In general, antibodies are protective proteins produced by our immune system to fight bacteria or viruses. Its power comes from its specificity—when you get sick, the B cells of your immune system undergo a very precise process of rapid evolution, rapidly developing antibodies that bind directly to whatever is killing you, without attaching to any cells in your body. The immune system can either inhibit the activity of an invading virus or mark it for destruction by other parts of the immune system, making the immune system an important defense against disease in our immune system.
This precise targeting ability also means they are an attractive tool for use in biology or medicine: You can use them to target anything from infection to cancer. After identifying a specific protein or process that goes wrong in a disease, much of the time and work spent on drug development is actually finding drugs that affect the process you’ve identified, while being as minimally invasive as possible. This should provide maximum therapeutic effect, with minimum side effects. So, now that our immune system has worked out how to do this, scientists have speculated about putting the immune system into clinical use.
The first antibody approved for medical use was muromonab-CD3 in 1986, designed (ironically) to suppress the immune system and prevent organ rejection in transplant patients. There are now hundreds of antibodies used in everything from cancer treatment to surprising everyday tests—pregnancy tests and rapid tests for Covid, for example, rely on antibodies.
Today the latest wave of antibody applications is after the big prize: the aging process itself. That’s because the science of aging makes us susceptible to a variety of problems, from diseases like cancer and dementia, to frailty, incontinence, and gray hair. Slowing down this process could keep us all healthier for longer—and parts of it are in the immune system’s recognition.
In 2021, a research team used antibodies to target a lethal drug to aged, “senescent” cells, whose removal has been shown to make mice live longer and live healthier lives. Another paper in 2023 used different drug-carrying antibodies to regenerate the skin of old mice. An antibody that targets a type of age-related protein mutation for purification makes genetically modified mice live longer. Also, in March 2024, another group reported that antibodies targeting inactive bone marrow cells improved the response to a (very misnamed) companion virus vaccine in middle-aged mice. It would be a good guess that the very molecules that our bodies use to fight disease may also be targeted to improve this ability in aging. We also know that these aging bone marrow cells can increase the risk of blood cancer and heart disease, so further testing could have broader benefits.
These are all wonderful proofs of principle, and better skin and age-defying immunity would be worth having, but can the immune system accelerate aging and make mice, or people, really live longer? In July 2024, scientists showed that antibodies targeting a protein called IL-11 could reduce inflammation in mice and increase their lifespan by 25 percent—up there with the best anti-aging drugs we know, like rapamycin. Even better, anti-IL-11 antibodies are already in human trials, with results (overwhelmingly) showing they are safe.
Greg Winter, who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2018 for work on the isolation and production of certain antibodies, told a conference in 2020: “I’m old now, and I have to take various blood pressure pills. I wish I could inject once a month or once every six months and just forget about all these combinations of different pills.” The year of realization of his dream would be 2025.
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