Aubrey de Grey's latest thoughts on WILT - Whole-body Interdiction of Lengthening of Telomeres - will appear in Frontiers in Bioscience later this year. Those who are new to the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) proposals may want to take a look, although only the abstract and list of contents are online as of the moment:

The intrinsic genetic instability of cancer cells makes age-related cancers more difficult to postpone or treat than any other age-related disease. Any treatment that a cancer can resist by activating or inactivating specific genes is unlikely to succeed over the long term, because pre-existing cancer cells with the necessary gene expression pattern will withstand the therapy and proliferate. "Whole-body Interdiction of Lengthening of Telomeres" (WILT) is a proposal to pre-empt this problem by deleting from as many cells as possible, the genes required for telomere elongation. Cancers lacking these genes can never reach a life-threatening stage by altering gene expression, only by acquiring new genes, which is far more unlikely. Continuously-renewing tissues can be maintained by periodic reseeding with telomere elongation-incompetent stem cells that have had their telomeres lengthened in vitro with exogenous telomerase. Here, I describe why WILT might prove to be an exceptionally powerful anti-cancer modality.

Both InfoAging and Wikipedia are good places to start for basic information on telomeres and why you should know more about them in the context of healthy life extension. You'll find more on the whys and wherefores of WILT and age-related cancer at the SENS website, and even more discussion and argument in the Immortality Institute SENS forum. That should keep you reading for a while...

UPDATE: The full paper in PDF format is now available at the SENS website.

Posted by Reason at May 29, 2005 12:14 AM | TrackBack (1)