March 2024 – Healthspan Compass

From the Editor

Welcome to the Healthspan Compass! There’s been plenty of news since the last edition. For the past week or so, attention has been riveted to the Alabama Supreme Court decision to equate embryo rights with the rights of a child. Media coverage has mostly swirled around the impact on IVF after the ruling placed fertilized eggs used in the process in frozen limbo. But unrecognized in the debate is the fact that excess frozen IVF embryos are often used in vital research aimed at curing a host of conditions that currently have no cure. The study of embryonic stem cells has been the foundation of regenerative medicine, now one of the pillars of cutting-edge biomedical research and medicine. Read below for the latest developments and some perspective.

Eve Herold
Editor-in-Chief

Follow this up with developments in longevity science, including a new way to incorporate age-reversing dietary changes without fasting and the almost unnerving growth in the capabilities of wireless wearable technologies. And I know we’re all inundated with reading material in the healthcare sphere these days, so to follow are some of the highlights of a report outlining the Hevolution Foundation’s vision of what it will take to advance the global healthspan.

ALL Eyes on Alabama

On Friday, February 16, the Alabama Supreme Court made its landmark decision regarding the legal status of frozen IVF embryos, ruling that the destruction of these embryos, whether intended or accidental, can be considered the wrongful death of a child. An outcry ensued after at least three Alabama fertility clinics ceased doing some IVF procedures out of concern for legal risks should any embryos be harmed or destroyed in the process. Critics of the ruling, which includes leaders in both political parties, are scrambling to introduce legislation aimed at protecting IVF, but it could take months, if not longer, for any sort of legal remedy to be decided.

Questions abound about the fate of thousands of frozen embryos being cryopreserved by IVF clinics, and what, exactly the couples who own them can do with them. The wrongful death act, when applied to embryos, “applies to all children, born and unborn, without limitation,” according to the ruling. That opens up a pandora’s box of questions regarding the manipulation or use of embryos in research and even some forms of contraception. Regenerative medicine relies on the ability to manipulate cells, including embryonic ones, to develop new medical technologies, which includes organoids for research and tissue-engineering for cell-based treatments.

Much of the research could not have been developed without the use of embryonic stem cells derived from excess frozen IVF embryos. Great strides have been made in converting skin cells into versatile stem cells, a process called induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), but it’s not clear how the ruling might even affect them. If an iPSC were inserted into an egg, it could generate an embryo.

For those who lived through the political firestorms surrounding stem cell research and cloning during the George W. Bush Administration, the ethical and political debate about embryos has remained essentially the same since the first isolation of human embryonic stem cells in 1998. The Alabama Supreme Court’s decision to ban the destruction of fertilized eggs was a political one, not a scientific or medical one. While this debate rages, science and patients need a voice and a place at the table. The Healthspan Action Coalition’s goal is to amplify the voices of science and patients in one of the most contentious issues of the day, even if it feels like déjà vu.

According to Healthspan Action Coalition Executive Director, Bernard Siegel, “The Alabama Supreme Court absurdly overreached by holding that frozen extrauterine embryos are children…people! A decision inconsistent with the plain dictates of common sense, crushing the most private, intimate and important hopes of folks seeking their very best outcome to create a family.  Rather than halting assisted reproductive technology, I predict that we will soon find the ruling will spur lawmakers to codify that IVF technologies be protected and made available to more of our population thereby  increasing, not decreasing, overall public support for reproductive rights. Moreover, the importance of biomedical research and modern medicine will gain even greater societal respect. Crushing hope never works in the long run.”

Conventional Wisdom in Alzheimer’s Challenged

Alzheimer’s disease has always been seen as a one-way path into progressive cognitive decline, mainly because no one has found a way to arrest the process or reverse its effects. Now Buck Institute scientists are bucking orthodoxy by exploring ways to restore the brain’s memory-forming functions. While the search for treatments has so far been focused on removing the toxic proteins that accumulate in the Alzheimer’s brain, Buck investigator Tara Tracy and her team have zeroed in on a protein, called KIBRA, that’s actually deficient in the synapses of patients with the disorder. They found that lower levels of KIBRA in the brain are associated with more severe disease. They synthesized a functional version of the protein that they administered to mice with dementia, and found that their memory impairment was reversed. It seems that tau and amyloid proteins are not the whole story in AD, welcome knowledge in a field that has struggled to find effective treatments for a condition that affects over 55 million people worldwide.

Wearables—Big Brother or Biomedical Treasure Trove?

One of the hottest trends in longevity science is the use of wearables that continuously gather health data that can be shared with doctors and researchers and allow individuals to more closely monitor their own health. Now there’s a wearable that detects emotions and transmits the data wirelessly. A South Korean team led by Jin Pyo Lee has developed a clear, flexible skin patch containing sensors that measure facial vibrations, coordinating expressions with voice data to produce information about the wearer’s emotions. So far, it’s being tested for commercial applications in virtual reality simulations of consumer behavior. Yikes—algorithms already know us better than we know ourselves, and now they know how we’re feeling in real time, possibly opening the door to even greater algorithmic manipulation of our emotions than already exists. But this technology could have usefulness beyond eliciting sales and clicks. In a research application, the patch could help elucidate the emotional component of many illnesses and tease apart how emotions and symptoms synchronize (or don’t) in an illness. The technology could be used to take physical therapy robots and chatbots to the next level of responsiveness. But as in everything else in AI, critical issues of exist as to privacy, oversight and who owns and controls the data, and what can be done with it.