starvation diet

the pint of science, brought to you by the faculty of science, charles university in prague, department of chemistry. sponsored by the pilsner brewery (plzeåˆskã½ prazdroj). ok. good evening, everybody. my name is jiå™ã­ mã­å¡ek,

starvation diet, i'm from here, from the department of organic chemistry, and i'd like to tell you a story today. i want to start of with this picture of this lady. her name is jeanne louise calment.

she's french as you can tell from the name. and in this picture she is 20 years old. and this picture was taken 1895. this picture, this is the same lady 100 years later, when she had her 121st birthday and the original thinking and the picture was taken in 1996. and she passed away a year later when she was 122. and she's the oldest, well-documented person that ever lived on earth,

and her story is quite amazing. she was born in south of france, in arles. she knew personally vincent van gogh, the painter. she was quite vital when she was 85. she took up fencing classes, and she rode bike until she was 100 years old. and the good news for the smokers in the audience is that she quit smoking when she was 117 years old. (laughter from the audience)

and she started smoking when she was 21! what i'm talking about is that it's truely exceptional in terms of longevity and the lifespan of humans, but i'm talking about it because we will for sure in the future we will see more stories like that because humans... life expectancy of humans is progressively increasing and we are staying in shape until older age. here you can see the evolution of life expectancy over the last 500 years, roughly. and you can see it was, for a long time it was oscillating around 40. 40 years,

and then in the mid-nineties the inception of modern science and technology it started growing rapidly and it's growing ever since. and this raises interesting questions like how far can we go? what are the limits, and can we actually slow down or even stop aging? or why do age at all, and what is the cost of aging?

and the simple answer to these questions is that we just don't know. in this table i just want to briefly mention that this is the list of the major causes of deaths in the states in 2014. and if you look at list and leave out the cronical respiratory diseases which is maybe due to smoking and unintentional injuries all of them the heart diseases, cancer, stroke and alzheimer's disease they are all age or aging-related and it's and it's projected that for instance alzheimer's disease will become in a couple of decades, this will become a major cause of, cause of death.

there is no cure for that. in the case of cancer: cancer is also on the rise. there's been some improvements in treatment, but still there... for instance, lung cancer which is the second most common cancer the life expe... the five-year life... not life expectency the five-year survival rate is around, somewhere between 5 and 10% and it has his not changed in the last 40 years. so, obviously there are new ideas needed,

and one of the of the think-outside-the-box ideas is that why just don't we slow down the aging? as i said, all these diseases are aging-related, so, if we slow down the aging process, then we can basically target all the diseases at once. it'd be sort of a systemic approach to somehow manage these diseases. however, the obvious question is: how do we go about it? how do we slow down the aging process? and here i have a proverb, an old czech proverb

that you might know from your grandmas. i didn't find the right english, proper english equivalent but it basically means that if you don't eat too much and if you don't drink and eat too much, you will live long. that's basically the message. and actually, it is the first... (from audience: i think our sponsors might object.) okay, if you don't eat too much. this is actually the first time a proven approach to

slow down aging and increase the life expectancy. it is now called the 'dietary restriction' or 'caloric restriction' and for instance in rats, if you feed rats with just 70% of the food they would normally eat you can increase the life expectancy by up to 50% which is pretty remarkable. we still don't know what the exact mechanism of this of this dietary restriction phenomenon is but there's some pathways that are popping up

that seems to be important in this in this phenotype, and here are two of them that have been identified recently and it's growth hormone/insulin-like or gf1 signaling pathway and and mtor signaling pathway, and for instance you can you can genetically - in mice - you can genetically engineer that in the way that they actually express a lower levels of the overall of these two pathways,

if you suppress the... if you decrease the signalling of these pathways, this leads to a life extension phenotype. and in mice, if you down-regulate the growth hormone again, you can go up to 50% increase in the survival, which is, if you translate into humans, this will be like extra 40 years on top of the 80 years that is the average life-expectancy. who wouldn't want that, right? and after all she is is another pathway

this the fact of the community and the flowing down eg and interesting trend interesting lee there are already drugs approved all the market that seems to be seen on these fat reason why there is performing soon here which is which is the drug for type 2 diabetes and recognizing which is significantly more flex if it's not for formulas depression

when when you get a transplant and we'll get recognized in order to prevent rejection of the way and these two grassy in in animal models this is too many of the effect of the doctor restrictions so if you you feed him to any more models you can significantly slow down aging and extend lifespan of the

model organisms and it was shown in recognizing monkeys and two molecules there now actually hey into a clinical trials on humans i think the remaining critical priority start this year and the image 24 for the very first time that aims through just come up with a pill that will slow down payments and we will see how to play out hopefully be

okay you doing over this this is singing woman in modern nation and already she's a countess bathory probably you probably know and the story is much less obviously the first lady she was she was one of the most prolific serial killer in the medial europe and is estimated fish kill 200 of her male or female servants in the castle chapters that

which is now in recently right ah the legend says that she was taking off a lot of the young young female servants in order reading three taking review in order to state just yeah and it is just a legend of course but this is crazy in this creates sounds there are some recent report of a recent reports that you can take an old mouse

and her black or blood and mouse is going to 22 an effect like muscular vascular remodeling or your genetic is and this is associated with the improvement in the computer skills like learning learning skills and memory so obviously there's there's something going on with this adjusting to the older members of the sacrificial

although all i know is that is exactly the ice yes they're like really unexpected and surprising actually exciting things going on now the aging research and with this is a success that the brains or the brain cells of these mice they have in turn intrinsic capability of free renewal regulation just of origination

just need to give them the right right trigger and we don't know about the triggers are but but it's is really exciting what the what are you anything in my life we are trying to be our cabinets so we are trying to develop tools chemical tools and water for the enzymes that are believed to be involved in the pathways

really aging and one of the enzymes one of the enzymes in fact great pace wait out we use the song time back to where you have any proteins inside kings and they can get past with rates over reactive oxygen species and they they oxidize personal info side of the possible fix this okay damage to revert it and restore natural

gentleness and i there's a lot of cameras in the audience you probably noticed that for chiral witness list as i'm coming over and over in nature is involved two glasses of the river base a issues under our feet trees introduce the car and when we enter this killed when i started my life last year it was it wasn't it was no way to mother

furthermore why is it important i was going to wait for the energy that was the element there was a report later if you take those off the flags which is a common aging model and the lifespan its lifespan of the wild-type you agree that the other time is eight and i'm almost double the average lifestyle the of the roofline and you survived with you if

you overexpress the beat and the lyrics are selected there is no effect so that when the lifestyle is obviously very very very present in fact my place this life is not like this old drawing this is my own artist fictional and there's no way to the people they were going to my to the activity of better of these and related to lunch or dinner so we got

to do that your time and we you came up with this this molecule call xo 4y again you can find the activity of the eight release enzymes just simply the we're gonna change here the right girl and also varies are associated to change in fourth so this is the very first row and then moving target this time we also show

that can monitor the inciting people using the using this bacterial cells in most people's know that's the stress about whether you have to hire professional and actually we took a population of bacteria and startup probe and images the microscope and from these include this is mark friends and that its again the first first first role in

and get more organized and miss the obvious future direction is to using all the periodic or human cells and would like to do is it like they're all the essay for pop library screening you would have cell probe and remember amount and we'll be looking for a compound that increases the video in time and the obvious question them with

such as like one who is that's if you can actually pharmacologically recalculate the last extension phenotype that will see with a genetically engineer organic and extended perhaps two metal sore or or maybe humans and

maybe sometime in the future we'll just stick with your day and really long and prosper

thanks for your attention