John Sedivy at CSHL explains LINE-1 reactivation, inflammation and aging

In a Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Leading Strand lecture, John Sedivy explained that LINE-1 and other transposable elements make up roughly 17% of the human genome and are normally silenced by heterochromatin in adulthood. As aging erodes that silencing, LINE-1 re-enters the cytoplasm, is sensed as viral material and drives chronic antiviral inflammation that may underlie neurodegeneration, cancer and other age-related disease. He pointed to epidemiology linking long-term use of HIV reverse transcriptase inhibitors (NRTIs) to lower rates of Alzheimer's disease, type 2 diabetes and some cancers, and his co-founded Transposon Therapeutics has a LINE-1-targeting reverse transcriptase inhibitor, about 20 times more potent than older drugs, in a large ALS trial.