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Tricking Youth With Red Wine

Researchers at Harvard Medical School says they had discovered a way to stimulate a potent "anti-aging" enzyme in living cells.

Lead researcher David Sinclair calls it an advance that could speed the development of drugs to extend human life span and prevent a wide range of geriatric diseases.

The novel approach has significantly increased the life spans of yeast and human cells in laboratory dishes and extended the lives of flies and worms -- organisms that, on the level of molecular biology, age much as humans do. Indeed, the researchers said, the compounds seem to have the same anti-aging effect as a drastic reduction in calories, the only strategy ever proven to extend life in mammals but one that most people find difficult to stick to.

Sinclair says that of all the compounds his team tested, the one that boosted the anti-aging enzyme the most was resveratrol, an ingredient in red wine that has been credited with that beverage's ability to lower the risk of heart disease.

The results of the research are published in the journal Nature. The findings strengthen an increasingly popular notion among many scientists that the cellular enzymes at the core of the experiments -- called sirtuins -- are universal regulators of aging in virtually all living organisms and represent a prime target for new anti-aging drugs.

"It's looking like these sirtuins serve as guardians of the cell," said Sinclair. "These enzymes allow cells to survive damage and delay cell death."

Now the race is on, Sinclair said, to find the most potent sirtuin stimulators -- or create synthetic ones -- and test their ability to extend the lives not only of cells, flies and worms but also of mice, monkeys and humans.