2022-10-24 - Presentation Dr. David Sinclair - ARDD2022 - Great release of unpublished data from David Sinclair's Lab




Transcript

0:00 [Music]
0:00 foreign
0:03 [Music]
0:06 we are on to our final speaker who is on
0:09 Zoom
0:10 David we are ready for your talk
0:12 whenever you are ready to share your
0:15 slides all right let's do it hi everyone
0:17 wish I could be there wish I was there
0:20 uh next year for sure next oh that's
0:23 great
0:24 I'll hold you up to that promise I've
0:26 got my uh my father visiting from
0:28 Australia he's 83 and
0:31 I think that took precedent but uh next
0:33 year I'll bring him with me that would
0:35 be amazing that would be amazing okay
0:37 well thanks for inviting me let me get
0:39 my
0:40 presentation up and running
0:43 perfect great and I'll set a timer so
0:47 that we're good
0:49 okay all right so um yeah it's it's uh
0:52 it's amazing to be here this conference
0:54 to your credit uh and the other
0:56 organizers um just it's growing to be
0:59 one of the Premier conferences in the
1:02 world in this topic so hats off to you
1:04 and I've really enjoyed the the talks
1:07 uh so just because I don't have much
1:08 time I'll get straight into it
1:10 uh so I've been doing this for a while
1:12 started at MIT working in little yeast
1:14 cells and we discovered that and by we I
1:16 mean a lot of other people as well uh
1:18 the team discovered that uh their
1:21 reaction to genomic instability uh
1:24 particularly repetitive regions uh leads
1:26 to the reorganization of Chromatin which
1:28 leads to changes in gene expression and
1:30 phenotypes of aging and what we work on
1:33 in the lab is that that process that we
1:36 worked on in Lenny grunty's lab in yeast
1:38 in the mid-1990s uh is also true for
1:41 mammals um and that there's a backup
1:44 copy of information to reset the
1:46 epigenome
1:48 uh so what I'll do today is I'll share a
1:50 fair bit of unpublished research it's uh
1:53 it's really a coming out moment here
1:55 um so this is how we think in my lab
1:57 um similar to many others we like to
1:59 understand why we get old
2:01 uh and we think that the Hallmarks are
2:04 part of a whole system and we think that
2:06 the loss of information in particular is
2:09 is very important and information comes
2:12 in two types in in biology mainly it's
2:14 the DNA and the epigenome control
2:16 systems and we have a a lot of evidence
2:20 in the field increasingly so that the
2:22 epigenetic noise as we call it and the
2:25 loss of differentiation is a major
2:28 driver of of the process we call aging
2:31 and illness
2:33 um so I'm going to talk about efforts in
2:36 many organisms including humans to slow
2:39 down aging by targeting epigenetic
2:42 modifiers
2:43 um which include the sirtuins which we
2:47 worked on and continued to do so
2:50 I'm going to talk about the ability to
2:52 reverse aspects of Aging including
2:55 epigenetic age
2:57 and I'm going to talk about what we
2:58 really have talked about a lot at this
3:00 conference and in my lab we are
3:02 fascinated with the
3:04 um the goal of having accurate clocks
3:07 that represent epigenetic aging if not
3:10 other aspects of Aging
3:12 um it's a bit of a complicated slide but
3:14 it does cover what we work on in my lab
3:17 this was from a review back in 2008 when
3:20 we published a paper that showed that
3:23 not just in yeast but in mammals
3:24 chromatin modifiers move around during
3:26 aging and that process can be
3:28 accelerated by extreme cellular damage
3:31 and what we used in this case was the
3:33 double-stranded DNA break or dsb and we
3:36 use an enzyme called people ppo1 to
3:39 accelerate what looked like aging and I
3:42 think you've heard probably me talk
3:44 about this before so I'll go quickly but
3:46 we've used this system to understand the
3:49 process of Aging in mammals and and how
3:52 to reverse it and just some some aspects
3:55 I want to point out
3:56 NAD is a cofactor co-substrate as you
3:59 know so Twins and we found that up
4:03 regulating cert one gene expression as
4:05 well as NAD levels in the cell can slow
4:08 down this reorganization of the
4:10 epigenome and prevent loss of gene
4:13 expression patterns and we did this in a
4:15 mouse back in 2008 in in neurons in the
4:18 brain but we've gone a long way since
4:20 then
4:21 come a long way oh we also I want to
4:24 report a little bit about mib626 which
4:26 is an NAD
4:27 precursor uh it's a polymorph of
4:30 nicotinamide mononucleotide that is GMP
4:35 pure it's been in humans and I'll update
4:37 you on that and how that seems to work
4:39 and our goal there is to have a drug
4:42 that will treat
4:44 um not just aging but diseases of aging
4:47 and they're about I think right now
4:49 we've got five clinical trials up and
4:52 running and I'll share some results of
4:54 that
4:55 um so what about the clocks uh we have a
4:58 paper that's up online it's not yet
5:00 published this is work by Patrick
5:02 Griffin and Jen Lee in my lab two
5:04 students who came up with the idea that
5:07 you can greatly reduce the the cost of
5:10 sequencing by uh transposon tagging DNA
5:14 samples and we can pull 500 or more
5:17 people or dogs or mice and we've built
5:21 some and Patrick and Jenna built some
5:23 really accurate clocks for Mouse tissues
5:26 and in humans you can see down below
5:28 wherever I can I give you directions to
5:31 go follow up on this news
5:34 um these are hot off the press human
5:36 clocks from Patrick they're really great
5:38 they've got um
5:40 all the attributes that you'd want this
5:42 is from human blood we have brought in
5:44 over a thousand human samples from
5:47 people a variety of Ages and you can see
5:49 that the the uh our values are really
5:52 great and uh the uh midday of 3.5 uses
5:57 it's not bad for a first start uh and
5:59 this is again just half the presses uh
6:01 the mouse ones look really good too I
6:04 would also phenotypic age clocks which
6:05 we've published on if you're interested
6:07 you could check that out
6:10 uh how about slowing aging well we've
6:12 worked on activators of sirtuins for a
6:15 long time Resveratrol was the one back
6:16 20 years ago we've developed some
6:19 synthetic ones and some NAD precursors
6:21 uh mib626 is as I mentioned an oral
6:25 formulation of a polymorph of mh66 that
6:28 stabilized crystalline and it's gone
6:30 through a lot of safety studies over the
6:32 last few years headed by this lab are
6:35 shally basin's group at Brigham and
6:37 Women's Hospital and David Livingston
6:40 runs the group at Metro biotech which is
6:42 a massachusetts-based company that's
6:44 been making NAD precursors both
6:46 synthetic and natural for the last
6:48 decade
6:49 uh and that and full disclosure this was
6:51 spun out of my lab and others including
6:54 Sheena Mai and Raj after
6:57 uh how do you measure uh what the effect
6:59 might be well one of the ways that
7:01 Shelley's lab did it was to look at
7:03 endurance and strength uh within an MRI
7:07 and so this is uh an example of the
7:10 machine that they built to insert the
7:11 patients into the machine and measure
7:14 their endurance strength and things like
7:16 uh ATP NAD oxygenation
7:20 um and some of the data that hasn't
7:21 probably been published yet but we're
7:22 starting to talk about it and this is
7:24 their group's data not mine uh is that
7:27 uh
7:27 a number of things happen when you take
7:29 uh 1 000 milligrams from roughly a month
7:33 of this uh substance orally
7:37 and you can see here an example of some
7:39 of the data uh the repetitions the
7:41 failure of that leg exercise uh
7:44 significantly greater after taking
7:45 mib636 this is similar or at least
7:48 reminiscent to the mouse data that we
7:50 published in 2018 on endurance in mice
7:53 due to increased vascularization of the
7:57 action on endothelial cells
8:00 um and others nice bit of data I would
8:03 admit it was a surprise a nice surprise
8:05 is that Shelley's group showed that um
8:08 lipids and cholesterol uh went in the
8:11 right direction for improved Health uh
8:13 as you can see here
8:16 uh HDL was not affected which was also
8:18 reassuring
8:21 uh what about acceleration of Aging now
8:23 we do this for two reasons one is to
8:25 understand why we age because if we can
8:27 cause it then we have some idea that
8:29 we're on the right track but we also
8:31 want to know if we can have a model of
8:35 Aging that's much quicker because
8:36 typical longevity experiment takes way
8:38 too long and in organoids organoids are
8:40 way too young when you build an organide
8:42 from a stem cell an ipsc they're age
8:45 zero which is not that useful and so
8:48 we've used this system which you may
8:50 know about it's close to getting
8:52 accepted we hope uh last last stages of
8:56 this uh 12-year Journey
8:59 um actually I started this project with
9:00 Philip oberdorf when I was 39 so I've
9:03 aged a little uh this project is uh the
9:06 combination of 20 labs around the world
9:10 to see if we can displace chromatin
9:13 modifiers in a way that mimics aging and
9:15 we've done that and that's this work
9:17 which we call the ice system and we have
9:19 cell based systems and mouse systems to
9:21 do that
9:22 and we'll use it in a minute I'll show
9:24 you later but we can drive aging
9:26 forwards as far as we can tell
9:27 epigenetically and the other Hallmarks
9:29 of Aging accelerate as well for the most
9:32 part
9:33 the reversal this is a very hot topic as
9:36 you all know we use uh typically we use
9:40 a combination of three of the yamanaka
9:42 factors rather than four we leave out
9:44 cmic and we're using other methods
9:46 chemicals now as well we published this
9:50 um in 2020 so I'm not going to repeat
9:53 that data but we did use it to
9:55 rejuvenate neurons in mice and restore
9:57 Vision in mice that had damaged or old
10:00 retinas by targeting the neurons
10:03 um and we find that we need all three of
10:05 those factors O S and K shown down here
10:08 in this Vector that we can control with
10:10 Doxycycline Teton and Ted off system if
10:12 you would like to try it this isn't uh
10:15 injections in the eye which was in the
10:17 the nature paper this one's the whole
10:19 brain and we're using a variety of aavs
10:21 now to infect different tissues and the
10:23 whole body in the in efforts to not just
10:26 accelerate aging but take those mice and
10:28 wild type and reverse them and see what
10:30 happens and this is work that I'm
10:32 showing you from Xiao Tian uh primarily
10:36 and jeun jeunyang and their goal is to
10:39 reverse the age of the brain and see
10:41 what happens
10:42 and uh well this was the paper I just
10:44 wanted to remind you and we had a lot of
10:47 help from people in the field some of
10:48 who are at this conference uh Morgan's
10:50 here uh that in was great help Steve
10:53 Horvath there's a long list you can see
10:55 here I couldn't have done any of this
10:57 without their Labs as well what was
10:59 amazing about this was that we showed
11:01 that there's a repository of youthful
11:04 information that can reset a cell's
11:06 epigenome we measure gene expression on
11:08 the right you can see it's nicely reset
11:10 proportionally to how this genes were
11:12 expressed when they were young this is
11:13 RNA and on the left I think even
11:16 just as impressive is the methylation
11:18 patterns were largely restored as well
11:21 um and the clock uh which uh Morgan and
11:24 Steve and that even helped us show uh
11:26 was as well and one of the
11:28 interesting things in this paper is we
11:29 found that damage to neurons accelerates
11:33 epigenetic aging as well so it's not
11:35 just DNA cutting
11:37 um or time it's extreme cell stress like
11:40 a nerve Crush that can do it as well
11:43 uh this has been commercialized or is
11:46 being commercialized by life biosciences
11:48 a boston-based company also spun out of
11:50 my lab you can check it out
11:53 um and you'll probably get the website
11:54 if you spell The Sciences correctly
11:57 there's an e in there
11:59 um Blackberry Sciences was started in
12:01 2017 uh Bruce Cassandra at Mass Eye and
12:04 Ear has done a lot of the pre-clinical
12:06 work and safety work we've now got a
12:08 fair amount of data and we're now in
12:10 non-human primates with a goal uh of
12:12 some time in uh the next whole to 24
12:15 months of uh starting uh work towards an
12:18 IND and getting into humans if all goes
12:20 well and our goal is to reverse
12:22 blindness in a variety of different
12:24 disorders in humans
12:26 but it is remarkable if you reverse the
12:28 age of neurons in the retina you can
12:30 restore vision and gene expression this
12:32 way
12:33 um of course I'm standing on the back of
12:34 some very big names uh in this field who
12:37 uh showed pointed the way uh this is new
12:41 data unpublished I was allowed to share
12:43 this from Bruce Cassandra's lab
12:45 uh he and I are infecting not the
12:47 neurons here but the retinal pigment and
12:49 pythelium cells rpe and these give rise
12:52 to uh the photoreceptors and these
12:54 degrade over time particularly in
12:56 macular degeneration and what Bruce has
12:58 found is that he can actually restore
13:00 the morphology and the function of these
13:02 cells and restore eyesight back to a
13:04 young State similar to what happens when
13:06 you rejuvenate neurons in the eye as
13:08 well
13:09 the system uh in the lab now that we're
13:11 doing is more human we have inducible
13:13 human neurons uh where we can
13:16 differentiate them both into flat
13:17 cultures and three-dimensional and we do
13:20 pro-aging with ice and reversal with osk
13:22 typically okay I'll give you some
13:25 examples of what we do
13:27 and this is work mainly by Xiao and Jay
13:29 in the lab we grow the nerves on these
13:31 little culture dishes that can sense
13:33 electrical signals uh when we have a
13:35 control induction of no osk there's not
13:40 very good electrical firing but when we
13:42 rejuvenate them
13:44 uh with uh the osk treatment uh just for
13:48 a short amount of time this just takes a
13:50 little over a week we see that there's a
13:54 great induction of function
13:57 um and it continues out the longer we go
13:59 this is day 50 that you're seeing on the
14:01 right so that's just neurons that's
14:03 human neurons we've got Alzheimer's
14:04 patient neurons as well we can make
14:07 these into little brain organoids you
14:09 can see here that we can turn on all of
14:11 the three yamanaka factors that we like
14:13 in these organoids which have a similar
14:15 brain structure to ours great models
14:19 um for human aging we can age these
14:21 forward and get them to take on
14:23 inflammatory and senescent signatures
14:26 which I think will be a useful model
14:28 in terms of reversal uh we've done this
14:30 in mice as well we can now deliver the
14:33 osk system into various places in the
14:37 brain whole brain or in this case on the
14:39 right the excitatory neurons and in both
14:43 cases we get an improvement in learning
14:45 in these old mice which is what I think
14:49 might have we might find out as a field
14:51 is that diseases of old age particularly
14:53 in the brain I'm thinking of like
14:55 Alzheimer's if you make the the brain
14:57 young then the diseases just go away
14:59 because most of these diseases of Aging
15:01 are caused by edging I mean it's obvious
15:03 to a lot of us but to the rest of the
15:05 world it's not
15:07 um so I want to thank the people who
15:09 made this possible uh there's a large
15:11 group The the clinical trial group is at
15:14 Brigham and Women's Hospital there are
15:16 four other clinical trials that are
15:18 ongoing there's one actually for
15:20 Alzheimer's disease that's starting to
15:21 recruit there's one um well I won't say
15:25 the whole lot but they're interesting
15:26 ones
15:28 um you can see that we've got
15:29 collaborators both for exercise
15:31 physiology the hormones and this is um
15:34 the mib636 group at Metro biotech
15:38 uh here we have uh the people in my lab
15:40 that helped or did major contributions I
15:43 want to point out the work of Jay who
15:45 did the Ice Mouse
15:47 um and matoshi I want to thank everyone
15:49 really but I want to focus on I
15:52 mentioned Xiao Jian
15:55 um for the osk work uh Yuan Chang Liu
15:58 who left the lab after he published
16:00 rightly so uh he's uh not listed but he
16:03 was the first author on that nature
16:05 paper and I also want to point out Chris
16:07 who's doing reversal of senescence uh
16:10 Gerald who's working on a lot of the
16:13 mouse projects I could go on I won't uh
16:15 do that but I do want to thank Patrick
16:17 who I probably didn't mention enough he
16:19 was the one that came up with this idea
16:21 to do the time seek clock
16:23 um so many collaborators it's impossible
16:25 to thank everybody these are the
16:26 highlights and I am so grateful for
16:29 their uh advice uh reagents and uh and
16:32 friendship over the years and the people
16:34 who uh supported the work financially
16:36 have been amazing too
16:38 um so I'll stop there and take any
16:39 questions thank you for having me
16:47 thank you so much David we have a
16:50 question here in the front from one of
16:52 our Inspire ambassadors
16:54 they're the high school students that
16:56 are involved in the erdd organization
17:00 hi my name is Andrea
17:02 um I was just wondering so you you said
17:05 that you used three of the Fourier
17:06 Monica factors when looking at eyesight
17:09 Rejuvenation have you tested any other
17:11 combinations of these yamanaka factors
17:15 we tested all combinations
17:18 um and
17:19 we needed three uh four uh worked as
17:23 well but we were concerned about the
17:26 loss of cellular identity so we left c
17:28 MC out and those three are necessary if
17:31 we just do one or two combinations uh it
17:34 did not work and if we gave them
17:36 individually in different viruses it
17:39 still didn't work so it seems like we
17:40 need to package them into the same AV
17:41 three of them put them in a polycystron
17:44 and get those in were there slight
17:46 changes maybe but the the big difference
17:49 was when when we put in all three now we
17:52 were trying for years different factors
17:53 so we tried nanog and that didn't work
17:55 very well it was pretty toxic
17:58 um and I think I mean it sounds like we
18:00 just tried something and it worked but
18:01 it was actually many years of one
18:03 Chang's efforts to find this particular
18:05 combination
18:08 great thank you so much uh it's quite
18:11 late here and we have we have a couple
18:13 questions Paul sorry it's late for me I
18:15 guess it's a couple of questions in the
18:17 back there
18:19 hi I was wondering if you also tested
18:21 the data that you showed in rpe cells in
18:24 pathological conditions either genetic
18:26 or chemical
18:29 oh uh yeah so it's been done in a uh a
18:32 mouse model of macular degeneration
18:37 um with the the iodide model if you're
18:39 familiar with it and it uh it works well
18:42 in that situation okay cool cool thanks
18:46 there's another one from Lawrence
18:48 hi David uh I don't know if you can see
18:50 me it's Lauren Zion from vitadel I am
18:53 wondering about the the time sake if you
18:55 can talk a bit about the implications
18:57 there uh how would it look like for the
19:00 consumer what does this enable what are
19:03 the uh downsides as well
19:07 uh yeah I don't know of any true
19:10 downsides uh
19:12 the cost is the main thing so what we do
19:14 is we we barcode each each person's
19:17 sample and we run them through the same
19:19 sequencing reaction there's also an
19:21 enrichment step that I didn't mention uh
19:23 and so it currently costs us
19:25 less than a you know basically a few
19:27 dollars less than five dollars per
19:29 sample and that's just on the bench here
19:30 not high throughput not optimized so we
19:33 think we can get the test down to really
19:35 low amounts and for the consumer that's
19:37 of course a benefit
19:40 um it this technology is licensed to a
19:42 company that next year will if all goes
19:45 well provide a product to Consumers
19:48 um to try this out but I wouldn't
19:50 release that until we've shown that it
19:52 works well we've done I think a couple
19:53 of thousand people so far we have 10 000
19:56 samples waiting to be tested and about
19:58 250 000 people on the waitlist so we
20:01 will use those numbers to aim to get a
20:03 really good clock and not put it out
20:04 there at all if it doesn't work I'm
20:07 assuming the costs doesn't include the
20:09 the logistics right so it would only
20:10 make sense in in batches with shipping
20:13 or something like that
20:14 yeah you know the shipping will be more
20:17 expensive than the cost of the test
20:18 eventually but yeah that that's just the
20:21 cost of the reagents and the the
20:23 sequencing yeah
20:25 great one more uh hello David uh so my
20:29 question is have you ever tried to uh
20:31 combine also fasting and color reduction
20:34 as a synergistic effect in your
20:36 reprogramming with the harmonica factors
20:38 uh we have not we have not we
20:42 have tried a few chemicals in
20:43 combination and we're still working on
20:45 that but no I think it's a good idea
20:48 um
20:49 it may be that some of the genes that I
20:52 talked about today could be involved
20:54 we'll try it
20:56 thank you
20:57 all right very cool thank you so much
20:59 David that was a fantastic and inspiring
21:02 talk we're looking forward
21:08 and we're living we're looking forward
21:10 to seeing you here next year so thank
21:13 you so much and everybody will
21:16 reconvene in 13 hours maybe we'll see
21:19 each other in the bar thank you so much
21:21 for today and see you later
21:29 [Applause]
21:33 [Music]