Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde proteins

Posted on 25. April 2009 by Vince Giuliano

A number of proteins in the body play dual roles with respect to longevity – negative roles in some circumstances and good roles under other circumstances.  I mention three substances in this regard: VEGF, telomerase and P16(Ink4a).

–         VEGF stands for vascular endothelial growth factor, a family of growth factors , signaling proteins that play predominant roles in angiogenesis, the proliferation of new blood vessels.    When the angiogenesis facilitates the viability and expansion of a cancer tumor, the result can be very bad for longevity.  Also, VEGF defeats an important avenue the body uses to defend itself against cancer by causing dendritic cells to not work properly.  Bad stuff! Under such circumstances the best thing to do is inhibit VEGF.  On the other hand, when the body is repairing an injury, promotion of VEGF could be good, in fact required for healing to take place. VEGF is important for maintaining glomerular and other capillary integrity(ref), for example.  A component of VEGF plays an important role in the survival of hematopoietic progenitor cells(ref), cells necessary for renewal of blood and other cells and longevity.  Good stuff!

–         Telomerase is a substance I have already discussed extensively, the substance that serves to enlongate the telomere caps at the end of chromosomes and therefore forestall replicative cell senescence.  Some longevity researchers have thought that telomerase activation could be a golden key to enabling life extension since cell senescence may be at the heart of many kinds of diseases including cancers as well as age-related organ degeneration.  Good stuff!  But wait.  Telomerase expression is turned on in most cancer cells, allowing them to replicate indefinitely and be immortal.  So, most research on telomerase today is focused on finding substances that turn its expression off as a way of making cancer cells mortal again(ref)(ref).  Bad stuff!

–         P16(INK4a) is also a substance I have discussed in my Anti-Aging Firewalls treatise.  On the one hand its increasing concentration with age provides a strengthening defense against cancers.  It works by driving cells into senescence through cell cycle arrest as an alternative to them possibly becoming malignant.  Good stuff!  On the other hand, it “induces an age-dependent decline in islet regenerative potential” and reduces the ability of stem cells to proliferate.  Bad stuff!  As I have said before, P16/Ink4a works together with the three other genes to articulate a process of simultaneously protecting against cancers and shutting down adult stem cell function and regenerative capacity in aging tissues.  Good stuff and bad stuff botIh!

These three Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde proteins illustrate a key point with regard to longevity research: many pathways which promote healthy cell proliferation and organ renewal also promote cancer expression.  Likewise, pathways important for inhibiting cancer proliferation also generally inhibit cell and organ renewal.  The key issue is how to achieve the renewal affects without triggering or promoting cancers.

About Vince Giuliano

Being a follower, connoisseur, and interpreter of longevity research is my latest career, since 2007. I believe I am unique among the researchers and writers in the aging sciences community in one critical respect. That is, I personally practice the anti-aging interventions that I preach and that has kept me healthy, young, active and highly involved at my age, now 93. I am as productive as I was at age 45. I don’t know of anybody else active in that community in my age bracket. In particular, I have focused on the importance of controlling chronic inflammation for healthy aging, and have written a number of articles on that subject in this blog. In 2014, I created a dietary supplement to further this objective. In 2019, two family colleagues and I started up Synergy Bioherbals, a dietary supplement company that is now selling this product. In earlier reincarnations of my career. I was Founding Dean of a graduate school and a full University Professor at the State University of New York, a senior consultant working in a variety of fields at Arthur D. Little, Inc., Chief Scientist and C00 of Mirror Systems, a software company, and an international Internet consultant. I got off the ground with one of the earliest PhD's from Harvard in a field later to become known as computer science. Because there was no academic field of computer science at the time, to get through I had to qualify myself in hard sciences, so my studies focused heavily on quantum physics. In various ways I contributed to the Computer Revolution starting in the 1950s and the Internet Revolution starting in the late 1980s. I am now engaged in doing the same for The Longevity Revolution. I have published something like 200 books and papers as well as over 430 substantive.entries in this blog, and have enjoyed various periods of notoriety. If you do a Google search on Vincent E. Giuliano, most if not all of the entries on the first few pages that come up will be ones relating to me. I have a general writings site at www.vincegiuliano.com and an extensive site of my art at www.giulianoart.com. Please note that I have recently changed my mailbox to vegiuliano@agingsciences.com.
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