I'm a cardiologist. Everyone is sharing this study as a skin story. They're burying the part that matters.
Scientists took the aorta of a 75-year-old donor, applied a single engineered enzyme, and stripped away more than 70% of the molecular damage — bringing it down to the levels you'd see in a 30-year-old artery.
Published five days ago in Nature Communications. Revel Pharmaceuticals, with Calico and the University of Colorado.
Here's what they erased.
Sugar reacts with proteins in your body the same way heat browns bread — slowly, over a lifetime. It leaves behind a residue called CML, the most abundant advanced glycation end product in aging tissue. It welds itself onto collagen and elastin in your skin, your eye lens, and your arterial walls.
Two things follow. Your arteries stiffen. And CML latches onto a receptor called RAGE, which drives chronic inflammation — the exact fire I've been writing about for months as the engine of heart disease.
Since the 1980s this damage was considered permanent. Your body has no enzyme to remove it. Every existing approach only slows new damage from forming. Nothing touched what was already there.
So they built an enzyme that doesn't exist in nature. They screened 45,000 protein structures, then ran five rounds of directed evolution across more than 500 million variants until they had CMLase — a molecular lawnmower that oxidizes the CML off the protein and restores the original, healthy lysine underneath.
Not patched. Reversed.
Over 70% cleared from elderly arterial tissue. Over 55% from elderly skin — below the levels found in 31-year-old skin. 45-78% in lens proteins. The CEO said they expected 20% and were floored.
Arterial stiffness drives systolic hypertension, heart failure, and stroke, and I have no drug that reverses it. I can slow the process. I cannot undo it. This paper says undoing it may be possible.
The caveats are real and I won't skip them. This was done on donated tissue in a dish, not in a living person. No functional data yet — we don't know if that artery got measurably more elastic. Delivering a large enzyme deep into human tissue is a hard, unsolved problem. Clinical trials are years away.
But something considered permanent for forty years just came off human tissue.
We spent a century learning to slow aging. Someone finally figured out how to erase it.
Thank you @theallinpod@friedberg@chamath@pesottas
3 de los 4 partidos de cuartos de final se jugarán a plena luz del día, adivinen cuál partido se jugará en un horario menos desgastante para los futbolistas.
England's only fit player who can play at right back got a 2 match suspension for a red card.
Until now, there have been 13 red cards in this Worldcup. All 13 only served 1 match suspension.
Quansah will serve 2, one against Norway and one potential match against ARGENTINA.
Bias aside, he was able to win the premier league & UCL 3x times in a row (two toughest competitions in football history), become football highest goal scorer and still win 5 Ballon D’ors in a system that highly favours your rival, that’s definitely a more impressive career
🚨🗣️ Mostafa Ziko: "Congratulations to Argentina on the World Cup; the tournament was rigged, they didn't need anything else."
"The referee was unfair, unfair, unfair, unfair."
This is your reminder that Henry Nowak's murderer wasn't even handcuffed after they finally learned what he did.
White people are second class citizens in this country.
🚨 If you are a white person in Britain and you get assaulted by ethnic minority men:
The police watch on and wait until you are on the floor before moving in to arrest YOU.
The police make no attempt to arrest your assailants, letting them run off without consequence.
The police call you a “dick”.
The police hit your head against the police car.
The police then put a statement out claiming they are satisfied with the conduct of the officers.
The police demand the footage proving their statement to be false not be shared.
All because the Police ‘Race Action Plan’ demands officers do not “over police” black people.
ENOUGH IS ENOUGH.
The Tories introduced these disgusting programs to force police to be institutionally racist against white people.
Labour continues them.
Reform will ABOLISH all Race Action Plans and ensure EVERYONE IS TREATED EQUALLY.
A starting right side partnership of Spence and Madueke is quite easily the worst I’ve ever seen in my lifetime
England are not a serious nation. 🏴