One CAN teach an old dog new tricks

... if you give it the right drugs!!!

Scientists and researchers from the University of Texas (Dallas) have recently demonstrate a potential new neurological drug which prevents newly born brain cells from dying. One may not appreciate this discovery (as I didn't!) until one realizes that when a number of brain cells are born the typical survival rate into maturity is less than 40%!!! By directly injecting the chemical they are calling P7C3 into the rats brains, they have dramatically increased the survival rate of neuron cells and shown several other positive results including:

• Corrects hippocampal deficits in healthy mice (i.e., long-term memory, spatial skills?)
• Allows rats to continue learning well into old-age
• May prevent age-related neurodegenerative diseases (e.g., Alzheimer's, etc.)
• May also prevent age-related physically degenerative conditions

This last point is demonstrated by the fact that, not only did the older P7C3-quaffing rats learn and remember better than their placebo-quaffing counterparts, they also showed higher body weights and less frailty as they aged!!! This may be because the drug works on the mitochondria of cells, which are not exclusive to those in the brain. The authors are quick to point out that they have not yet identified the mechanism, only the results (as commonly comes first with biological research!).

What is even more remarkable about this work is that it is the result of a combinatorial or a broad screening research method.... What a colleague of mine at a USAF research facility calls "The Dumb Guy Approach". That is, they eschewed the traditional approach of working up a theoretical mechanism ab initio (from first principles) and choosing a drug accordingly--this process is akin to carefully crafting a perfectly aerodynamic dart and throwing it at the center of your dartboard a.k.a. the hypothesis. Instead they took a library of 1000 possible chemicals (suggested by theoretical chemists who pared down a list of 200,000 to a fairly representative sample) and tried ALL of them--akin to taking a giant box full of darts and throwing them all at the board at once, then checking to see which one stuck. And it WORKED!

Now if you're excited about this drug and want to know when it'll become available, hold your horses. It is not even out of the animal testing phase, which means it will have to be picked up by a drug company and the research effort will be handed off from academia to industry before human trials can begin. Then it will probably be several years (3-5) before the FDA can pass it through the approval process (assuming the results are just as good for humans!). But it certainly bodes well for future generations!!!

Link to news article
Link to research article
(^ for those who can access the journal Cell, by institutional subscription or otherwise)