Extra: CMLase - The Enzyme That Could Reverse Ageing

yeah well first thank you for having me as we age you know many things happen the body kind of you can kind of think of it as a car that's been driven for 200 000 kilometers with the no auto you know tune-ups and so as our bodies drive across life things wear down there's rust that forms on the doors and the engine you know windows might break the driver you know they're not thinking as clearly and lots of things go wrong with the car And what we at Revel have focused on with the CMLA story is unrusting part of this aging process.

We've focused on the structural aspects of aging, this buildup of rust and the changes in materials that occur as we age.

And that's the story that has gotten people really excited about our work.

So when you talk about rust, what exactly do you mean? Because obviously human cells do not rust.

Human cells do not rest.

That's right.

In the aging space, there's cellular parts of aging.

So many people may have heard of things like epigenetic reprogramming or stem cells, mitochondria, telomeres.

All of these different concepts are cellular.

But the body is actually 70% non-cellular stuff.

We're 70% structure.

And the structure tends to stick around for decades at a time.

Collagen, your arterial tissue.

the ligaments and tendons in your joints, the crystalline proteins in the lens of the eye.

All of these things, they exist as structural materials in the body that cells live within, and these are the materials that rust.

Anytime you have long-lived materials like collagen, they're subject to just constant chemical insult.

Glycation and oxygen, these different processes are kind of like weathering of rocks outside or the way a tire ages in the sun.

And so this chemical process of rust is basically the oxygen and glycation building up on proteins like collagen that make up most of the structural material in our body.

Right, and this process of, well, let's just call it rusting, what does it do to the function of collagen or the nature of the material that we're talking about?

Yeah, so, you know, another analogy I'm going to use is, you know, if you imagine rust on a car, there's a few things that could happen.

The surface of a car might be smooth initially, but, you know, as rust builds up, it's going to become scratchy.

And maybe, you know, like inflammation is the analogy in the body.

When you have this chemical rust, in our case, these advanced glycation end products, this particular type of rust we're targeting, They're inflammatory.

The body doesn't recognize them.

They shouldn't be there.