Startup Company Aims to Reverse Aging in Dogs - Humans are Next

It takes a lot for a novel innovation or scientific breakthrough to make others think that “what Elon Musk is doing look fairly pedestrian.” That, however is exactly what famed Harvard biologist George Church might just do with the announcement that he is backing a new startup biogenic company that is focused on making history.

Harvard.edu MIT Technology Review reports that Church, who is also involved in bringing the extinct woolly mammoth back to life (an effort cited in Ben Mezrich’s excellent book ‘Woolly: The True Story to Revive One of History’s Most Iconic Extinct Creatures) and Rejuvenate Bio are working on transplanting the progress made in reversing the signs of aging made in worms and mice to Man’s best friend.

PX Here Theoretically, it seems likely that many of the symptoms and degenerative results of aging can be reversed. With theory in hand, Church has set about zeroing in on how the reprograming of an entity’s cells can turn the biologic clock back. The process was fairly easy when the subjects were worms or mice, who possess thousands or millions of types of cells. From the average primate to humans, a body is made up of trillions of types of specialized cells. Three years ago, Church spearheaded the use of CRISPR gene therapies in rolling back the biologic age of mice.

Such efforts do not impress some researchers. “I don’t think we are even near to being able to reverse the aging process as a whole in mammals,” says J. Pedro de Magalhães, a scientist at the of the University of Liverpool. Such naysaying had not deterred Church of Rejuvenate. The company had used more than 60 different gene therapies on tests on mice. Once satisfied with the results, Rejuvenate decided to move on to tests on dogs. “We have already done a bunch of trials in mice and we are doing some in dogs, and then we’ll move on to humans,” Church told the podcaster Rob Reid earlier this year.

Wikimedia Commons “Dogs are a market in and of themselves,” Church said during an event in Boston last week. “It’s not just a big organism close to humans. It’s something people will pay for, and the FDA process is much faster. We’ll do dog trials, and that’ll be a product, and that’ll pay for scaling up in human trials.” Church has announced that if he was certain the process of ‘de-aging’ was safe, he would volunteer himself as a guinea pig. Critics have voiced the fact that Rejuvenate has not publicly disclosed how the gene therapy exactly works.

MaxPixel MIT Technology Review writes, “To Rod Russell, editor of the website CavalierHealth.org, the offer is ‘pure hype.’ He says there is ‘absolutely no evidence’ for a way to make dogs younger and that even for pets, experimental drugs can’t be said to work before a study is complete. ‘No one would be naïve enough to contribute money on a promise that this treatment will make their Cavaliers younger. Or would they?’ he asks on his site.”

What do you think?