TERT activation is one of the most common alterations causing cancer. In fact, the whole point of the normally very low TERT expression in somatic cells is likely to be cancer prevention. It’s the mechanism behind the Hayflick limit, which puts a bound on the max number of divisions a cell can go through, via telomere shortening. Without such a limit, you get cancer. I highly doubt it will make you live longer.
Sure it likely will. However, it may also get you cancers, for which we'd need to enhance other cancer preventing mechanisms. TERT is essentially a fallback.
Plus perhaps you can have a "rejuvenation session" with TERT instead of boosting it forever. Thing seems like it can work after TAC is no longer being activated for quite some time.
Ultimately though yes, it may increase the number of cells that have already taken multiple hits if multiple hit cancer hypothesis is really true.
Edit: For those who aren't familiar with PubPeer, it's a platform for exposing research fraud and criticisms of research papers. This particular researcher is well known on it.
Long telomeres do not lead to long life. Telomere length has an optional length that's not too short nor too long. Maybe activating TERT in elderly people won't hurt because they won't have time to develop cancer? But it seems like a bad idea based on our tendency to project absolutes: telomeres shorten with age, so obviously we should lengthen them to be young! Right?
Recent research has challenged the notion that longer telomeres are universally beneficial, revealing a complex relationship between telomere length and cancer risk. Having excessively long telomeres is indeed related to an increased cancer risk, primarily because it prevents the natural selection against potentially cancerous cells[1][3].
Key findings from recent studies include:
1. People with mutations leading to abnormally long telomeres have a higher risk of developing various cancers, including melanoma, thyroid neoplasms, and blood-related cancers[1].
2. Long telomeres allow cells to accumulate more mutations over time, as they can divide more times before reaching critical telomere shortening[1][3].
3. The telomere tumor suppressor pathway, which normally helps prevent cancer by limiting cell division, is less effective when telomeres are too long[4].
4. Families with mutations in the TINF2 gene, which regulates telomere length, show a higher incidence of various cancers, including breast, colorectal, and thyroid cancers[4].
5. Genome-wide association studies have identified both rare and common genetic variants that lengthen telomeres and are strongly associated with increased cancer risk[3].
These findings suggest that while short telomeres can lead to premature aging and organ failure, excessively long telomeres may provide a permissive environment for cancer development by allowing cells to proliferate beyond normal limits[1][3][4].
There's a difference between activating TERT once in a while and having it extra active all the time.
I assume that before applying the drug you'd check the mean telomere length, which is easy enough to do.
You probably wouldn't give it to people with actual active cancers either, and check for anything unusual afterwards, to handle with properly targeted poison. (AKA chemotherapy, and resulting cancers would be super early stage so easy to quash)
The trick is, you want the telomeres to shorten all the way in cells that rapidly divide because this ends cell lines. And if you don't end proliferating cell lines, you get cancer. All of us and all of our tissues have cells that are basically pre-cancerous, they have driver mutations associated with cancer, and the only thing preventing them from running amok is the fact that there are limitations in the number of divisions that are possible. This is all based on information that's become visible via single-spell spatial transcriptomics. See Peter Campbell's work.
>"It is encouraging, however, that long-
term TAC treatment was well tolerated without any overt or his-
tological adverse effects including carcinogenesis. Nonetheless,
additional safety studies in non-human primates are warranted.
Along these lines, it is worth noting that TAC may reduce cancer
incidence, given that insufficient telomerase resulting in telomere
dysfunction coupled with loss of p53-dependent DNA check-
point control is a major driver of chromosomal instability and
cancer genesis in the aged. 53 Correspondingly, TERT reactiva-
tion in aged inducible-TERT mice was shown to reverse aging
phenotypes without causing an increase in cancer."
A sad day for humanity when death, the great equalizer, gets closer to being controlled by rich people. Not that rich people not already have access to better healthcare, but still.
Why can’t we all live in caves and chase our prey across the savannah, all equal, until a broken leg or an infected scratch causes certain death, like nature intended?
Might just be me, but I don't think the world would be a better place with a separate caste of immortals controlling the world governments and resources.
It's not crazy, no one thinks that. My question is why do so many people think of and fear this as a plausible scenario, to the point they prefer to rot and die than see progress in that front. Now this is crazy.
Fortunately for everyone involved, this kind of immortality is not invulnerability, and it doesn't quite save the neurons which are slowly dividing cells, only indirectly limiting damage to them.
So you might have doddering 120 year old ancients (potential predicted life extension) with ever more brain damage.
Because if you were a billionaire who had the ability to make people live forever, why would you let the working class have it and not just keep it for you and your immediate family?
If I were a billionaire and wanted to keep it for me and my immediate family... good luck to me.
How would I be able to enforce it? By somehow keeping the costs high? By lobbying?
Nothing would work, because this would be too big for the working class to just sit there and watch, and if lots of people get really pissed, it can turn very ugly, as history has taught.
People will want it and they'll get it, one way or the other.
Where X = "Starting to rot from the inside out as soon as we hit forty, while simultaneously watching loved ones age badly and becoming decreasingly self-sufficient, at best."
Yeah, who needs "X". I won't even bother with the "the rich" stuff, because, frankly, it's too tired, pathetic, childish and naive.
It could be a flip of a coin. Craig Venter[0] almost patented what was back then the human reference genome (based on his own genome), but thankfully publicly funded efforts prevailed to taper the profiteering.
We could be in a similar situation with anti-aging drugs. Plus, with citizen science projects making ad-hoc labs more accessible than ever, there's a good chance that normal people could make their own versions of these anti-aging drugs, assuming that science journals and informatic pipelines remain accessible (the current rent-seeking of top journals lends some small but worrying evidence against this).
"That’s what I like about death, it’s democratic. It would irritate me if you could jog and live forever and I got stuck here smoking and having a good time and died over it. No, you’ll die too, you know, you’ll have thirty four more years to run up and down the stairmaster."
