Dr. Martin Picard

You call out.

You call out for help.

Yeah.

Cytokines are universal language of cell-cell communication.

Cytokines are not immune.

There's this fundamental way that cells have to talk to each other.

There's a parallel in biology, which is how different species develop much faster.

Then they reach reproductive age much faster, and then they die much earlier.

Like mice, for example.

They live like two to three years, and they develop really quickly.

So everything is accelerated.

And there's two beautiful papers, one published in Nature, one published in Science, on the same month in 2023, that I think shed some light on this.

They ask, what controls the pace of development?

in mice and in humans.

And so they took mouse cells, human cells, stem cells, put them in a dish, and then you look for the rhythm of development.

And they found that, as others had seen before, the mouse cells, which came from an animal that develops, grows, and dies in three years, versus human cells, an organism that develops, grows, and dies in like 80-ish years, have very different developmental rates.

And then they ask, what's different between that?

What controls the pace of development?

And they found that the main driver of this, and then they did experiments where you can accelerate or decelerate the pace of development by modulating mitochondrial metabolism.

Exactly.