Jacob Kimmel

They don't perform many functions directly themselves, but they bind specific pieces of DNA and then they tell which genes to turn on, which genes to turn off.

They eventually put chemical marks on top of DNA, on some proteins that DNA surrounds.

And this is one of the answers, this particular layer of regulation called the epigenome.

It's the answer to this fundamental biological question of how do all my cells have the same genome, but ultimately do very different things.

Your eyeball and your kidney have the same code, and yet they're performing different functions.

And that may sound a little bit simplistic, but ultimately I think it's kind of a profound realization.

And so that epigenetic code is really what's important for cells to define their functions.

That's what's telling them which genes to evoke from your genome.

What has now become relatively apparent is that the epigenome can degrade with age.

It changes.

The particular marks that tell your cells which genes to use can shift as you get older.

This means that cells aren't able to use the right genetic programs at the right times to respond to their environment.

You're then more susceptible to disease.

You have less resilience to many insults that you might experience.

And our hope is that by remodeling the epigenome back toward the state it was in when you were young, right after development, that you'll be able to actually address myriad different diseases whose one of strong contributing factors is that cells are less functional than when you were at an earlier point in your life.

So we're going after this by trying to find combinations of these transcription factors that are able to actually remodel the epigenome so that they can bind to just the right places in the DNA and then shift the chemical marks back toward that state when you were a young individual.

Oh, how I wish it were straightforward.

No, it's very likely.

Each of these transcription factors binds hundreds to thousands of places in the genome.

And one way of thinking about it is if you imagine the genome is sort of the base components of cell function, then these transcription factors are kind of like the basis set in linear algebra.