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t m c » p u l s e | n o v e m b e r 2 0 1 9 7 Staying Strong How a new drug, nutrition and exercise help prevent muscle decline W e lose muscle as we get older. Period. No matter how much we exercise or diet, age- related muscle loss is a fact of life. Our strength typically tops out around age 35 and then starts to decline—slowly, at first, but acceler- ating in our later years. "Think of your parents at age 75," said Stanley Watowich, Ph.D., an associate professor in the depart- ment of biochemistry and molec- ular biology at The University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) at Galveston. "They're about half as strong as they were when they were 35. That limits their quality of life. Maybe they can't lift the grandchildren. Maybe they have trouble walking." Watowich wants to change that. He and his team are developing a drug, now known as RT-001, to help people retain muscle strength as they age—a pill that would allow our muscles to act younger even as we get older. "We know we really decline at 60," Watowich said. "But can we change that trajectory? If we can, you're going to stay stronger as you age. You're going to have a better quality of life." This holy grail of health works by targeting one enzyme in the body. "There is a molecule—an enzyme—that controls how metab- olism occurs in different cell types," Watowich explained. "As we age, this enzyme increases in the muscles. We don't know why, but it does, and it interferes with the muscle stem cells' ability to become activated. When you're younger, muscle stem cells get activated, go to damaged muscle, proliferate, grow and fuse and they repair the muscle. As you age, you still have these stem cells, but they no longer get activated, in part because the metabolic state has been impacted by this enzyme, called nicotinamide N-methyltransferase (NNMT)." Watowich's drug turns off NNMT. "By stopping it from working," he said, "we kind of reset the stem cell to a point where it functions as if it's in a younger person." Results from a study of the drug's effect on aged mice were published earlier this year in Biochemical Pharmacology. ➟ B y M a g g i e G a l e h o u s e Stanley Watowich, Ph.D., an associate professor in the department of biochemistry and molecular biology at The University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) at Galveston, is developing a drug to help people retain muscle strength as they age.