With the advent of AIs in the form of LLMs and GPTs, the progress in the realm of biological sciences is taking place at a frantic pace. Technologies such as Nvidia Clara and Parabricks are assisting in uncovering new biological insights and discoveries like never before. Many American universities have already started using these tools to further genomic understanding.
The best part about all such developments is that they are mostly in the public domain and institutions are willing to share their research to promote greater collaboration. The recent news about the progress in understanding of ‘telomerase’, popularly known as the immortality enzyme, is quite exciting.
But before understanding ‘telomerase’, it is important to know about telomeres that are present in our cells, kind of like shoelace. Plainly speaking, every time a cell divides to make a new cell (which happens all the time to keep us alive and healthy), these telomeres get a tiny bit shorter, and when they get too short, the cell is no longer capable of dividing. At this point, the cell dies, and this is a big reason as to why we age over time.
Let’s say we want to fix these telomeres and make them longer again. That is possible with the help of telomerase. It is like a feature in a software or a game that is by default ‘off’ inside our cells. If the telomerase feature is turned on, it makes telomeres long again and consequently, leads to the creation of new cells. Usually, cancer cells have telomerase feature switched on and that is the reason why cancer cells multiply at a rapid rate.
Scientists are now working on methods through which telomerase feature could be switched on and off at will. This would not only prevent the spread of cancer (by switching off telomerase feature in cancer cells) but also could be useful in slowing down the aging process (by switching on the telomerase feature inside healthy cells).
Telomerase has a lot of other use-case scenarios as well in the field of regenerative medicine and some rare diseases. It is an ongoing topic of research and hopefully in the times to come, we should be able to see some tangible results.
As I said in the beginning, these things are developing fast because of AI. Being a tech and AI enthusiast, I feel pretty good when I read about this stuff. Stay tuned for more.
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