INDY, I'm Not Dead Yet, is one of the earliest of longevity-associated genes to be documented. Researchers uncovered its effects in flies at the turn of the century, something like half an eternity ago given the pace of modern biotechnology. Despite the rapid pace of progress in the field as a whole, the INDY gene is also an example of the extremely slow and incremental progression that is characteristic of any one specific line of research in molecular biochemistry. The open access paper I'll point out today is a review of what is presently known of INDY in flies and mammals, information gathered over the what is now going on for two decades of work. The focus is on the ways in which the beneficial effects of reduced levels of INDY appear quite similar to those of calorie restriction - though clearly it is a complicated overlap, because trying both reduced levels of INDY and calorie restriction either has no effect or shortens life span. Regardless, anything that looks a lot like calorie restriction tends to be treated as a potential road to the development of calorie restriction mimetic drugs in this day and age.

Why is progress slow when you follow any one particular thread in aging research? Well, for one funding for aging research is small in comparison to other fields of medical research. Secondly, cellular biochemistry is enormously complex. It does in fact tend to take a few years even now for any one group to make a single connection in the complex web that is cellular metabolism. Just moving the focus of research into INDY from flies to mice took a long time, and it is still clearly in its early stages when considered in the context of the bigger picture of identifying targets, developing drugs, and producing clinical treatments. Mapping and tinkering with metabolism is a good thing in the long term, as gaining a full understanding of our cells is - and should be - the goal of the life sciences, but it certainly isn't the fast road to meaningful interventions to slow or reverse the aging process. For that we need engineering approaches like SENS, turning what we already know of aging into repair treatments capable in principle of rejuvenation.

INDY - A New Link to Metabolic Regulation in Animals and Humans