Just a few doses of an experimental drug can reverse age-related declines in memory and mental flexibility in mice, according to a new study by UC San Francisco scientists.
The drug, called ISRIB, has already been shown in laboratory studies to restore memory function months after traumatic brain injury (TBI), reverse cognitive impairments in Down Syndrome, prevent noise-related hearing loss, fight certain types of prostate cancer and even enhance cognition in healthy animals.
In the new study, published Dec. 1, 2020, in the open-access journal eLife, researchers showed rapid restoration of youthful cognitive abilities in aged mice, accompanied by a rejuvenation of brain and immune cells that could help explain improvements in brain function.
“ISRIB’s extremely rapid effects show for the first time that a significant component of age-related cognitive losses may be caused by a kind of reversible physiological ‘blockage’ rather than more permanent degradation,” said Susanna Rosi, Ph.D., Lewis and Ruth Cozen Chair II and professor in the departments of Neurological Surgery and of Physical Therapy and Rehabilitation Science.
“The data suggest that the aged brain has not permanently lost essential cognitive capacities, as was commonly assumed, but rather that these cognitive resources are still there but have been somehow blocked, trapped by a vicious cycle of cellular stress,” added Peter Walter, Ph.D., a professor in the UCSF Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. “Our work with ISRIB demonstrates a way to break that cycle and restore cognitive abilities that had become walled off over time.”
The drug, called ISRIB, has already been shown in laboratory studies to restore memory function months after traumatic brain injury (TBI), reverse cognitive impairments in Down Syndrome, prevent noise-related hearing loss, fight certain types of prostate cancer and even enhance cognition in healthy animals.
It does seem pretty far reaching (or maybe far fetched!), but sometimes there's an common element underlying various conditions that can explain things.
I'm going to send the university's press release to my friend who is a medical researcher. Part of her research involves examining changes in the eye that result from traumatic brain injury. She has been studying TBI for some time and may have some insights.
-------------------------------- When the world wearies and society ceases to satisfy, there is always the garden - Minnie Aumônier
Posts: 38217 | Location: Somewhere in the middle | Registered: 19 January 2010
My friend's response to my query about the research..
quote:
It passes the sniff test, with a few caveats:
1) the work was funded by NIH (there was a smiley here)
2) the author whose lab the work was performed in won the Lasker Award, which is considered the last step on the way to a nobel prize
3) eLife is a new journal, whose stated purpose is to publish good papers before review. They only accept 15% of submissions, and say they are in competition with Nature and Science. But their impact factor is much lower than those journals, so they spend a lot of time arguing how the impact factor (determined by # of citations their papers receive) is unimportant. I'm surprised they didn't submit work of this magnitude to Science or Nature.
4) Mice are way different than humans and even rats, and a number of successful preclinical trials run with mice were completely unsuccessful in humans. Why didn't they use rats? (there was another smiley here)
(Bias alert....my friend works with rats in her research....)
-------------------------------- When the world wearies and society ceases to satisfy, there is always the garden - Minnie Aumônier
Posts: 38217 | Location: Somewhere in the middle | Registered: 19 January 2010
