Translator: Daniele Locatelli Reviewer: Ms Buffard's students
Hello.
So, what you see is the painting of the "Fountain of youth".
So you can see people entering,
old people, thrilled, entering on one side,
going into these healing waters
and then emerging on the other side, rejuvenated.
And this is what people have been dreaming for centuries -
to find this fountain of youth.
So, my work actually has to do with pretty much the same thing.
I am a biologist and I study longevity
and looking for the Fountain of Youth.
So, how did I get to be interested in it?
I was born in a family of two scientists, so both my parents are physicists.
And from the beginning I knew I wanted to be a scientist,
but I wanted to be different from my parents.
So I chose biology.
Again, I didn't know which area of biology I would want to study
and when I was a sophomore in college,
I was born in Russia, in Saint Petersburg of former Soviet Union,
I heard a lecture by a guest professor and he spoke about aging research
and how cells age.
And it fascinated me so much that I decided:
"Ok, this is what I want to do when I become independent,
after I go through all this, this is what I want to do".
And why is aging so fascinating?
So, now the biggest killer of people in developed countries is aging.
Of course, people die from heart disease,
from cancer, stroke.
But all these maladies happen as we age,
so they are the result of aging.
So if instead of treating the cause, treating age diseases individually,
we slow down aging,
so we can take care of all of these diseases
and this is what is amazing about it.
So, then it took me many years, studying, PhD and then post-doc
until I was able to found my own laboratories
and start approaching this big problem.
And I wanted to do something different from what everybody does
because the classical way would be to take a fruit fly or a mouse
and find a mutant that maybe lives a little bit longer and study it.
I wanted to do something different. I wanted to go look out in nature.
We have animals that live so much longer
and then they have relatives that live short.
So for example here, these are my favourite animals.
these are rodents, I love rodents very much.
And here you can see mouse, rat
and underneath in red text is their maximum life span.
Some of them are very short lived
and these are the ones that most scientists focus on.
But you have animals that are very long-lived,
capibara, beaver, squirrel or naked mole rat,
which is my favourite.
They can live so much longer.
If we can find what makes naked mole rat
live ten times longer than the mouse,
then this is something we can use to make humans live longer.
So, here I would like to introduce to you
my favourite animal, naked mole rat.
The real thing is actually much smaller, this is just a stuffed toy.
The real thing is about this big,
like a mouse, but they live ten times longer than mice, up to 32 years.
And I am going to show you a little video from our laboratory,
so you can see naked mole rat and I think there is inner beauty
in these animals.
People think they're ugly, I don't think so.
And I hope you will agree with me after you see.
So these are truly amazing animals, they live so long
and they don't get sicker as they age.
They never develop cancer, they don't develop age-related diseases,
they don't develop heart disease, arteriosclerosis
or these changes in the brain like an Alzheimer disease.
They pretty much don't age. So we decided: "Let's find out why".
And after a lot of trial and error,
we were able to actually come down to a single molecule,
which is something that's called hyaluronan.
Here you can see a petri dish
and this is where cells from naked mole rat were growing
and the student is holding up a Pasteur pipette
and pretty much taking a goo out of the petri dish,
because cells from naked mole rat secrete some kind of gooey substance;
and we found that this substance is called hyaluronan or hyaluronic acid
and this is what protects naked mole rat from cancer.
So this molecule somehow prevents naked mole rat cells from forming tumours
and it can also, through other properties, contribute to longevity of naked mole rat.
Human cells also make this molecule but it's much shorter.
In the naked mole rat, it is very very long. It's different.
So the question is: "Can we take it from naked mole rat
and can it benefit other species?"
Because maybe it is only something that is good for naked mole rats.
So this little puppy is a Shar-Pei dog
and they were bred by humans to have these skin folds.
And humans didn't know what is inside the skin folds in the beginning.
Now we know.
Those skin folds are filled with hyaluronan, so the same molecule,
and when we looked at veterinary records and the incidence of cancer in dogs,
it turns out that Shar-Pei dogs
have significantly lower risk of several cancers.
So inadvertently,
people selected these dogs to overproduce hyaluronan
and now the dogs are protected from cancer.
So that was really something exciting.
Perhaps we can also use it for humans.
So now let's look at something other than naked mole rat.
So, grey squirrel.
This is not an exotic animal, you probably all have seen grey squirrels
and many people hate them
because these squirrels compete with native European red squirrels.
So people hate them and so forth.
But it's a fascinating animal because they can live up to 24 years,
which is again amazingly long life span.
So we started to study grey squirrels, how do they do it?
And we were surprised to find
that grey squirrel cells do not produce this very long hyaluronan.
So they do it completely differently.
We are actually now pretty close to finding out the mechanism
but again, what I want to say here is it's different from naked mole rat.
Squirrels chose completely different pathway to longevity.
And now, another animal I would like to introduce to you,
not a rodent, it's a bowhead whale.
So, whales are amazing.
Bowhead whale can live up to 211 years.
And how did people find out?
Because some whales were hunted
and they had pieces of harpoons lodged into their tissues
and it was possible to date those pieces
and say, "Well, these animals can live 200 years".
And another thing that's amazing about whales: you all know they're huge.
So now, the risk of getting cancerous growth
depends on the number of cells.
Because a tumour grows out of one cell mutating.
So imagine now, a whale is 2000 times heavier than a human.
It has 2000 times more cells in its body.
So its risk of developing a tumour is 2000 times greater.
You would say, "Why don't they just die in infancy from cancer?" No they don't!
Because they have mechanisms to protect them from cancer.
And these are mechanisms that are better than ours
because they're so much bigger than us, so they need more.
And now we are working with samples
that we are taking from whales and we study their cells.
And again they don't go through hyaluronan pathway.
They don't use the pathway that grey squirrels chose,
they chose something else.
So, again, we are finding something completely unexpected
and something that humans do not have.
What would we like to do?
This is the summary:
we want to take those mechanism, those adaptations
from that animal - the intelligent naked mole rat -
and then bring them to humans.
And in case of hyaluronan, this is really a success story.
Because this is one molecule,
so we were able to identify a single molecule that we can take,
and we can pretty much apply to people.
So hyaluronan is already used by humans
although, not this very long version that we found in naked mole rat,
so it's a shorter version.
But it is used in arthritis patients, injections into knee,
it is used in cosmetic products...
So it something that can be readily applied
and now we are developing ways of how it could be used in people,
this very long version which may be protecting from cancer
and, we hope, maybe promoting longevity.
This is a real success story, but there is so much more out there,
because, as I showed you, there are so many long-lived species,
and each one of them evolves something different.
You will say, "Well, human is a long-lived species,
so why don't we study humans?"
Well, but in humans, yes, we have a very good mechanism
that takes us through life, into our 80s and 90s
if we are lucky and maybe 100s.
But these mechanisms may already be sort of maximized, optimized
and we, perhaps, cannot drastically improve them,
but if we take something from those other species,
very obscure creatures and borrow them,
so we can benefit and hopefully
we can extend human life-span significantly.
So, to summarize, what I would like to say,
this is a very exciting time to do aging research
and I believe that it is possible to extend human life span,
it is possible to keep people healthy for much longer
and cure all those diseases of aging,
and, well, I am very excited doing this research
and I believe that real discoveries
lie into looking into long-lived species in the wild.
There are so many of them
and there is so much to be found over there.
So, I am very optimitic about human life
that we can live so much longer and healtier.
Thank you.
(Applause)