Prime Time: A New Look At Aging

Nanotechnology and Aging, Part 3

We talked earlier about how patents are a measurement of how quickly knowledge is increasing, and brought you the good news that almost 25% of all patents regarding nanotechnology were filed in the last year alone. It's good news because nanotechnology has a big part to play in making the aging process easier, simpler and slower.

The other way to measure the advancement of human knowledge is by looking at academic publications. This gives a rough idea of the problems that scientists are trying to solve--if nobody is researching laser treatment for hangnails, there won't be any discoveries regarding this.

Current research that involves nanotechnology and aging is focused on drug delivery and vaccines. There are scientists working on a vaccine that would protect against Alzheimer's Disease, for example. Others are trying to make nano-robots that will clean arteries the way a Roomba cleans your carpet. Here are some other areas of research found at Scirus.com:

 
1. Nanotechnology for regenerative medicine: nanomaterials for stem cell imaging.
Solanki, Aniruddh / Kim, John D / Lee, Ki-Bum , Nanomedicine (London, England),  3 (4), p.567-578, Aug 2008
...cells. The application of nanotechnology to stem cell biology would...challenges in regenerative medicine, the current applications...and further potential of nanotechnology approaches towards regenerative medicine, focusing mainly on magnetic...
  
2. The Sackler Colloquium on promises and perils in nanotechnology for medicine.
Austin, Robert H / Lim, Shuang-fang , Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America,  105 (45), p.17217-17221, Nov 2008
The Sackler Colloquium entitled "Nanomaterials in Biology and Medicine: Promises and Perils" was held on April 10-11, 2007. We have been able...an example of this new class of nanomaterials with potential use in medicine and biology.
 
3. Nanotechnology in regenerative medicine: the materials side.
Engel, Elisabeth / Michiardi, Alexandra / Navarro, Melba / Lacroix, Damien / Planell, Josep A , Trends in biotechnology,  26 (1), p.39-47, Jan 2008
...a desirable behaviour. Nanotechnology is not only an excellent...systems. The application of nanotechnology to regenerative medicine is a wide issue and this...only focus on aspects of nanotechnology relevant to biomaterials...
 
4. Nanotechnology applications in medicine.
Angeli, Elena / Buzio, Renato / Firpo, Giuseppe / Magrassi, Raffaella / Mussi, Valentina / Repetto, Luca / Valbusa, Ugo , Tumori,  94 (2), p.206-215, Mar 2008
In recent years there has been a rapid increase in nanotechnology applications to medicine in order to prevent and treat diseases in the human body. The established and future applications have the potential to dramatically...
 
5. Convergence of nanotechnology and cardiovascular medicine : progress and emerging prospects.
Iverson, Nicole / Plourde, Nicole / Chnari, Evangelia / Nackman, Gary B / Moghe, Prabhas V , BioDrugs : clinical immunotherapeutics, biopharmaceuticals and gene therapy,  22 (1), p.1-10, Jan 2008
...range, collectively referred to as 'nanotechnology', are increasingly being applied to...pathophysiological problems in cardiovascular medicine. Analytical techniques based on high-resolution...elucidate cardiovascular pathology. Nanotechnology has also significantly impacted diagnostic...
 
6. In vivo single molecular imaging and sentinel node navigation by nanotechnology for molecular targeting drug-delivery systems and tailor-made medicine.
Takeda, Motohiro / Tada, Hiroshi / Higuchi, Hideo / Kobayashi, Yoshio / Kobayashi, Masaki / Sakurai, Yuu / Ishida, Takanori / Ohuchi, Noriaki , Breast cancer (Tokyo, Japan),  15 (2), p.145-152, Jan 2008
The recent advances in nanotechnology have a great potential to improve the...Future innovation in cancer imaging by nanotechnology and novel measurement technology will...medical science for the development of medicine.
 
7. Dendrimers in medical nanotechnology.
Barrett, Tristan / Ravizzini, Gregory / Choyke, Peter L / Kobayashi, Hisataka , IEEE engineering in medicine and biology magazine : the quarterly magazine of the Engineering in Medicine & Biology Society,  28 (1), p.12-22, Jan 2009

8. Plant viruses as biotemplates for materials and their use in nanotechnology.
Young, Mark / Willits, Debbi / Uchida, Masaki / Douglas, Trevor , Annual review of phytopathology,  46, p.361-384, Jan 2008
...functionalized to produce multifunctional biotemplates. In this review, we examine the recent advances in using plant virus capsids as biotemplates for nanomaterials and their potential for applications in nanotechnology, especially medicine.
 
9. Nanoparticles in medicine: therapeutic applications and developments.
Zhang, L / Gu, F X / Chan, J M / Wang, A Z / Langer, R S / Farokhzad, O C , Clinical pharmacology and therapeutics,  83 (5), p.761-769, May 2008
Nanotechnology is the understanding and control of matter generally in the 1-100 nm dimension range. The application of nanotechnology to medicine, known as nanomedicine, concerns the use of precisely engineered materials at this length scale to develop novel...
 
10. Nanotechnology: a new frontier in virus detection in clinical practice.
Abraham, A M / Kannangai, R / Sridharan, G , Indian journal of medical microbiology,  26 (4), p.297-301, Oct 2008
Researchers are expanding the applications of nanotechnology in the field of medicine since mid-2000. These technologies include...general and viral infections in particular. Nanotechnology is a significant advance in molecular diagnostics...

If nanotechnology can fight aging, there will be people who are against it

There really are people who think life was better in the good ol' days, and who think that messing with Mother Nature is really wrong.

Nanotechnology will mess with Mother Nature, more than anything we've done before. It has the capacity to completely rebuild our bodies, one atom at a time. Some scientists think a baby born today could potentially live forever. Listen to Ray Kurzweil and Dr. Terry Grossman:

Immortality is Within Our Grasp

"Do we have the knowledge and the tools today to live forever? If all science and technology development suddenly stopped, the answer would have to be no. We do have the means to dramatically slow disease and the aging process far more than most people realize, but we do not yet have all the techniques we need to indefinitely extend human life. However, it is clear that far from halting, the pace of scientific and technological discovery is accelerating.

According to models that Ray has created, our paradigm-shift rate - the rate of technical progress - is doubling every decade, and the capability (price performance, capacity, and speed) of specific information technologies is doubling each year. So the answer to our question is actually a definitive yes - the knowledge exists, if aggressively applied, for you to slow aging and disease processes to such a degree that you can be in good health and good spirits when the more radical life-extending and life-enhancing technologies become available over the next couple of decades.

Longevity expert and gerontologist Aubrey de Grey uses the metaphor of maintaining a house to explain this key concept. How long does a house last? The answer obviously depends on how well you take care of it. If you do nothing, the roof will spring a leak before long, water and the elements will invade, and eventually the house will disintegrate. But if you proactively take care of the structure, repair all damage, confront all dangers, and rebuild or renovate parts from time to time using new materials and technologies, the life of the house can essentially be extended without limit.

The same holds true for our bodies and brains. The only difference is that while we fully understand the methods underlying the maintenance of a house, we do not yet fully understand all of the biological principles of life. But with our rapidly increasing comprehension of the human genome, the proteins expressed by the genome (proteome), and the biochemical processes and pathways of our metabolism, we are quickly gaining that knowledge. We are beginning to understand aging, not as a single inexorable progression but as a group of related biological processes. Strategies for reversing each of these aging progressions using different combinations of biotechnology techniques are emerging. Many scientists, including the authors of this book, believe that we will have the means to stop and even reverse aging within the next two decades. In the meanwhile, we can slow each aging process to a crawl using the methods outlined in Fantastic Voyage.

In this way, the goal of extending longevity can be taken in three steps, or Bridges. Fantastic Voyage is intended to serve as a guide to living long enough in good health and spirits - Bridge One - to take advantage of the full development of the biotechnology revolution - Bridge Two. This, in turn, will lead to the nanotechnology-AI (artificial intelligence) revolution - Bridge Three - which has the potential to allow us to live indefinitely. "

If this doesn't make the hair on the back of your neck stand up, I don't know what will. We understand most of what we have to learn and most of what we have to do to achieve immortality. It could happen.

Sad thing is, as we get closer to it, people will be against it. And they won't just say, 'Thanks, but it's not for me.' They'll be saying 'It's a crime against nature and nobody should be allowed to use it.'

Nanotechnology and aging: Think small to think big

Science is fun, especially these days, when it sounds more like science fiction than science. But before we get into the fun stuff, let's remember what we really mean when we talk about aging.

For most of human history, the average lifespan was between 20 and 25 years. This wasn't because 25-year-olds suddenly keeled over--it was because 20% of children died in the first 5 years of life, because motherhood was almost as fatal as childhood, and because witch doctors and shamans didn't have as much luck with their charms as our doctors do with penicillin. Murder and warfare, contrary to our romanticized view of the past, were actually more common than they are today, as was famine. This lowered the average for the entire population. But, if you made it over each of these hurdles, you stood a chance at reaching the Biblical 'three score and ten,' and many did. But not enough to pull the average lifespan up to a respectable figure, such as the 88 years that Japanese women can expect today.

The fact is, even if we don't extend our lifespan at all, our lives are immeasurably richer than before, as we don't have to live in as much fear as did people just 200 years ago. (If we choose to live in fear, so much the worse for us.) But as we knock down the old hurdles that kept so many of us from reaching our allotted timespan, new ones crop up, such as Alzheimer's disease.

Now that science has done so much to bring the average lifespan up by eliminating the premature causes of death, we are turning our attention to the latter stage problems such as cancer, dementia, COPD, etc. The question is, will we have as much success fighting these conditions as we have had fighting infectious disease, childhood and maternal mortality and the like.

Take nanotechnology, which is making tools and products, and providing services, with very small things. Very small. About one billionth of a meter small. We're doing it now--there are more than 1,500 products licensed for consumer use that use nanotechnology today, although most of them are things like sunscreen and other coating materials.

I sometimes make predictions for a living, doing something called PESTLE and SWOT analyses. Here's a prediction for you: Nanotechnology will do for this century what electricity did for the 20th Century--change it so radically from the previous century that the lives of those coming before will be almost unrecognisable.

Nanotechnology will hold some, maybe many, of the keys to our battle against aging. This article from back in the Stone Age (2002) gives some clues about the goals:

"Fifty years from now, what causes of death will be preventable?  That depends largely on the technology we will have available, so let's start by projecting some technology trends.  Gene sequencing and identification will be as easy as a blood sugar test.  Medical devices such as artificial hearts and insulin pumps will be implantable and well-integrated with the body's natural demands.  Surgical instruments will be more delicate and less destructive; what today is "major surgery" will be done with an office visit.  Computers will be millions of times faster than today's machines.  Last but not least, we will probably have the ability to build strong, useful, complex machines out of individual atoms and molecules.  This is called "nanotechnology" or simply "nanotech",  and it will make us healthier in several important ways."

"Can we expect technology to solve all our medical problems?  This chapter will answer that question by examining what nanotech can do for medicine.  Nanotech is a huge topic, and medicine is even bigger, so this chapter can give only a sketchy overview.  On the nanotech side, we will focus on robot-like machines with precise molecular parts; on the medicine side, we will limit ourselves to a mechanical view of medicine that mostly ignores the complexity that arises from all the body's systems working together.  And I'll be remarkably unambitious (by future standards) in defining "good health": Good health is when the body is able to support typical activities without significant discomfort.  (Optimum health is a matter of personal preference, and the chapter is long enough without getting into all the ways people could improve their bodies.)  Even with these restrictions, it will become clear that nanotech can solve most or all of the medical problems that might keep us from being in good health, thus allowing us to remain in a state of good health for many decades or even centuries."

..."Medical theory and technique today are a vast improvement over the state of the art a century ago.  However, by comparison with what could be, medical practice today can only be described as primitive.  Surgery creates huge wounds which require days to heal.  Cancer therapy usually aims to be as destructive as possible, without wiping out anything too important.  Most of our drugs were discovered by trial and error, and their side effects are sometimes drastic.  Organ transplantation requires crippling the immune system.  Many conditions cannot be cured at all.  The good news is that even basic nanotechnology can correct most if not all of these problems."

..."A problem can't be corrected unless it is first detected.  One of the first contributions nanotech will make to medicine is in the area of research.  Miniaturization will create probes that gather orders of magnitude more data.  Chemical sensors can be built small enough to put inside living cells.  Probes may be thin enough to go through tissue without causing noticeable injury.  Small, low-power devices may be implanted for continuous monitoring."

..."The normal way to deliver a chemical today is to dump it into either the bloodstream or the stomach, and let it spread all through the body.  For some chemicals, such as insulin, this is appropriate.  But for others, such as chemotherapy drugs and some antibiotics, it is best to keep them as local as possible.  Nanosurgical techniques can put drug delivery devices right where they are needed.  The devices can be numerous and tiny, so that they can be inserted into any organ.  In most cases, the devices could manufacture the required chemicals on the spot, using elements and energy from the surrounding tissue, thus eliminating the need for holding tanks and external supply.  (Nature has demonstrated that a complex chemical factory can fit into the space of a bacterium.)"

..."If an organ fails, we must either replace it or do without.  Usually the replacement organ comes from someone else, which means that the body will reject it unless drugs are taken to cripple the immune system.  Today several organs, including the larynx and the bladder, have been grown on special scaffolding.  With nanotech to build far more complex and precise scaffolding, we will be able to create most organs this way from the patient's own cells, thus allowing rejection-free transplantation.

Artificial organs will become far more feasible.  Today, artificial hearts have been used in a few cases, and the use of external artificial kidneys (dialysis) is common.  These devices don't work very well, though they are certainly better than nothing.  However, a nanotech-built device could use the body's own energy supply--glucose and oxygen--for power, and could be far more sensitive and responsive to the body's condition."

Sounds like science fiction, right? But in the 7 years since this article was published, scientists have been working on each of these areas (and more). In our next nano post we'll look at what's being accomplished.

A few last words about robots

They won't make beds, but will they do windows?

"Driving a car autonomously across the continent would be easy. Opening a door turns out to be really hard, and making the bed is absolutely impossible."

The same robot technology that guides massive machines around Australian mine sites could be delivering cups of tea in aged-care homes within a decade, a robotics expert says.

Professor Hugh Durrant-Whyte says the era of the robotic "healthcare assistant" is closer than many people thought, and innovation in mining and agriculture sectors was driving the technology.

Pointing to massive autonomous drill rigs and driverless haul trucks now being used on mine sites in Australia's Pilbara, Prof Durrant-Whyte says its a matter of time and scale. "We've got (robotic) systems that we can put on a $2 million haul truck or a $100,000 tractor," says Prof Durrant-Whyte, who is research director at Sydney University's Australian Centre for Field Robotics.

"Soon we'll put them on a $10,000 thing like a car, then it will be put on a $1,000 thing in your home."

Hospitals and other care-related environments were where Australians would see "a lot more robotics more immediately", he says.

Existing and emerging technologies could produce robots able to monitor patients, help carers with labour-intensive tasks like lifting, and even provide entertainment for the ill and infirm.

"You'd like it to be able to recognise expressions, to have enough knowledge to say: `Okay, I think that person is asking for a drink'," Prof Durrant-Whyte says.

"Then it must be able to navigate down the hall to someone without, obviously, running over the patient ... In effect the robot will have some subjective understanding of what the people it is working with want and need. And I think that's definitely coming - I wouldn't say there are prototypes, but certainly there are deployable examples - and the sort of healthcare assistant I'm talking about is within a decade."

While the prospect of a household care assistant may also sound enticing for many, Prof Durrant-Whyte cautions that some seemingly mundane tasks are still far outside of a robot's reach. Manoeuvring though a series of tunnels - be it a mine or hospital corridors - was one thing, but making a bed was another, he says.

And if you're really interested in how robots can help seniors--and disabled people as well--keep an eye on Japan.

"TSUKUBA, Japan -- A robotic suit that reads brain signals and helps people with mobility problems will be available to rent in Japan for $2,200 a month -- an invention that may have far-reaching benefits for the disabled and elderly.

HAL -- short for "hybrid assistive limb" -- is a computerized suit with sensors that read brain signals directing limb movement through the skin. The 22-pound battery-operated computer system is belted to the waist. It captures the brain signals and relays them to mechanical leg braces strapped to the thighs and knees, which then provide robotic assistance to people as they walk.

Cyberdyne, a new company in Tsukuba outside Tokyo, will mass-produce HAL. Two people demonstrated the suits at the company's headquarters on Tuesday. A demonstration video also showed a partially paralyzed person getting up from a chair and walking slowly wearing the HAL suit.

The Rest of the Robots

In my previous post I talked about how robots could be used to do household chores, making assisted living more practical for more seniors, and about how the technology used to make robots better might help us get around and be more independent.

There's another way that robotics will impact aging. Here's an example: "During the past eight years, the use of robotic-assisted laparoscopic prostatectomy (RALP) for prostate cancer has grown tremendously and at a pace almost unparalleled in modern surgery. Current estimates indicate that half of all prostatectomies done in the United States are done robotically, and that figure is likely to increase as more and more surgeons gain robotic experience."

Robotic surgery is growing. "Since they were introduced a decade ago, robot-assisted surgeries have become widely accepted in the United States, especially for cardiac, gynecologic, and urologic procedures. The authors note that in 2007, about 60% of all radical prostatectomies were performed with robot assistance, and that robot-assisted cardiac and urological procedures can result in less blood loss and fewer complications than standard open approaches. In addition, the use of robots in cardiac surgery has had a favorable effect on operative time, length of stay in intensive care units, and length of overall inpatient care days, compared with open procedures."

But it's not just surgery. Robots can be used in hospitals: "LONDON, UK: Remote Presence (RP6) Robots may now allow a medical expert to visually examine and communicate with a patient from anywhere in the world, via the machine, using wireless technology, while they can also be used for surgical teaching and even videoconferencing. The robots are controlled with a joystick from a remote site. The doctor 'driving' the robot can view the patient, ask questions and read patient records, view X-rays and test results from the console, as an article in Science Daily reports."

...And out of hospitals, too. Money quote: "We can build robots that repair spaceships and build cars; why not use technology to assist people in reaching their goals of independence despite disabilities?"

It's going to be interesting. And soon.

Robots and Aging: Part 1 of about a million...

Of the three technologies--nanotechnology, biotechnology and robotics--that will make a difference to how we age, robotics is the easiest to talk about. You can see a robot, at least.

 Domestic robots are all the rage in Asia. In South Korea, the government wants every home to have one in 10 years. They can be used for monitoring (most come with webcams), child-minding (I wonder if future psychologists will be talking patients through bonding issues with their robots), but also with domestic tasks. The implications for assisted living are obvious, and we'll talk about them more later.

But the other big point about robotics is that the technology used to make robots more useful can actually be used to make us more capable.

I want one of those just for my household chores. The exciting thing is that this technology will get pushed forward because the various Departments of Defense see the advantages of giving soldiers a bit more oomph (See Starship Troopers, by Robert Heinlein, for more detail). The last time the DoD put big money into research, it turned into the Internet.

Two Views of Aging: Part 2

Tom here again: Science and good civil engineering have removed most of the hurdles to achieving the Biblical three score and ten: infant mortality, death in childbirth, infectious disease.

"Census Bureau's Summary of the Statistics for the Registration Area in 1914. Washington, D. C., January 16, 1916. According to a preliminary announcement with reference to mortality in 1914, issued by Director Sam. L. Rogers, of the Bureau of the Census, Department of Commerce, and compiled by Mr. Richard C. Lappin, chief statistician for vital statistics, more than 30 per cent of the 898,059 deaths reported for that year in the "registration area," which contained about two-thirds of the population of the entire United States, were due to three causes-heart diseases, tuberculosis, and pneumonia-and more than 60 per cent to eleven causes-the three just named, together with Bright's disease and nephritis, cancer, diarrhea and enteritis, apoplexy, arterial diseases, diphtheria, diabetes, and typhoid fever." Typhoid fever. Diptheria. I don't even really now what apoplexy is.

Good civil society and improvements in defense equipment have led to fewer deaths in war and fewer deaths by natural disaster.

So we are now free to concentrate on improving that three score and ten--I don't think we have quite set our sights on Methuselah's 969, but in the industrialised world today, nobody is surprised any longer when people reach ages between 85 and 105 without much of a fuss. In fact, as many Americans die after reaching the age of 80 as die before that age.

Getting to 85 seems very much to be about making good personal decisions regarding alcohol, tobacco and firearms--er, diet. And it would also appear that good decisions are the primary causes of making it from 85 to 105--keeping active, connected and a healthy sense of optimistic perspective.

These are all personal lifestyle choices--so what does technology have to do with it? Well, quite a lot, really. To move the median age of death up by a decade requires that the personal choices people make are supported. By good networks that help families stay connected. By providing technologies that help people stay active and live independently.

But perhaps most importantly, it will be science and technology that eventually overcome the remaining hurdles to 100--or 105, 110 or whatever the new 'limit' becomes. Cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer's--these are diseases of age. These diseases afflict those who have made perfect life choices as well as those of us who are trying to improve. So in my next post I will start introducing the technologies that will make life more 'forgiving' for all of us--technologies that will make it easier to get where we want to be.

Two Views of Aging: Part 1

This is Tom here, writing from San Francisco on a beautiful spring evening. The sun is setting behind the Golden Gate Bridge, and I'm writing about aging.

I'm 54 years old. I'm in good health, although I have two chronic conditions (high cholesterol and hypo-thyroidism) that are being successfully controlled through medication. And I feel good. But I don't know what the future holds for me. That's because the future is changing.

There are only 1,083 patents on file with the word 'gerontology' in their title, abstract or text in the scientific database Scirus. Half of them have been filed in the past 5 years. Similarly, there are 11,861 patents with the phrase 'human longevity' in the title, abstract or text. More than half were filed in the past five years.

In thirty years I will be the same age as Ted, my writing partner, is today. He happens to be my father. I think there's actually a chance that both of us will be around to see the day. This blog will be about how to get there--but also why.

Science and technology will provide a lot of the how. But this new society that's being created around us, with the atomisation of the nuclear family, increased mobility looser ties between people, make the why ever-more challenging. And if we don't solve the 'why' part, the how is just mechanics.

The technologies that we know will impact on aging include biochemistry and genetics, nanotechnology and robotics. There are other technologies that will play a part. But the why--that won't be found on the shelf of a store any time soon.

So I get the easy part--I'll be writing about how aging will change. As usual, my dad gets the harder part.