milner, Altos Labs has announced that their primary focus is on reprogramming cells in the pursuit of reversing the trajectory of many diseases, and thus, reversing aging.
“Altos Labs is a new biotechnology company focused on cellular rejuvenation programming to restore cell health and resilience, with the goal of reversing disease to transform medicine.” (Source: AltosLabs.com)
Altos Labs researchers are aiming to turn back the human aging process by resetting epigenetic clocks within our cells. Cellular rejuvenation programming is a process by which the aging of cells may be reversed, potentially leading to the prevention or reversal of age-related diseases, such as cancer. In animal studies, cellular rejuvenation programming has been shown to lead to improved healthspan and increased lifespan. Researchers at Altos Labs intend to investigate its effects in humans with further research. The process will potentially involve the use of the Yamanaka factors, specialized proteins known as sirtuins and artificial intelligence or machine learning. Implications of successfully developing this technology would be vast, and it could one day lead to a significant extension of the human lifespan.
Dr. Blagosklonny’s Recommendation
Following the public unveiling of this new and highly-funded quest to reverse aging through cellular reprogramming, Dr. Blagosklonny openly chimed in with a perceptive recommendation in his latest research perspective. Given that potential revelations learned from studies at Altos Labs may take years to be brought safely to public markets, Dr. Blagosklonny suggests that research at Altos Labs should also include a deep investigation into rapamycin, a clinically approved mTOR inhibitor. Rapamycin is a promising anti-aging agent that was first clinically approved as an immunosuppressive drug to prevent organ rejection after a kidney transplant.
“Rapamycin treatment is rapidly becoming a mainstream anti-aging intervention.” (Source: Blagosklonny, 2022)
Dr. Blagosklonny writes that potential life-extension with rapamycin may allow us to slow aging while we await future discoveries that may reverse aging altogether. However, he also writes that treatment with rapamycin alone is unlikely to extend lifespan sufficiently enough to benefit from Altos Labs’ future discoveries within our lifetime. Dr. Blagosklonny urges that discovering efficacious combinations of rapamycin with other therapeutic agents may enable humans today to live long enough to benefit from Altos Labs’ future discoveries in cellular reprogramming.
“If Altos Labs would allocate a small percentage of its funding to develop rapamycin based drug combinations, then additional decades of life extension may be available 3–5 years from now.”
“The number of potential combinations with rapamycin is enormous.” (Source: Blagosklonny, 2022)
Click here to read Dr. Blagosklonny’s full research perspective, published in Oncoscience.
Aging (Aging-US) is an open-access journal that publishes research papers bi-monthly in all fields of aging research. These papers are available at no cost to readers on Aging-us.com. Open-access journals have the power to benefit humanity from the inside out by rapidly disseminating information that may be freely shared with researchers, colleagues, family, and friends around the world.
In 2018, Dr. Mikhail Blagosklonny wrote a thought provoking theory article, entitled: “Disease or not, aging is easily treatable.”
Figure 1. Relationship between aging and diseases. When growth is completed, growth-promoting pathways increase cellular and systemic functions and thus drive aging. This is a pre-pre-disease stage, slowly progressing to a pre-disease stage. Eventually, alterations reach clinical disease definition, associated with organ damage, loss of functions (functional decline), rapid deterioration and death.
The Top-Performer series highlights papers published by Aging that have generated a high Altmetric attention score. Altmetric scores, located at the top-left of trending Aging papers, provide an at-a-glance indication of the volume and type of online attention the research has received.
Would re-classifying aging as an official disease help fuel the anti-aging drug industry? While many sufficient arguments can place aging in this category, Dr. Mikhail Blagosklonny—Editor-in-Chief at Aging, Oncotarget, Oncoscience, and Cell Cycle, and adjunct faculty member at the Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center—believes that classifying aging as a disease is unnecessary and counterproductive.
“It is commonly argued that aging should be defined as a disease so as to accelerate development of anti-aging therapies. This attitude is self-defeating because it allows us to postpone development of anti-aging therapies until aging is pronounced a disease by regulatory bodies, which will not happen soon.”
In this article, Dr. Blagosklonny emphasizes his theory that human aging is the quasi-programmed continuation of growth and development. He explains that progressive aging later in life results in aberrant systematic hyperfunction, which leads to disease and, eventually, death.
“Aging is a normal continuation of the normal developmental program, so it is NOT a program but a purposeless, unintended quasi-program [10–16].”
Beginning after the growth process, Dr. Blagosklonny segments the aging process into four stages: pre-pre-disease, pre-disease, clinical disease, and death (see Figure 1). In the early stages of aging, the unseen asymptomatic abnormalities which arise have not yet reached the currently agreed upon clinical definitions of disease. Dr. Blagosklonny explains that “healthy” aging can be interchangeable with “pre-pre-disease” and “pre-disease.”
“‘Healthy’ aging has been called subclinical aging [33], slow aging [18,34] or decelerated aging [35], during which diseases are at the pre-disease or even pre-pre-disease stage.”
TREATING AGING
“Aging is easily treatable.”
Dr. Blagosklonny justifies this instinctually debatable claim simply by pointing out the ways in which humans are already defying aging. Calorie restriction, intermittent fasting, and the ketogenic diet have all been proven to slow aging and extend healthy lifespan. Certain nutrients, conventional drugs, and pharmacological therapies which have shown anti-aging properties include metformin, aspirin, statins, beta-blockers, ACE inhibitors, Angiotensin II receptor blockers (ARB), and (the anti-aging therapy Dr. Blagosklonny is most intrigued by) rapamycin, and other rapalogs.
“Rapamycin (Rapamune/Sirolimus), an allosteric inhibitor of mTOR complex 1 [63,66], is a natural rapalog as well as the most potent and best studied rapalog.”
Dr. Blagosklonny chronicles numerous studies over the years verifying rapamycin’s life- and health-extending effects in microorganisms, mice, humans, (non-human) primates, and even canines. Read more about the origin and applications of rapamycin.
PREVENTATIVE MEDICINE IS ANTI-AGING
“Gerontologists think of metformin as an anti-aging drug [121–130], and metformin can be combined with rapamycin [131].”
In addition to the use of rapamycin and other anti-aging drugs, current preventative medicine strategies can be seen as anti-aging therapies, and vice versa. Dr. Blagosklonny discusses examples of preventative medicine and anti-aging therapy. In one example, patients who present with pre-diabetic symptoms may be treated with metformin to decrease insulin-resistance in advance, in order to prevent diabetes in the future. This is an example of preventative medicine as an anti-aging therapy.
“Physicians generally do not think of metformin as an anti-aging drug, simply because it is expected that life will be extended, if diseases are prevented.”
CONCLUSION
“Aging does not need to be defined as a disease to be treated.”
In conclusion, Dr. Blagosklonny proposes that “aging can be treated as a pre-disease to prevent its progression to diseases.” He suggests that, to preventatively combat disease brought on by aging, rapamycin and conventional life-extending drugs can be combined with “modestly low-calorie/carbohydrates diet, physical exercise, and stress avoidance.”
Click here to read the full theory article, published by Aging.
Aging is an open-access journal that publishes research papers monthly in all fields of aging research and other topics. These papers are available to read at no cost to readers on Aging-us.com. Open-access journals offer information that has the potential to benefit our societies from the inside out and may be shared with friends, neighbors, colleagues, and other researchers, far and wide.
