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Dopamine. Source

1. Recently learned of dopamine's surprising role in negatively regulating prolactin secretion. Totally interesting how closely neurotransmitters & hormones overlap with each other sometimes... which is how you get antipsychotics that promote lactation & Parkinson's drugs that suppress it.

• Learning about this throws me back to Sarah Constantin's lit review of overlooked lifespan interventions - notice how many are related to alterations of hypothalamic, pineal, & pituitary function with age. Probably something there!

2.  Cool screening technique for finding repurposable longevity drugs in vitro.

The authors used a screening technique to find drugs that upregulate a stress resilience gene called Fmo, associated with “free lunch” lifespan extension in C. elegans. By identifying these drugs in vitro, they showed that a portion of them could extend lifespan in C. elegans.

• I’m not a big fan of using observational data to develop longevity interventions, like seeing that Fmo is upregulated in long-lived C. elegans. However, it’s a cost-effective way to find promising leads, making this paper interesting.
• The recent success with IL-11 illustrates this approach:
• 1. Researchers noticed IL-11 upregulates with age
• 2. They hypothesized it’s detrimental to health
• 3. They tested it in a lifespan study with mice, which proved successful

        While this linear approach often fails, it’s currently one of the best systematic methods we have for finding longevity interventions.

3. Wrote a little thread about James Thomson's less remembered but crucial role in discovering iPSCs (which won Shinya Yamanaka the Nobel Prize). If it weren't obvious already, I like to consider myself a connoisseur of longevity lore lol