Dr. Serrano is an internationally recognized expert in the field of tumor suppression, senescence and aging.

Dr. Serrano, can you please give us your own definition of aging?

Dr. Serrano: I like to define aging as a progressive loss of capacity to maintain and repair tissues. This, in turn, implies a parallel increase in the risk of developing multiple diseases.

What inspired you to focus on molecular biology?

Dr. Serrano: My fascination for molecular biology started when I was a teenager at high school and learned that underneath life there was a world of sophisticated little machines, enzymes, tubes, vesicles, channels, codes, signals, all made up of simple elements. I still find this fascinating and I believe that if we want to understand aging, we have to understand its underlying molecular processes. Furthermore, molecular approaches may lead to pharmacological interventions, as it has been the case with so many human diseases. I am convinced, one day, not too far away, aging will also be controllable, to some extent, using molecular medicines.

What would you say is the most important scientific development in age science and longevity in recent years? How close are we to achieving a significant extension of our healthy life span?

Dr. Serrano: The key developments started in the 90s when scientists realized that small changes in some genes were sufficient to delay the aging of animals. This was a dramatic conceptual change that made us realize that longevity had a genetic component (longevity does not depend exclusively on the genetic makeup, but it is a strong determinant). Scientists feel comfortable with genes, we know how to isolate them, manipulate them, make them stronger or weaker; genes encode proteins that can be purified and studied, that perform functions and that can often be blocked or reinforced with small chemical compounds. After 25 years of applying the methods of molecular biology, our understanding of aging is now very detailed, although still incomplete. The first pharmacological compounds that delay aging in animals have been found, many more will be found and refined in the next years, and some of them will likely be active in humans.

How does our ability to repair and reprogram cells contribute to our longevity and health preservation? Is there a direct relationship?

Dr. Serrano: This is a difficult question. Unfortunately, the capacity of scientists to improve tissue repair is still very limited. Tissue repair is an extraordinarily complex process and we understand it very superficially. Nobody has yet found a method to improve tissue repair and ask how this impacts on longevity. Common sense says that longevity should increase if we improve tissue repair, but sometimes common sense plays tricks on us.

The science of understanding the sources of damage is more advanced, compared to tissue repair. Reducing the physiological sources of damage (DNA errors, oxidative damage, loss of telomeres, accumulation of protein aggregates, etc.) has a clear positive impact on longevity in experimental animals.