Today, there are more than 50 million people around the world living with dementia. By 2050, it is expected that number will have tripled. The pharmaceutical industry has done plenty to help us slow our physical decline. Slowing our mental decline has proven much tougher.
In fact, research into Alzheimer’s treatments (the most common form of dementia) is known as “the graveyard of drug development”. Billions of dollars have been invested, thousands of clinical trials performed, and we remain a long way from a cure and with only a handful of drugs that will slow its progress.
This article takes us down to Mexico where a new generation of treatments are being trialled. These treatments rely on recent breakthroughs in gene sequencing and editing, and claim that rather than treating dementia directly, they instruct the patient’s brain to create two enzymes – telomerase and Klotho – that play a role in controlling cellular ageing. By boosting the amount of these enzymes, researchers hope they can rejuvenate cells in the brains and in doing so “turning back the clock and erasing age-related conditions such as Alzheimer’s”.
The company behind this trial, BioViva, has a fascinating history. When it was founded in 2015 it was the first company in to the world to try to use gene therapy to reverse ageing. It’s first patient was its founder and CEO, Liz Parrish, who performed a one-person experiment on herself in Bogota, Colombia, far from the oversight of American regulators.
This is a wild story of a company right on the cutting edge of medical technology, but also reads like the latest chapter in a story humans have been writing for thousands of years – searching for the fountain of youth.
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