Longevity Daily: 7th August, 2020

Everyday our team of researchers in Oxford are inundated with scientific, and medical research articles that have the potential to improve health, wellbeing, and longevity. In this blog we highlight a few of them that caught our attention today.

1. According to Cancer Research UK, and the American Cancer Society one in two people will develop cancer at some point in their lives. Indeed cancer is one the most devastating diseases of aging. But, if we are able to detect cancer early then we may have a chance of successfully treating and curing it.
   • In order to detect cancer early many research groups around the world are testing human blood for tell tale signs of cancer DNA or cancerous proteins. These test are called liquid biopsy.
   • Recently two new papers published in Nature Medicine showed that measuring the methylation status of cell-free DNA (cfDNA) in a liquid biopsy holds great potential for early noninvasive detection of cancer.
   • Using cfDNA from blood, and urine in one study the researchers were successfully able to predict brain tumors, and in the other study researchers were successfully able to detect kidney cancer.
     
2. Epigenetics is a field of research focusing on changes that affect gene activity and expression, without altering the DNA sequence. It has the potential to explain further mechanisms of aging, origins of cancer and several other phenomena.
   • In this new research paper, there was a discovery of 59 genes that are potential modulators of the rate of age-related behavioural deterioration in Caenorhabditis elegans.
   • Among those modulators, BAZ-2 and SET-6 are reducing mitochondrial function, thus accelerating aging process. Interestingly, the reduction mechanism is conserved in cultured mouse neurones and human cells.
   • Moreover, the expression of human orthologues of these two C. elegans modulators increases with age in a frontal complex of a human brain and correlates positively with the progression of Alzheimer’s disease.