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A medical researcher once told me: “If you can live for the next twenty years, you’ll be able to live past one hundred easily”. What he was referring to was the multiple advances in treating the diseases of old age, which, he averred, would soon extend everyone’s lifespan well past a century. Of course, he told me this fifteen years ago, so I guess we can take his assertion with a grain of salt.
Still, it can’t be denied that medical science has made astonishing leaps in treating the diseases associated with ageing.
Cancer, once a death sentence, has improved in survivability by over 20% in just the last forty years: 70% of cancer patients today will survive the disease. Hip replacements, knee replacements, organ transplants…
More promising still are the tantalising prospects offered by new generation biotechnology.
Stem cells are perhaps not quite living up to the hype, but advances are chugging quietly along.
Now, nanotechnology is offering a potential breakthrough in another disease particularly associated with age: macular degeneration.
Macular degeneration is a form of central vision loss, which has massive social, mobility, and mental consequences. It impacts hundreds of millions of people globally and is increasing in prevalence.
The degeneration is the consequence of damaged retinal pigment cells. Our bodies are unable to grow and replace these cells once they start dying, so scientists have been exploring alternative methods to replace them and the membrane within which they sit.
Scientists have had some success in growing cells in the lab, but the problem has been the flat surfaces they grew them on. Eyeballs, as you may have noticed, are not flat. So the challenge now is to build a suitably 3d scaffold. Enter, nanotech.
Nottingham Trent University biomedical scientist Biola Egbowon and colleagues fabricated these 3D scaffolds with polymer nanofibers and coated them with a steroid to reduce inflammation.
Using a technique called electrospinning, which produces nanometer-wide fibers by squirting a molten polymer through a high-voltage field, the team was able to keep the scaffold sufficiently thin.
The polyacrylonitrile polymer they used provided mechanical strength, and Jeffamine polymer attracts water, essentially allowing the synthetic scaffold to act as a membrane.
The water-attracting ability of the material is what helps the cells bind to the scaffold and also encourages their growth.
There is too much of a good thing, though as that water-attracting effect can get too strong, causing cell death.
The team’s new formulation seems to be just right, as the system increased the growth and longevity of the retinal lab cells and kept them viable for at least 150 days.
“This research has demonstrated, for the first time, that nanofiber scaffolds treated with the anti-inflammatory substance such as fluocinolone acetonide can enhance the growth, differentiation, and functionality of retinal pigment epithelial cells,” says [Anglia Ruskin University biochemist Barbara Pierscionek].
Unlike previous efforts to build similar scaffolds using collagen and cellulose, the new method appears to produce healthier cells, potentially more compatible with actual, human eyes. Potentially.
“While this may indicate the potential of such cellularized scaffolds in regenerative medicine, it does not address the question of biocompatibility with human tissue,” Egbowon and colleagues caution in their paper, as there is a massive difference between growing cells in a petri dish and having a functioning tissue substitute within a body.
Science Alert
Which is always the kicker. Plenty of “cures for cancer”, for instance, may work very well at nuking cancer cells in a petri dish — actually treating cancer in living human bodies, though, is another thing entirely.
Still, one thing seems certain: while we nascent codgers might or might not live to blow out one hundred and fifty or so candles, at least we’ll go to our graves with a bunch of shiny new body parts.
