Advances in Age-Defying Therapies
Baku, April 18 (AZERTAC). While rapamycin has been shown to extend lifespan in lab animals, it may lead to impaired glucose tolerance and insulin sensitivity, which are classic signs of diabetes.
By teasing apart rapamycin's activity at the cellular level, researchers at Whitehead Institute and the University of Pennsylvania have determined that inhibiting only the protein cluster known as the mechanistic target of rapamycin complex 1 (mTORC1) prolongs life in mice without adversely affecting glucose tolerance or insulin sensitivity.
To understand better rapamycin's benefits and risks, researchers from the lab of Whitehead Institute Member David Sabatini and Joseph Baur, assistant professor of Physiology, at the University of Pennsylvania's Perelman School of Medicine, have discovered precisely how rapamycin is behaving at the cellular level. Their intriguing results are published this week in the journal Science.
Rapamycin, which is also called sirolimus and marketed in the United States as Rapamune, is a known inhibitor of the mechanistic target of rapamycin complex 1 (mTORC1), a protein complex that regulates many cellular processes linked to growth and differentiation. mTORC1 is part of a cellular signaling pathway, called mTOR, which responds to nutrients and growth factors. Mechanistic target of rapamycin complex 2 (mTORC2) is also part of the mTOR pathway and regulates insulin signaling.
To see if rapamycin's positive effects on lifespan effects could be separated from its negative metabolic effects, Lamming and Ye bred mice whose mTORC1 activity was partially inhibited but whose mTORC2 activity remained largely intact. The females of this mouse population lived longer than control mice while maintaining normal insulin sensitivity.
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