What are zombie cells and how to escape from them
Miscellaneous / / August 01, 2022
They do not bite, but they prevent us from living longer and staying healthy.
Scientists still do not fully understand why we age and how exactly this process starts. But it is known for sure that zombie cells play an important role in this. Young molecular biologist Niklas Brandborg, in his book The Mystery of the Ageless Jellyfish, tells how experts are investigating this phenomenon.
The book was published in Russian by MIF publishing house. Lifehacker publishes an excerpt from the second part.
In many tombs in ancient Greece, skeletons are littered with heavy stones and other objects, as if the Greeks were trying to prevent their dead from rising.
Let's go even further, to the cradle of history, Mesopotamia, where the goddess Ishtar makes a frightening promise: "I will let the dead rise and eat the living." Nightmares about the risen dead - zombies - have come down to our time.
And for them there is a place in this book dedicated to the fight against aging. But not because I will help you rise from the dead. No, no, we'll talk about smaller objects. About some of your cells that become the living dead - zombies. […]
What are zombie cells and why are they dangerous?
Scientists call the process of zombie cell formation cellular senescence. These cells seem to freeze. This can happen when cells are damaged or when their genetic aglets - telomeres - disappear. Typically, this leads to cell suicide. But sometimes the cell just refuses to die and becomes zombie. Such cells remain in the tissues and release harmful substances into them.
Zombie cells are a major problem for aging scientists right now. Despite the fact that such cells are always present in our tissues in small numbers, it turns out that they cause very significant harm: because of them, we age.
In experiments on mice, the scientists isolated zombie cells and then transplanted them into active young mice. They were healthy and vigorous, but after transplantation they quickly lost their strength. What surprised the scientists was that the mice did not recover even six months after transplantation, although zombie cells do not live that long.
It turned out that due to the substances emitted by them, normal healthy cells also turn into zombies, and this process spreads throughout the body like an infection. The half-dead cells don't bite anyone, as real zombies are said to do, but they act much more effectively, capturing the entire body.
Of course, the unfortunate mice that are transplanted with zombie cells die earlier than usual. And the more zombie cells are transplanted, the faster this happens.
Other experiments in mice have definitively confirmed the important role that zombie cells play in the aging process.
Scientists have bred mice with a special genetic mutation, in every cell of which is like a bomb. This bomb only activates in zombie cells, and scientists have figured out how to control it with a special substance. Now they can kill zombie cells if the need arises.
During the experiments, the mice were divided into two groups. One group was left alone. In the second group, after the mice reached adulthood, figuratively speaking, they launched a bomb twice a week. It was necessary to do this, because zombie cells appear all the time. To get rid of them, you need to remove them again and again.
The scientists then compared the two groups. It turned out that the mice that had their zombie cells removed lived on average 24-27% longer than their counterparts, and they looked and felt much better.
Why Fighting Zombie Cells Is Hard
As we age, the number of zombie cells in our body increases. Accordingly, the risk of dying or acquiring age-related diseases also increases.
This does not mean that the body does not need zombie cells at all: it turned out that they play a very important role, for example, in the process of human development, as well as in wound healing. The problem - we repeat - is rather that with age, the body ceases to effectively get rid of them. If everything in the body works as it should, the cell immune system will just come and eat the zombie cage. However, as is the case with intracellular cleaning - autophagy - the ability of the immune system to get rid of unwanted elements fades with age.
Unfortunately, we don't have a genetic bomb that can kill zombie cells like the mice in the above experiment. But scientists are coming up with other options. A special drug called a senolytic can specifically kill zombie cells.
When destroying zombie cells, the most important thing is to be extremely accurate. Zombies, like terrorists, hide among the civilian population. If you shoot at random, you'll hit an innocent. And the number of normal cells in the body always exceeds the number of zombie cells, so the risk is high. That’s why it’s so difficult—although possible—to invent senolytics.
At the moment, based on senolytics, a number of medicines are being developed. They act in different ways, but most of them have the same goal - to force zombie cells to commit suicide. This is what a damaged cell usually does: in the last 24 hours, between 50 and 70 billion cells in your body have committed suicide. They do this in order not to degenerate into cancer cells, not to harm surrounding tissues, or to stop the infection. In other words, cells are constantly sacrificing themselves for others.
As we have already found out, zombie cells do not commit such suicide. They slow down this process. And how to solve this problem? Disengage brake.
What remedies against zombie cells are already known
D+Q
One of the most powerful anti-zombie drugs we've come up with is the combination of dasatinib and quercetin.
Dasatinib is a real medicine used to treat some forms of leukemia. Quercetin is used as a dietary supplement: it is polyphenol, present, for example, in cabbage and onions. In mice given these two substances, the zombie cells die and the mice live longer.
However, it must be admitted that this is not an easy path so far. It would seem like a good idea to limit yourself to the soft food supplement "quercetin", but, unfortunately, it does not work alone. Perhaps the whole point is in the synergy of D + Q, or each of the substances kills only certain aged cells.
Fizetin
Quercetin from the D+Q combination is found in vegetables. In search of its analogue that can fight zombie cells, scientists have examined thousands of plant substances and found fisetin.
Elderly mice fed fisetin with food lived a little longer, even if they were about 75 years old in terms of human age at that time.
Fisetin is found, for example, in strawberries, apples and grapes, so it is easy to get it. But in order for the volume of fisetin to approach the one given to mice, you need to eat quite a lot of berries: at least a couple of kilograms of strawberries. Here's your excuse.
What can you do yourself
We are still at the very early stage of the fight against zombie cells. In this very slow and long process, drug development is happening very quickly, right before our eyes.
There is a lot of clinical research going on right now, and over the next two years we will know a lot more about zombie cells. I hope that in the end there will be a real cure for aging.
But until then, we can fight the zombie cells on our own. For example, experimenting with nutritional supplements. Yes, while we only have limited information about how effective these supplements are, they are not always safe to use. If you prefer - and rightly so - methods without side effects (which, by the way, have other positive points besides killing zombie cells), you can try the following.
- Eat fruits and vegetables. The two best weapons against zombie cells (quercetin and fisetin) are fruit and vegetable pigments. But if you eat less than an elephant, you won't be able to get enough of them from food, according to research. And yet, it is quite possible that there will be a positive effect from the use.
- Sleep enough. Studies have shown that the diurnal rhythm hormone melatonin helps zombie cells to recover. Melatonin is not just a sleep hormone, as it is often described, and yet healthy sleep has never hurt anyone.
- Avoid infections. Cells turn into zombies due to common infections. Flavonoids, such as quercetin, can be used to fight certain infections, such as influenza type A.
This book will bring you closer to answering questions about how to age without aging, how to live longer and stay healthy for the rest of your days. Together with scientists, you will try to figure out what the secret is jellyfishwho know how to reverse their age, how naked mole rats resist cancer and what kind of bacteria are functionally immortal. And all this is based on laboratory research!
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