About the battle in old age, and a possible cure for Parkinson's disease

The main problem with Parkinson's disease is that we do not know what exactly causes it.

Take a stick, take a backpack, and get on a plane to Germany. Walk around Berlin, and take a good look at its residents. It is likely that a large part of the people you will see already have gray hair. You will encounter a similar phenomenon in France, Russia and even China and Japan. People decide to give birth at a late age, and give birth to few children - sometimes no more than one child per family. The parents stay alive until their eighties, but in the last decade of their lives they find it difficult to live on their own, due to the diseases of old age that attack them.

Many economists are already warning today that the greatest problem of the Western world today is not death, but immortality: elderly people who manage to hold on to their lives, with great difficulty, despite being paralyzed due to Parkinson's disease, senile due to Alzheimer's disease, or confined to their beds due to heart attacks and strokes. These elderly receive assistance and medical treatments from the state, but these cost a lot of money. This money comes from the young people who work and pay income tax to support the old and sick who are no longer able to work. This is a catastrophic situation, which may lead to the internal crisis of European countries due to a lack of young people who will work and earn money, and the inability of the elderly to continue working even in their old age.

what is the solution Bringing many children into the world, who will feed the old people? Mother Russia tries to persuade her citizens to have children through generous maternity allowances, but these do not succeed in fulfilling their role. Russian women prefer to develop their own successful careers, instead of staying at home with the babies. Another direction, therefore, lies in finding a cure for the diseases of old age. And perhaps, in the end, a cure for aging itself.

The futurist Ray Kurzweil has been predicting for many years the arrival of the 'Age of the Singularity', and claims that during the 21st century some of the human beings will be granted eternal life. However, as of today, a cure for aging has not yet been found, and it is likely that there will never be a single substance, or Dr. Catros's miraculous injection, that will remove the yoke of the guillotine from the collective neck of human beings.

The skeptics will now say that in the course of history we have succeeded in eradicating at least one disease - the smallpox - and reducing the incidence of certain infectious diseases to zero or nothing. It is true. But these diseases originate outside the body, in bacteria, viruses and other living creatures that attack our bodies and use them as living and breathing growth plates. There is no law comparable to the diseases of old age, such as Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease and others, which to the best of our understanding come in large part from natural processes that occur within the body itself. To stop the diseases of old age, we will have to find a way to neutralize and redirect the internal metabolism of our bodies.

Is it possible?

The Parkinson within us

Parkinson's disease is a good example of a disease of old age. This serious disease attacks one percent of all people over the age of 60, and four percent of the population over the age of 80. It slows down the movements of its victims for years, until it completely paralyzes them. A quick calculation shows that if a cure is found for the disease, several tens of millions of people will win their lives a second time.

The main problem with Parkinson's disease is that we do not know what exactly causes it. We know that nerve cells in the brain die, but we are still not sure what exactly causes them to die. The evidence, as of today, points to one main suspect: a protein known as alpha-synuclein. This protein is produced by the body itself at a high level in all Alzheimer's patients, and it is known that many proteins of this type are able to connect together into large clumps, which the cells are unable to break down. These lumps interfere with the activity of the cells, and eventually cause their death.

But what if we could prevent these lumps from forming? It is possible then that we would be able to prevent Alzheimer's disease. And what if we could dismantle them, even after they were created? And then we might even reach a partial cure for the victims of the disease.

And here, last month it was reported about the development of a new material at the University of California Los Angeles, known as 'molecular tongs'. This substance is designed to capture alpha-synuclein, thereby preventing it from joining into large clumps. And even more: injecting the substance into a living creature caused the blocks in his brain to disintegrate. All this, without interfering at all with the normal brain activity.

The new material, known as CLR01, was developed by neurology professor Gal Bitan, who is currently a researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles. Jeff Bronstein, a professor of neurology at the same university, used CLR01 and tested it in cell culture. Already there, the substance demonstrated the ability to break down the clumps of alpha-synuclein and prevent the cells from dying.

In many potential drugs of this type, the researchers discover that they have created and developed a substance that has a huge effect on the target protein, but it also affects other proteins in the body to the same extent and disrupts their action. The disease is resolved, but the patient dies. But in CLR01, the opposite phenomenon is revealed: the substance is not toxic or has side effects for healthy nerve cells. It is likely that in very high concentrations it may damage the cells, but at least in the tested concentrations it is completely safe... in cell culture.

The reason I emphasize its safety in cell culture is that culture is completely different from the living body. It usually contains only one type of cells, does not benefit from blood circulation, brain membranes, a liver to break down harmful substances or any of the body's other functions. Therefore, cell culture experiments are an important first step in many studies, but they cannot be a substitute for experiments conducted on the living creature. Bronstein and Bitten also understood this, and tested CLR01 on a living, breathing organism: the small zebrafish, whose scale pattern resembles Iraqi pajamas at its best.

Thanks to the wonders of genetic engineering, there are now zebrafish in laboratories that develop symptoms similar to those of Parkinson's disease, including the accumulation of alpha-synuclein clumps in their brains. The researchers added CLR01 to the aquarium water, and tracked the action of the substance on the nodules in the brain. The effect was clear: just like in the cell culture, CLR01 was able to prevent the association of alpha-synuclein into clumps and stop the death of the nerve cells and the development of the disease in the zebrafish.

encouraging? for sure. promising? There is no doubt. But it must be remembered that at the end of the day, the researchers were able to stop Parkinson's disease in zebrafish only. There is a big difference (although not as big as we would like to think) between zebrafish and humans. The next step, which has already begun these days, is to study the effect of CLR01 on mice with Parkinson's disease. If the substance shows a similar effect there as well, there is a good chance that the research will progress to clinical trials in humans with Parkinson's.

And if he succeeds there too?

Well, then we will find that we have found the cure for one of the most common and excruciating diseases of old age. This discovery encodes much more than "just another drug". This will be a milestone in the war against aging and everything it stands for. It will testify to our arrival at the ability to play with the human body as if it were composed of living lego blocks, the wrong arrangement of which can cause the diseases of old age, but the rearrangement can prevent these diseases, whose existence has until now been closely related to our human existence.

The day we defeat Parkinson's, we will know that there is a chance to defeat old age as well.