Science

Restoring capacity to repare

In health, our bodies maintain a natural equilibrium whereby any damage that occurs is balanced by our capacity to repair. But as we age, and in chronic illness, this balance is disrupted -the accumulation of damage exceeds the body’s capacity to repair it.

Eventually, this imbalance leads to chronic disease(s), the leading cause of illness, disability and premature death globally. The scale of the problem is enormous. Almost all Europeans aged 45 years and older will develop at least one chronic disease in their lifetime. And disability resulting from chronic disease contributes to the global loss of 1.73 billion years of full health- travelling back in time, that would be 1.5 billion years before dinosaurs roamed the earth and when the only life forms were single cells.

Our current treatment approaches are, largely, to allow symptoms to emerge, and then control/reduce them to improve quality of life and slow further decline. Whilst modern medicines are effective in doing this, they do not support, and, indeed, may suppress, the body’s natural repair processes. This reduces the body’s ability to respond in the way nature intended. As a result, patients ‘live with’ chronic diseases, experiencing continued, albeit slower, disease progression, re-emerging symptoms and reduced quality of life compared with healthy individuals.

Istesso’s treatments work by modulating the mitochondria – the beating heart of the body’s cells, responsible for energy production and central to everyday cell function. By targeting cells with high energy requirements and low metabolic flexibility, turning different metabolic pathways on or off, affecting how cells behave and function, our medicines support and promote the body’s natural capacity to repair, allowing them to repair damaged tissue and restore tissue architecture to its original form. The applications of this approach are broad, with potential to directly prevent and potentially reverse decline in degenerative conditions such as muscle and/or bone loss (sarcopenia and osteosarcopenia), and in multiple chronic diseases of autoimmunity or fibrosis, such as RA or idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF).

Identifying a signal that can direct damaged tissues to regenerate and repair has long been a critical, but elusive, goal of medicine. By enhancing the body’s natural capacity to repair, Istesso’s novel experimental medicines could address this challenge, ultimately slowing progressive age- and disease-related decline, helping us to age better and live longer.