An interview with regenerative medicine luminary Dr. Anthony Atala.

After meeting him at the Astana Global Challenges Summit 2018, we’ve kindly been granted an interview by Dr. Anthony Atala, M.D., Director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine and the W. Boyce Professor and Chair of Urology at Wake Forest University.

Dr. Atala is one of the most influential names in the field of regenerative medicine and biotechnology. His research focuses on growing human cells and tissues for use in transplants, and given the constant dire need for organ donors worldwide, his work is poised to improve—and save—the lives of millions. He and his team have already successfully engineered and transplanted bladders into living patients, and as he’s told us himself, more types of tissue have been engineered and tested in models; hopefully, they will one day be usable in patients as well.

Dr. Atala’s groundbreaking work has earned him countless awards, prizes, and nominations in well-known magazines, such as Scientific American, Time Magazine, the Huffington Post, and many others; he has also served on the boards and committees of several organizations, such as the National Institutes of Health, the National Cancer Institute, and SENS Research Foundation. A more detailed biography of Dr. Atala can be found here.

Scientists at Hollings Cancer Center at the Medical University of South Carolina have found that human lung cancer cells resist dying by controlling parts of the aging process, in results published online May 10th in the Journal of Biological Chemistry. The discovery could help us better understand aging and eventually could lead to new treatments for cancer.

Cancer becomes more common as people get older, but scientists are still searching for answers about why this happens. At Hollings Cancer Center, research into the connections between aging and cancer is led by Besim Ogretmen, Ph.D., SmartState Endowed Chair in Lipidomics and Drug Discovery. Ogretmen’s team found that cancer cells have specific ways to resist dying the way normal cells do. They do so by protecting the tips of their chromosomes, which hold our DNA, from age-related damage.

Ogretmen studies how cancer cells are different than normal cells to understand how cancer grows and spreads in the body. His work is part of an $8.9 million program project grant to research how alterations of lipid metabolism affect cancer therapy. The grant is helping fund a clinical trial of an anticancer medicine to inhibit cellular signaling that helps cancer survive. The drug was found to be useful against cancer in the research reported in the group’s new paper.

“I am extremely excited about the research involved in the current Scientific Reports article,” said Joseph I. Shapiro, M.D., senior author and dean of the Joan C. Edwards School of Medicine. “I believe that our team has not only implicated the NAKL discovered by our colleague, Dr. Zijian Xie, in the aging process but identified a novel therapeutic target as well as a specific pharmacological strategy to actually slow the aging process. Although it will be some time before we can test these concepts in human subjects, I am cautiously optimistic that clinical therapeutics will ultimately result.”

The team’s extensive year-long study first focused on aging mice who were given a western diet to stimulate oxidant stress to antagonize the NAKL. The western diet increased the functional and structural evidence for aging; however, the introduction of pNaKtide slowed these changes in the mice. The same results were then replicated when human dermal fibroblasts were exposed to different types of oxidant stress in vitro by stimulating the NAKL, increasing expression of senescence markers, and causing cell injury. With pNaKtide treatment, the researchers demonstrated that the negative attributes associated with aging were significantly dampened.

“Our data clearly suggest that the Na/K-ATPase oxidant amplification loop is intimately involved in the aging process and, if confirmed in human studies, might ultimately serve as a therapeutic target,” said first author Komal Sodhi, M.D., an associate professor of surgery and biomedical sciences at the Joan C. Edwards School of Medicine. “If the pNaKtide can be safely used in humans, it might be possible to study the applicability of that specific agent to the problem of clinical aging.”