From Monday to Friday, day after day; Jesús Ávila has been punctual for forty years at his job. “I have been through many places,” he assures this newspaper. This 77-year-old from Madrid graduated in Chemistry at the Complutense University of Madrid in the 1960s, although his professional life has led him to spend a lot of time outside of Spanish laboratories. A disciple of Margarita Salas and Severo Ochoa, Ávila tries to understand the brain, “although I don’t think I will ever achieve it,” he answers between laughs. Between mountains of pages stacked in his office, this CSIC researcher seeks to find answers to aging and the ills derived from the passage of time in the human body. However, he flees from any hint of immortality “what I want is to ensure that if we live longer, it is with a better quality of life.”
-More than 40 years between laboratories, what is the reason or reasons that have made you get up and come here for more than four decades?
I’ve been to many places. I studied at the Complutense University of Chemical Sciences, but my first job was at the Institute for Nuclear Studies. Later I met Eladio Viñuelas and Margarita Salas, they are my mentors, they changed my life and they made me passionate about this field of study. Also, I can say that I was the first scholarship holder of Margarita Salas. She taught me a lot. Then I went to the United States for a while to finally return to Spain. In this return I began to be interested in the field of cells and neuroscience, I was increasingly passionate about studying and understanding the brain, although I think I will never achieve it (laughs). Trying to find out the bases of memory and feelings is something that I am passionate about.
-You have mentioned the name of Margarita Salas, but you cannot forget that of Severo Ochoa either…
-I am very lucky because, throughout my life, I have been with very smart people, very intelligent and generally good people. Margarita educated me and taught me the three “P’s”: patience, perseverance and perfection. With Don Severo, I have always called him that, I coincided when I was director of the Center for Molecular Biology and he was the honorary director. We had a few arguments and I remember that in one of them he got so angry that he wrote an article on ABC saying that he had to improve many things in this center. He attacked me a lot, but I have it there because it is a jewel. You are not always attacked by a Nobel Prize (laughs).
-And now what work?
-In aspects of the neuronal cytoskeleton. Translated: we seek to know what are the bases of neurodegenerative problems, such as Alzheimer’s disease. This disease has a very small proportion of family origin, but the greatest risk is aging and at those ages the risk is great, we must find ways to prevent it. The problem is that when you go to the neurologist it is already too late, because there is such great neuronal destruction that nothing can be done. We look for that prevention and we do it at two levels. The first is to find out what happens in the morphology of the neurons that causes them to not work well. We also work on checking how we can aging. In Alzheimer’s disease there are modifiable risks that make the probability decrease, such as exercising or leading a healthy life. Then there are other factors that cannot be changed such as genetics or aging, what we want to do is make the latter modifiable. There are many people working on reversing aging, but not on the nervous system. We focus on the brain and it is curious because this rejuvenation thing seems to be very important, so much so that a man named Bezos, the head of Amazon, has now created a huge biomedical company to attack this problem and has taken to the best Spaniards
-Have they called you?
-At my age I no longer register (laughs). I have worked with some of them and they are at a very high level. In their research they are focused on peripheral cells, but we are focused on rejuvenating neurons so that what does not work well due to age can work correctly again. We have started with the hippocampus, where memory resides, and there we have seen in mice that when they age, memory decreases. However, we have verified that following a series of procedures it recovers and it is something in which we are very interested.
-But when do we start to age?
-It is something that comes almost by decree. Although over the centuries, life expectancy has been increasing. Now you can reach an average of 80 years and what is being tried is that this maintenance and living conditions are as favorable as possible. That is where neuronal rejuvenation is attempted…
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How is this rejuvenation done? Are the cells reprogrammed or reset?
-There are several ways. One is very curious that we call it the Dracula method, which changes the blood of the young to the old and is called parabiosis. We don’t do that, we follow what Yamanaka discovered and it earned him a Nobel Prize. Until its discovery, it was believed that the life of a cell was one-way, that is, it divides, differentiates and gives rise to a complete organism. Yamanaka managed to demonstrate that this path could be reversed by taking differentiated cells and making them embryonic, or what is the same, returning them to their primary state. This is curious because it happens in practically all differentiated cells, except in neurons. Our first work of him was to use the determinants of genetic manipulations in mice and to see that the aged neurons in the hippocampal zone state rejuvenated themselves. However, genetic manipulations cannot be done in humans, because it is unethical and it cannot be harmed. So what we are looking for is to find a pill that is given to the person and does the same as the Yamanaka factors in a simple context.
-And for what purpose?
-I work in the public, not in the private and I do not look for the money. There are some compounds that we have analyzed and they are patented and the name they bear is that of the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC) and if one day it generates money, it will all go to the Council. What we seek is to avoid neurodegenerative problems, such as Alzheimer’s disease, whose greatest risk is aging. That people lose consciousness and memory is a very serious problem and if we can slow down the aging aspects of neurons and make people continue with a good quality of life it would be a very big step.
-Then that would be his big eureka!
-When I was little I was very competitive, but when the years go by that is lost. It doesn’t matter who gets it and in this the wisest was Ramón y Cajal who said that after you they would come better than they would get it. I totally agree. The issue is that someone does it and it is as universal as possible, because it is useless to do it and that those who have more money enjoy it, that is not the idea.
-You have told us that you have been working in this field for a long time. When could that pill you were telling us about be available?
-There is some that is already patented, what happens is the matter that comes later. The purely academic and prior knowledge world is one thing and the commercial and economic world is another. In this case, the word does not belong to the researcher, but to the pharmaceutical companies that are going to commercialize it. They are the ones you have to ask. It is profitable? Where do you have to get the money? One thing is the discovery and another the commercialization.
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