andrew de leon

Andrew de Leon was famous for looking for the Fountain of Youth which took him to present day Florida.

Obviously he didn't find it, however recently anti-aging researchers and specialists are on the verge of some major advances in the field of anti-aging. In fact in the not too distant future I believe instead of using the term anti-aging the new term will be something like aging reversal or stop - reverse aging.

This is all because of a discovery that was behind the 2009 Nobel Prize for Medicine being awarded.

It has been known since the early 1980's that our cell chromosomes contain something called telomeres.

So what is a telomere? To explain what a telomere is let us take a step back.

Every cell of our body contains within it a nucleus. If we look inside these nuclei we find our chromosomes. Our chromosomes contain all of our genes which are responsible for our of our heredity traits like the color of our eyes and hair, height, etc. Now our chromosomes are made up of DNA. Essentially our DNA looks like very, very long strands of beads. At the very tip of these long string of beads is the telomere.

Here is the heart of the telomeres - telomerase matter and this gets very interesting. Scientists have identified the length of these telomeres is essentially the aging clock in your body. As an embryo you basically start out with about 15,000 units of telomeres. Each time our cells divide we lose a little length off the end of our telomeres, for reasons I won't get into here.

As an embryo, our cells divide many numerous times up until the time we are born so as a newborn we now have about 10,000 units of telomeres. We continue to lose telomere units as we age (the telomeres get shorter and shorter) until we have about 5000 telomere units. At that point we typically die of old age.

What all the excitement is about is the discovery of the enzyme telomerase, which actually can lengthen telomeres, effectively greatly slowing down the aging process. This enzyme is why reproductive cells don't age like other cells in the body and produce old babies. This discovery and research into telomerase is what was responsible for these scientists winning the 2009 Nobel Prize for Medicine.

Recently a substance has been developed by scientists, which is a telomerase inducer. Testing this substance on mice, scientists have effectively been able to actually reverse the age of mice, making their organs younger.

The leading researcher leading the way in telomere and telomerase research is Dr. Bill Andrews. He is currently working on a telomerase inducer product, which extends telomeres and thus should help extend people's lifespan. From what I understand Dr. Andrews is expected to bring this product to the market in August 2011 and it will be the most potent telomerase inducer on the market.