Author Archives: Senior Researcher

Increase Height Slightly Using Golimumab or Simponi

Something else that I had found from the research on possible compounds and chemicals which have some ability to cure arthritis, both rheumatoid and psoriatic, goes by the name Gilimumab aka Simponi.

Golimumab for the Treatment of Rheumatoid Arthritis After the Failure of Previous Disease-Modifying Antirheumatic Drugs: A NICE Single Technology Appraisal.
Golimumab for the treatment of psoriatic arthritis: a NICE single technology appraisal.
Golimumab for the treatment of psoriatic arthritis.
Golimumab for the treatment of ankylosing spondylitis: a NICE single technology appraisal

There is evidence that this drug created in the lab helps in reducing the symptoms of arthritis, but it may not be the most cost effective way of treating it.

As for whether it can lead to increased height, the effects of it would be minimal. Any effects would be from the increased lubrication between the bone ends.

Increase Height Slightly Using Tocilizumab By Inhibiting Interleukin-6

I have been noticing that many of the compounds that can be helpful to treat the symptoms of arthritis, osteoarthritis can be used to boost height slightly. The added thickness of the articular cartilage covering around the joints is form the increased lubrication these compounds can produce.

Something that I did find from scouring through old PubMed articles looking at the various kinds of arthritis treatment was a compound called Tocilizumab, which seems to be able to inhibit the inflammatory effects of interleukin-6.

Study #1: Inhibiting interleukin-6 in rheumatoid arthritis

Abstract – Interleukin (IL)-6 is the most abundant proinflammatory cytokine in the circulation and synovial joints of patients with active rheumatoid arthritis. It has pivotal roles in the immune response and inflammation. In rheumatoid arthritis, it causes synovitis, joint destruction, and many systemic manifestations. Clinical trials of tocilizumab, a humanized anti-IL-6 receptor monoclonal antibody that blocks IL-6 signaling, have demonstrated therapeutic benefit. It heralds a new era of anticytokine therapy in rheumatoid arthritis.

Study #2: Humanized antihuman IL-6 receptor antibody, tocilizumab

Abstract – Interleukin-6 (IL-6) is a pleiotropic cytokine that regulates immune responses and inflammatory reactions. Overproduction of IL-6 has been shown to play a role in inflammatory autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis (RA), and juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA) and, therefore, an agent blocking IL-6 actions can be a therapy of these diseases. IL-6 belongs to a cytokine family, which shares the cytokine receptor subunit glycoprotein (gp) 130. This family also includes IL-11, oncostatin-M, and leukemia inhibitory factor (LIF). In the IL-6 receptor (IL-6R) system, both a membrane-bound IL-6R and a soluble form of IL-6R are able to mediate IL-6 signals into the cells through the interaction of gp130. Tocilizumab is a humanized antihuman IL-6 receptor antibody designed using genetic engineering technology. Tocilizumab recognizes both the membrane-bound and the soluble form IL-6R and specifically blocks IL-6 actions. Tocilizumab is expected to ameliorate the autoimmune inflammatory diseases with IL-6 overproduction and has been clinically developed as a therapeutic agent for RA, systemic-onset and articular types of JIA, Crohn’s disease, etc. Tocilizumab has been shown to be effective not only for improving signs and symptoms but also for preventing joint destruction of RA. Immunopharmacology and clinical benefit of tocilizumab in RA is addressed.

Study #3: Interleukin-6–a key mediator of systemic and local symptoms in rheumatoid arthritis.

Abstract – Interleukin-6 (IL-6) is a pleiotropic cytokine, present at elevated levels in patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Il-6 signaling involves both a specific IL-6 receptor (IL-6R) and a ubiquitous signal-transducing protein, gp130 that is also utilized by other members of the IL-6 family. Il-6 signaling occurs by two mechanisms. Conventional signaling involves the binding of IL-6 to transmembrane IL-6R on cells expressing this receptor. In contrast, trans-signaling involves binding between the complex of soluble IL-6R/IL-6 and membrane-bound gp130. Trans-signaling allows IL-6 to affect cells that do not express IL-6R, including many synovial cells. The biological activities of IL-6 contribute to both systemic and local RA symptoms. Il-6 is a strong inducer of the acute-phase response, which can result in fever, secondary amyloidosis, anemia, and elevations in acute-phase proteins, such as C-reactive protein (CRP). The ability of IL-6 to induce B-cell differentiation may lead to the formation of rheumatoid factor and other autoantibodies. In joints, IL-6 promotes osteoclast activation and induces the release of matrix metalloproteinases, thus contributing to joint damage. In patients with RA, IL-6 levels correlate with markers of disease activity and clinical symptoms, and animal studies support the concept that this cytokine plays a role in the development of inflammatory arthritis. Clinical trials with tocilizumab, a humanized monoclonal antibody to soluble IL-6R, have shown that blocking IL-6 signaling reduces RA symptoms and markers of disease activity. Current evidence thus strongly supports the association between IL-6 and RA symptoms and suggests that IL-6 blockade will be a useful therapeutic strategy for patients with this disease.

Analysis:

Interleukin-6 is supposed the be the most abundant type of cytokine which causes inflammation when the body is under attack as a defense mechanism. This effect by the interleukin-6 is what causes different types of arthritis. From the 3rd study…

“In joints, IL-6 promotes osteoclast activation and induces the release of matrix metalloproteinases, thus contributing to joint damage…”

It was found that this compound known as tocilizumab has some way to inhibit the function of the interluekin-6.

It is described as being “a humanized anti-IL-6 receptor monoclonal antibody”

The main part that is fully understood is that it is anti-IL-6. The next part of its description which makes some type of sense is that it attaches to the receptor of the IL-6 to block it from doing something.

Tocilizumab was created by genetic engineering to be an antibody to be able to recognize the IL-6 receptor, known as IL-6R in two states, in the soluble form and the membrane-bound one. It was clinically developed to be a therapeutic agent for rheumatoid arthritis. It seems that it also helps in preventing the joints from being broken.

Implications For Height Increase Application

This compound known as Tocilizumab is something that can definitely treat rheumatoid arthritis and prevent the destruction of the joints. The studies I have found does not really say whether it produces any type of anabolic cartilage matrix material. It would probably be most effective towards working on older individuals who are suffering height loss from joint deterioration. It would probably have the most height altering affect by preventing dramatic height loss.

The First Product Manufactured By The First Biotech Company In The World Genentech Was To Treat Short Stature

I was doing research for another project I was working when I somehow found myself reading up on what can be considered one of the world’s best companies to work for and the 1st real biotech company in the world, Genentech.

Genentech has been consistently ranked as among the best companies to work for in the world by Fortune magazine for over 15 years. In 2006 it was rated #1.

I would also like to present the Awards and recognitions section from the Wikipedia article on Genentech.

Currently the company of Genentech owns the website www.gene.com (very cute and clever).

From the wikipedia article on Genentech…

It states that Genentech was created in 1976 by a VC Robert A. Swanson and a biochemist Dr. Herbert Boyer. The Swiss health-care conglomerate Roche AG owns Genentech after a massive buyout a few years ago.

Under the research section…

Genentech scientists in these various areas of expertise currently focus their efforts on five disease categories:

Oncology
Immunology
Tissue Growth and Repair
Neuroscience
Infectious Disease.

If we go to the product pipiline section, we can see that the 2nd product to ever come out, in 1985 by of Genentech was human recombinant human growth hormone (rhHGH)

1985 – Protropin (somatrem) – Supplementary growth hormone for children with growth hormone deficiency (ceased manufacturing 2004).

From the source Money.CNN.com it would seem that the first product, Insulin, was introduced very early on…“Within two years Genentech had concocted human insulin, which in 1982 became the first biotech drug to go to market….”

The fact is that when children suffer from the disorder of being deficient in growth hormone, they develop extreme short stature and stunted growth. The way that most endocrinologists would suggest to not allow that to happen is to start the child on growth hormone therapy will will be where the kid gets a injection of growth hormones a few times each week for many years (usually until they are close to bone maturity)

However, it seems that from a article posted on the Genentech website it suggests that the product protropin was actually the first one that really got down the pipeline. From the article “25th Anniversary of First Product Approval” which was an article written in Oct. 28, 2010…

“Twenty-five years ago, on October 18, 1985, Genentech received approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to market its first product, a growth hormone for children with growth hormone deficiency. It was the first recombinant biotech drug to be manufactured and marketed by a biotechnology company…”

It would turn out that for one of the founders of Genentech, he found out that his son was growing too slow which was caused from growth hormone deficiency. His son was going to end up short! and that was when Dr. Herbert W. Boyer decided to take action….

From the Genentech webpage…

“I got an idea for [the commercialization of recombinant DNA technology] when my oldest son was tested for growth hormone. He was on the lower end of the growth curve, and the pediatrician wanted to test his growth hormone levels…It turned out he had normal levels of growth hormone. The pediatrician said that he felt he would grow to an acceptable size based on that, and even though he was in a lower percentile, it was nothing to get too worried about. I didn’t even know that kids were treated with growth hormone to treat dwarfism. I think at the time I may have even told my wife, ‘You know, we could make human growth hormone; all we have to do is isolate the gene.’” — Herbert W. Boyer, Ph.D., Co-Founder of Genentech

“….considering Genentech’s manufacturing plant was new and Protopin growth hormone was the first commercial product to come out of the facility…. Genentech’s Hallelujah Chorus heralded the FDA approval of Protropin growth hormone. In an atmosphere of great celebration, Genentech entered a new era as a biotechnology company marketing its own product.

Genentech’s Protropin® (somatrem for injection), the first product to be manufactured and marketed by a biotech company,…”

For me this just shows us just how significant the element of height is in our lives. The fact seems to be that it was Protropin, not Insulin which was the first real product created by what some people would call the first and still one of the biggest and best biotech companies in the world, Genentech.

Protropin, a somatropin was developed because the founder realized that his son was going to end up short, and that was when he decided to search for something. It just shows us that when something like short stature means that people we really care about will have a very hard and difficult life, we finally start to take action.

Interesting Fact: I would also like to point out that from the product pipeline, it seems that the 5th product to ever come out of Genetech was ALSO a growth hormone, most likely used to treat short stature. Nutropin would become the successor to protropin.

1993 – Nutropin (recombinant somatropin) – Growth hormone for children and adults for treatment before kidney transplant due to chronic renal insufficiency.

Analysis: The thing about chronic renal insufficiency is that it is one of the most common causes for children to develop into short stature. Refer to the PubMed studies below…

So could it be that Genentech, who has been consistently ranked the BEST IN THE WORLD as a company was created all because of the fact that a son was going to end up short and the father wanted to try to do something to prevent that from happening???

The Importance Of Doing Original Research And Having Deep Insights, A Lesson From The Life Of Ettore Majorana

The italian physicist Ettore Majorana is someone who I have always admired and been fascinated by ever since I learned how much the great Enrico Fermi respected his physics abilities and his strange disappearance.

I recently read a paper on a theory on what happened to Majorana where it is claimed that he faked his own death or disappearance and found a way to escape to South America, presumably Peru or Venezuela. While this type of stuff would be interesting only to physics historians, I do have to say that the way Ettore Majorana was able to do original, deep, and insightful research is what I most admire in him.

There is no doubt that this man was extreme intelligent, so much so that Fermi would often lament the fact that Majorana was not there to help in finding solutions to challenging physics problems.

What I am proposing is that after maybe the next 2-3 months, when the majority of the easy papers and posts are finally written up, which will be done soon, it will be time to start synthesizing all the research together from all the posts written in this past year to try to dig for something that researchers may not have seen before.

We will no longer be writing articles which can be duplicated by any ordinary height increase researcher or journalist. I have seen dozens of researchers who can claim that letrozole is the answer to all of their height needs. Well letrozole is rather easy to identify as an important part of our grow taller endeavor since it is clearly written for us to find and read. We need to do more and connect studies and experimental conclusions together to reach new insights and ideas.

We have to go deeper and deeper into the science. There is no other way. It is not possible to stay on the shallow end of understanding and keep on writing about abstracts we find from PubMed. To make any serious breakthrough we need to really sit down and put thing together.

Currently I am looking over the ideas of possibly weakening the cortical bone layers using reverse ossification ideas making the bones eventually elastic enough to stretch will significantly less force applied.

The other idea I have been looking for is ways to cause bone fractures, specifically sharp thin cuts on the bone which can be done non-invasively, maybe through a multiple direction low intensity guided laser apparatus, like that of the MRI-guided focused ultrasound (MRIGFU). I wrote about the possibility of using MRIGFU towards height increase in the post “Increase Height And Grow Taller Using Magnetic Resonance Image, MRI Guided High Intensity Focused Ultrasound Surgery, FUS“

The last thing I have been looking at is finding the best growth factor combination needed to cause adult human adipose tissue derived mesenchymal stem cells to differentiate only into chondrocytes.

– Just a side thought for today. –

Increase Height And Grow Taller Using Pluripotent Stem Cell Transdifferentiation

The idea I am proposing is something that I am quite sure scientists and researchers around the world have not been able to figure out yet. A guess is that it would take another 20 years of careful research before not only will scientists understand the molecular signaling and mechanisms which cause the process of transdifferentiation, but also how to control the process well enough to turn adult human cells that are completely differentiated into another type of cell.

I am proposing that it will be possible using pluripotent stem cells who are going through transdifferentiation to increase one’s height. First, we review what the process of “transdifferentiation” (source is Wikipedia) is…

“…is a process where one mature somatic cell transforms into another mature somatic cell without undergoing an intermediate pluripotent state or progenitor cell type. It is a type of metaplasia, which includes all cell fate switches, including the interconversion of stem cells. Current uses of transdifferentiation include disease modeling and drug discoveryand in the future may include gene therapy and regenerative medicine…”

I personally got extremely interested in transdifferentiation when I read about how the immortal hydra use this process to reverse in aging and stay biological immortal. I would write two older post about this idea.

The original article that started it all was “Can a Jellyfish Unlock the Secret of Immortality?” published in the New York Times back in November of 2012. It seems that this jellyfish, the Turritopsis nutricula is the only species we know of were the adult of the species can do transdifferentiation.

The usual way that most cells actually change from one type into another is to first dedifferentiate back into the progenitor stem cells which they were derived from. One they are de-differentiated, then they re-differentiate into the other types of cells. This is NOT transdifferentiation. In transdifferentiation, the step where it has to go back and then forward again is removed. The other way, where we induce the cells to go backwards, and then forwards again is known as pluripotent reprogramming, which has its own benefits, strengths, and weakness.

I would rather go for this endeavor, we use transdifferentiation because it allows for shifting for cells who have similar lineages, while for pluripotent reprogramming, the possible combinations which the progenitor cells can go into are limitless. We just want to focus on cartilage cells and bone cells.

Something I would like to point out is that recently I found that one can de-differentiate chondrocytes into fibroblast-like cells automatically and then re-differentiate them back into chondrocytes using the right type of structure, so the structure of the medium which encapsulates the cells can also determine what the cells will turn into.

The main method which transdifferentiation of the cells is possible in the laboratory is by doing something called “Lineage Instructive Approach”

From wikipedia, “In this approach transcription factors from progenitor cells of the target cell type are transfected into a somatic cell to induce transdifferentiation”

So it seems that we determine which types of cells we want to form, and also figure out which are the precursor progenitor cells which create this specific type of cell lineage. We take the transcription factors that are specific to the precursor cells and get them implanted into any type of cell found in the human body. This theoretically should get the overall cell to start to change its identity.

Implications For Height Increase Application

When one day we can induce cells in the adult human tissue like the cortical bone structure to change into chondrocytes, then we would have really developed a very unique idea on how to increase our height, in a very invasive approach. We might be able to just inject the right type of transcription factor to turn the cells that make the bones into the type of cells that make cartilage. With a simple injection, we develop cartilage tissue again where cortical bone was.

Indeed we would still need to possibly increase the osteoclast numbers to start to remove the hard bone matrix as well as inject a certain type of compound, probably thyroxine to get the chondrocytes that are newly formed to be in the right structural alignment.

However the hardest part in my opinion at this point in the research is that we will need to figure out how to change bone cells into cartilage cells in a stable way that won’t just de-differentiate back into bone cells again. Of course, the first step is to get transdifferentiation to be achieved, and that may take over a decade of real research.

Swiss Study Show That Divorced Men Are On Average Shorter Than Their Married Counterparts

I was looking through PubMed today and came across a little interesting article/study which looked at the socio-economic patterns of height. The abstract was the only thing that I could get but it did reveal something a little interesting. It was just a short segment but I do wonder what the implications of something like this would be.

PubMed study: “Taller – Healthier – more equal? The biological standard of living in Switzerland in the second half of the 20th century.”

Econ Hum Biol. 2010 Mar;8(1):67-79. doi: 10.1016/j.ehb.2009.09.002. Epub 2009 Sep 12.
Kues AB.
Source: journals@econhist.de

Abstract

This paper analyzes the trends in physical stature and body mass of the Swiss population born between 1955 and 1985, based on data collected in the “Living in Switzerland Survey” (Swiss Household Panel) of 2004. Aside from the time trend, we investigate the impact of educational and marital status as well as spatial effects on height and BMI. The results corroborate previous studies: average height increased during the second half of the 20th century for both women and men, better educated individuals are tallest, divorced men are shorter than married men and urban populations enjoy a height advantage over rural ones. We also compare the level and the trend in height to other postindustrial populations to identify key causes of physical growth and conclude that the quality of the health care systems and equal access to it seem to have a greater impact than other redistributive aspects of the welfare state. The relatively low level of inequality in health led to average height in Switzerland that are similar to those obtained in the Scandinavian social-democratic welfare states. Other measures such as income inequality do not have a high explanatory power for the average stature of the Swiss population.

PMID:19797002 [PubMed – indexed for MEDLINE]

Analysis

Maybe more than just showing the relationship of how divorced men are shorter than their married counterpart, there was a few other things that this 30 year study between the years 1955-1985 of Switzerland revealed. These are the main things…

better educated individuals are tallest
urban populations enjoy a height advantage over rural ones
the quality of the health care systems and equal access to it seem to have a greater impact than other redistributive aspects of the welfare state
The relatively low level of inequality in health led to average height in Switzerland that are similar to those obtained in the Scandinavian social-democratic welfare states

So if you live in the city, you are a little taller than if you lived on a farm. If you are in the tallest group, you are more likely to be well educated.

Healthcare plays a huge part. Because of how equal it is in getting healthcare for everyone, the entire average height of switzerland has reached the level of height seen in the Northern Scandinavian countries.

Natural Height Growth

Cancer, Stem Cells, Regenerative Tissue Engineering, Transdifferentiation