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Normally, antibodies are protective proteins produced by our immune systems to fight bacteria or viruses. Its strength comes from its specificity – when you get sick, the B cells in your immune system undergo an exquisitely precise process of accelerated evolution, quickly optimizing antibodies that bind precisely to what ails you, without sticking to it to any of the cells of your body. Antibodies can shut down a marauding germ or mark it for destruction by other parts of the immune system, making antibodies a critical defense against disease in our immune arsenal.
This ability to precisely target also means that they are an attractive tool for use in biology or medicine: You can use them to target anything from an infection to cancer. After identifying a particular protein or process that goes wrong in a disease, most of the time and work spent on developing a drug is actually finding drugs that hit the process that you have identified, while affecting the least possible. This should provide the maximum treatment effect, with the minimum of side effects. Therefore, since our immune systems have already worked out how to do this, scientists have speculated about the use of antibodies in clinical applications.
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 in use for everything from cancer treatment to surprisingly daily pregnancy tests and rapid tests for Covid, for example, are based on antibodies.
Today the latest wave of antibody applications are going after a bigger prize: the aging process itself. That’s because the biology of aging makes us susceptible to a wide range of different problems, from diseases like cancer and dementia, to frailty, incontinence and gray hair. Slowing down this process could keep everyone healthier for longer – and part of it is in the face of antibodies.
In 2021, a research group used antibodies driving a deadly drug to aged cells, “senescent”, whose removal it was shown to make mice live longer and healthier lives. Another paper in 2023 used subtly different antibodies for the drug rejuvenate the skin of old mice. An antibody targeting a type of protein modificationwith made genetically modified mice live longer. And, in March 2024, another group said that the antibodies it targets defective bone marrow cells improved response to a vaccine against Friend virus (very poorly named) in late middle-aged mice. It will be a beautiful symmetry that the molecules that our bodies use to fight against diseases could be brought back to improve this ability in old age. We also know that these older bone marrow cells can increase the risk of blood cancers and heart diseaseso more tests could uncover wider benefits.
These are all fascinating proofs of principle, and better skin and immunity with age would be worth having, but can antibodies slow down aging and make mice, or humans, really live longer? In July 2024, scientists showed that antibodies targeting a protein called IL-11 could reduce inflammation in mice and extend their lives by 25 percent, so far the best anti-aging drugs we know, like rapamycin. Even better, anti-IL-11 antibodies are already in human trials, with (very) preliminary results indicate that they are safe.
Greg Winter, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2018 for work on the isolation and mass production of specific antibodies, said at a conference in 2020: “I’m old now, and I’m going to take different blood pressure pills. I’d like to just have an injection once every month or once every six months and just forget about all those combinations of different pills.” The year his dream becomes reality could be 2025.
