Public Health Ethics Paper (accepted for publication)

I was very pleased to learn today that my latest journal submission titled "From Sanitation Science to Geroscience:  Public Health Must Transcend ‘Folkbiology’" was accepted for publication in Public Health Ethics.  The abstract: 

Folkbiology refers to people’s everyday understanding of the biological world.  The early twentieth century pioneers of public health C-E.A Winslow (1877-1957), and his mentor H. Biggs (1859-1923), conceptualized public health as the “purchasable” science of preventing disease and death from unfavourable economic and living conditions.  Their ideas were foundational in shaping public health’s strategy of a ‘war against disease’ (Winslow, 1903), a strategy that was very successfully in preventing the early-life mortality risks from infectious diseases, and was eventually extended to combating the chronic diseases of late life (like cancer). However, the initial framing of public health, through the lens of sanitation science, was predicated upon folkbiological premises that geroscience must abate in order to direct public health interventions towards the goal of improving the quality of life for older persons in the twenty-first century.  Three folkbiological premises of sanitation science’s “war against disease” are identified and critiqued: (1) the belief that health is the ‘normal’ condition of the human mechanism, and disease ‘unnecessary’; (2) the belief that the proximate causes of disease are the only modifiable risk factors public health interventions can alter; and (3) the belief that the rate of biological aging is universal. 

Cheers, 

Colin

AI, Aging and Drug Development

Nature Communication has this interesting article on the potential of machine learning algorithms for novel drug development targeting aging.  The abstract:

Cellular senescence is a stress response involved in ageing and diverse disease processes including cancer, type-2 diabetes, osteoarthritis and viral infection. Despite growing interest in targeted elimination of senescent cells, only few senolytics are known due to the lack of well-characterised molecular targets. Here, we report the discovery of three senolytics using cost-effective machine learning algorithms trained solely on published data. We computationally screened various chemical libraries and validated the senolytic action of ginkgetin, periplocin and oleandrin in human cell lines under various modalities of senescence. The compounds have potency comparable to known senolytics, and we show that oleandrin has improved potency over its target as compared to best-in-class alternatives. Our approach led to several hundred-fold reduction in drug screening costs and demonstrates that artificial intelligence can take maximum advantage of small and heterogeneous drug screening data, paving the way for new open science approaches to early-stage drug discovery. 

Cheers, 

Colin

Video abstract for my Aging Cell Article

 

Morality is not declining

Nature news has a nice news piece on this recent study on the (mis)perceptions of the decline of morality.  A sample from the study:

People believe that morality is declining. Is it? Societies keep (or at least leave) reasonably good records of extremely immoral behaviour such as slaughter and conquest, slavery and subjugation or murder and rape, and careful analyses of those historical records strongly suggest that these objective indicators of immorality have decreased significantly over the last few centuries15,16. On average, modern humans treat each other far better than their forebears ever did—which is not what one would expect if honesty, kindness, niceness and goodness had been decreasing steadily, year after year, for millennia. Although there are no similarly objective historical records of everyday morality—of how often people offer their seats to an elderly person, give directions to a lost tourist or help their neighbour fix a fence—there are subjective measures of such things.

....Participants in the foregoing studies believed that morality has declined, and they believed this in every decade and in every nation we studied. They believed the decline began somewhere around the time they were born, regardless of when that was, and they believed it continues to this day. They believed the decline was a result both of individuals becoming less moral as they move through time and of the replacement of more moral people by less moral people. And they believed that the people they personally know and the people who lived before they did are exceptions to this rule. About all these things, they were almost certainly mistaken. One reason they may have held these mistaken beliefs is that they may typically have encountered more negative than positive information about the morality of contemporaries whom they did not personally know, and the negative information may have faded more quickly from memory or lost its emotional impact more quickly than the positive information did, leading them to believe that people today are not as kind, nice, honest or good as once upon a time they were.

Cheers, 

Colin

Former Ballerina With Alzheimer's Performs 'Swan Lake' Dance

A very moving video!

Cheers, 

Colin

Gene therapy for muscular dystrophy

Nature news reports on the upcoming FDA decision regarding the approval of the first gene therapy for muscular dystrophy.  A sample:

DMD seems like a straightforward target for gene therapy. The disease affects boys almost exclusively, because they have only one copy of the X chromosome, where the dystrophin gene is located; girls with a disease-causing variant have a backup copy. Replacing even some working protein in muscle cells should reverse the disease, or at least halt its progression.

But developing that replacement has proved difficult. Dystrophin is the longest gene in the human genome and is much too large to fit into the adeno-associated virus (AAV) vector commonly used to deliver gene therapies. Sarepta and several other companies have got around this by designing a gene that encodes just the most important parts of the protein (see 'Big genes in small packages'). The resulting ‘microdystrophin’ is only partly effective.

Cheers, 

Colin

Aging Cell Paper (now out)

My latest article entitled "Geroscience and Climate Science:  Oppositional or Complementary?" is now available on the "early view" of Aging Cell.  Here is the abstract:

Two of this century's most significant public health challenges are climate change and healthy aging. The future of humanity will be both warmer and older than it is today. Is it socially responsible, in a warming planet of a population exceeding 8 billion people, for science to aspire to develop gerotherapeutic drugs that aim to reduce the burden of aging-related diseases that may also increase lifespan? This question is the “elephant in the room” for geroscience advocacy. Science communication concerning what constitutes empirically valid and morally defensible ways of navigating the dual public health predicaments of climate change and healthy aging must be sensitive to both the interdependence of the environment (including planetary health) and the mechanisms of aging, as well as the common (mis)perceptions about the potential conflict between the goals of climate science and geroscience. Geroscience advocacy can transcend narratives of intergenerational conflict by highlighting the shared aspirations of climate science and geroscience, such as the goals of promoting health across the lifespan, redressing health disparities, and improving the economic prospects of current and future generations.

Cheers, 

Colin