To restore youthful function to cells failing in many age-related diseases, we need to purge them of stubborn wastes that accumulate during biological aging. At Rice University, SENS Foundation is funding research to identify, test, and improve the function of natural enzymes in the environment capable of degrading specific wastes, so that we can harness them to give the same ability into our cells.

Healthy cell function depends on having a working waste disposal system called the lysosome, to break down damaged and outmoded molecules and salvage their valuable components for recycling. The accumulation of damaged molecules too stubborn for the lysosome to handle causes and is caused by the gradual failure of this system to keep up with the daily burden such wastes, and this failure is a major cause of many of the crippling diseases of aging.

SENS Foundation is funding research to equip our cells with powerful new enzymatic cleaners to break down these stubborn wastes, unclog the waste disposal units, and rejuvenate cell function. One team is centered at our in-house SENS Research Center in the Bay area; the other team, funded by SENS Foundation donors, is at Rice University, headed up by bioremediation specialist Dr. Pedro Alvarez at the Center for Civil and Environmental Engineering at Rice University.

The Rice University group has discovered that the common soil bacterium Rhodococcus jostii RHA1 is able to break down 7-ketocholesterol, a critical waste product that paralyzes immune cells tasked with protecting the arteries, leading to atherosclerosis. Grad student Jacques Mathieu is now identifying and testing the abilities of the specific enzymes that let the bacteria break down this waste, scanning the genome of the organism (in collaboration with researchers at the University of British Columbia, Canada) for the genes that encode it, and putting evolutionary forces to work in colonies of the bacteria to make them even better at doing the job.

Meanwhile, fellow Rice researcher Rob O'Callahan is working to isolate a different form of age-related waste (lipofuscin) that is widespread in the cells of aging heart and brain cells, to see if enzymes identified at Rice and at the RC may also be able to break down this cell-clogging material.

When successful, SENS Foundation will then fund further work to upgrade our own cellular incinerators with versions of these enzymes modified to do the same job in our cells that they do for these bacteria.