How artificial intelligence can help in the quest for immortality

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Experiment uses AI to find potential remedies capable of slowing down the aging of our cells, preventing them from turning into ‘zombies’ Biophysicist Felix Wong was the main author of the study Personal archive The search for the elixir of life is intrinsic to humanity. While the mythology of Ancient Greece told the story of how Zeus poisoned the titan Chronos, his father, and thus achieved immortality, modern Physics discusses ways to manipulate time in our favor. A group of scientists from the Californian startup Integrated Biosciences, in partnership with researchers from Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), in the United States, took this journey a step further. The name of the study they published, “Discovering small-molecule senolytics with deep neural networks”, may sound complicated. Perhaps that is why its dissemination has not yet gone far beyond the academic world, since the research was detailed in an article in the journal Nature Aging in May of this year. In the text, their findings are described like this: “We trained deep learning models with the results of a sample of small molecules for senolytic activity and applied our models to discover structurally diverse compounds”. What the scientists did, to simplify the explanation, was to use artificial intelligence (AI) to search for possible remedies capable of slowing down the aging of our cells and thus also combating diseases such as fibrosis, tumors, inflammation and arthrosis. “Finding a new drug is like looking for a needle in a haystack”, tells BBC News Brasil the American physicist and mathematician Felix Wong, specialist in Biophysics, main author of the study and one of the founders of Integrated Biosciences. “In our case, the haystack consists of all potential chemical compounds ever created or that could be developed.” Senolytics are capable of eliminating aged cells, senescents Disclosure Using AI, Wong was able to test how more than 800,000 options of chemical solutions reacted to potential drugs capable of selecting and eliminating senescents, known as “zombie cells” in the body and which lead to to aging processes. At the end of the experiment, he and his team came up with three potential drugs that, in theory, could carry out this control. “If we searched everything, that is, looking at each compound one by one, it would require a substantial effort, since the haystack would be almost infinite”, assesses Wong. “We use AI to search through that haystack much more efficiently, making the machine predict which of these drug candidates are most likely to work.” In a statement to Nature Aging, biophysicist Andrew Rutenberg, a professor at the University of Dalhousie, in Canada, highlighted this methodology as the great differential of the research. “This impressive work uses deep machine learning techniques to explore diverse molecular structures for use as new senolytics.” The authors show how cheminformatics (a term for “chemical information”) can be used to create promising new drugs against aging, then tested by them, and share details of their software to help accelerate future molecular discoveries. The Ridiculous Bank Robbery That Inspired a Scientific Study on Ignorance and Trust How to Train AI to Do Science The experiment started by preparing the machine to carry it out. Scientists first tested nearly 2,400 compounds in test tubes to evaluate them as possible killers of zombie cells. Then, they fed the software with the collected data. After being trained in this way, the AI ​​was used to search for the best anti-aging drug candidates from over 800,000 options. The robot manages to test all the alternatives, simultaneously, in search of the most efficient drug. In scientific jargon, at this stage, the experiment was carried out “in silicon”, that is, restricted to the digital environment. With the sieve, 216 compounds were reached. Of these, 25 showed high senolytic activity, which means they are very efficient in killing zombie cells. New laboratory experiments then reduced the list to three potential drugs. One of them was tested on an 80-year-old mouse. The scientists detected a decline in aging biomarkers, that is, in the number of “zombies” in the rodent’s kidneys. According to Wong, this “indicates that the compound can efficiently reduce the aging of cells in living animals.” For now, the three solutions in testing phases are called BRD-K20733377, BRD-K56819078 and BRD-K44839765. Complicated acronyms, which look like they came out of lab vial labels. “But that one day may allow us all to live longer and healthier”, Wong envisions. Compounds from cells that have been tested by scientists Disclosure Why not test in humans? In the sieve performed by the AI, one of the main factors evaluated was the probable side effects of the medications. “We’ve been using computers in biological experiments for more than fifty years, but AI has advanced in such a way that, today, it’s possible to carry out experiments on these scales,” says biologist Aline Martins from Brasilia to BBC News Brasil. She is a researcher at The Scripps Research Institute, in the city of San Diego, United States, where she conducts research using artificial intelligence to look for more efficient biomarkers (biological compounds capable of detecting and thus helping to prevent disease). Martins, who is not among the authors of the study, was enthusiastic about her colleague’s work because he “tested in many ways how thousands of existing substances, with assets described in the scientific literature, can be reused with the function of combating aging “. She also points out that this is “something that would be impossible to do in humans, or in the laboratory, without using this silicon environment”. The zombie cells, the senescent ones, are not necessarily bad for our bodies. On the contrary, they also act as a natural anti-cancer mechanism. “By stopping damaged cells from dividing, this process reduces the chance of cells getting out of control and becoming cancerous,” says Felix Wong. However, zombies also lead to aging and, in continual effect, to diseases such as arthrosis, inflammation or even cancer. “What is sought today is a balanced senolytic, capable of slowing down our aging processes, but without causing even more harmful and toxic effects in the process”, emphasizes Aline Martins. Wong believes that we may be close to this finding. “We followed the rites of science. We hope to eventually test in humans, with the aim of using these compounds to increase our lifespans by eliminating subpopulations of aging cells that are harmful to us.” Is it the elixir of life? An ancient Chinese myth, dating from the 2nd century BC, tells the story of an archer, Hou Yi, who, after a heroic deed responsible for saving his people, won the elixir of life from the goddess Xiwangmu. The drink would be able to grant him immortality. However, his wife, Chang’e, one day drank the divine cocktail to prevent a thief from stealing it. With that, she was the one who achieved immortality and, in legend, flew to the moon, where she would still live today. Are Wong and his team on the path to discovering the elixir of life? The scientist himself does not believe this to be the case. “Senescence (the aging process of cells) is just one aspect of maturing.” Therefore, according to him, these drugs, even if successful, will not be “the fountain of youth”. “To achieve this, we would also have to focus on other milestones in the aging process, such as stem cell depletion.” The objective is, therefore, to find ways not towards immortality, but towards having long and, at the same time, healthy lives. Even because, both from the point of view of Physics and Philosophy, immortality is unattainable. As the Italian physicist Guido Tonelli recently told BBC News Brasil: “Nothing is eternal, every structure of matter, be it a human, a star, a galaxy, is intrinsically fragile. Sooner or later, everything ends”. – This story was originally published in VIDEOS: science news

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