With over 75 million baby boomers in the U.S. alone, age-related diseases are a major concern in the health care system. The connection between aging and cancer has become a pillar in medicine: we know that as we age, our cells tend to accumulate damaging changes in their DNA, eventually becoming unfit to perform their normal functions.
My lab has found that examining a cell's RNA may have the potential to identify the changes that our cells gain from aging. The benefit of manipulating RNA rather than DNA is that the cell's blueprint does not change, which could cause unpredictable, permanent changes to the cell. This focus on RNA represents a potentially major shift in how scientists try to prevent cellular damage.
