SARS-COV-2 and biomimetics: What saves the planet will save our health

What Can the Gut Microbiota of Animals Teach Us about the Relationship between Nutrition and Burden of Lifestyle Diseases?

The gut microbiota performs several crucial roles in a holobiont with its host, including immune regulation, nutrient absorption, synthesis, and defense against external pathogens, significantly influencing host physiology. Disruption of the gut microbiota has been linked to various chronic conditions, including cardiovascular, kidney, liver, respiratory, and intestinal diseases. Studying how animals adapt their gut microbiota across their life course at different life stages and under the dynamics of extreme environmental conditions can provide valuable insights from the natural world into how the microbiota modulates host biology, with a view to translating these into treatments or preventative measures for human diseases. By modulating the gut microbiota, opportunities to address many complications associated with chronic diseases appear. Such a biomimetic approach holds promise for exploring new strategies in healthcare and disease management.

Chronic Kidney Disease and the Exposome of Ageing

The gap between improvements in lifespan and age-related health is widening. Globally, the demographic of ageing is increasing and there has emerged a 'diseasome of ageing', typified by a range of non-communicable diseases which share a common underlying component of a dysregulated ageing process. Within this, chronic kidney disease is an emerging global epidemic.The extensive inter-individual variation displayed in how people age and how their diseasome manifests and progresses, has required a renewed focus on their life course exposures and the interplay between the environment and the (epi)genome. Termed the exposome, life course abiotic and biotic factors have a significant impact on renal health.We explore how the exposome of renal ageing can predispose and affect CKD progression. We discuss how the kidney can be used as a model to understand the impact of the exposome in health and chronic kidney disease and how this might be manipulated to improve health span.Notably, we discuss the manipulation of the foodome to mitigate acceleration of ageing processes by phosphate and to explore use of emerging senotherapies. A range of senotherapies, for removing senescent cells, diminishing inflammatory burden and either directly targeting Nrf2, or manipulating it indirectly via modification of the microbiome are discussed.

Manipulating the exposome to enable better ageing

The sum total of life course exposures creates an exposome that has a significant impact on age-related health. Understanding the interplay between exposome factors and the (epi) genome, offers pertinent insights into the ageing process and its relationship with the accumulation of allostatic load. We propose to exploit this to develop a biomimetic approach that will provide insight into how evolution through natural selection in other species has solved many age related human health issues. In particular, we will emphasise the need to reconnect a more mechanistic approach to medical science with a broader natural sciences approach, using biomimetics to mitigate the global burden of age related ill health. In particular, we will discuss how such an approach indicates leverage of the activities of the Nrf 2 gene to enhance health span via reintroduction of the classical 'Food as Medicine' concept, including modulation of the microbiome and the creation of more salutogenic and biophilic environments. Additionally, we will discuss how this approach integrates with novel and developing senotherapies.

A biomimetic natural sciences approach to understanding the mechanisms of ageing in burden of lifestyle diseases

The worldwide landscape of an ageing population and age-related disease brings with it huge socio-economic and public healthcare concerns across nations. Correspondingly, monumental human and financial resources have been invested in biomedical research, with a mission to decode the mechanisms of ageing and how these contribute to age-related disease. Multiple hallmarks of ageing have been identified that are common across taxa, highlighting their fundamental importance. These include dysregulated mitochondrial metabolism and telomeres biology, epigenetic modifications, cell-matrix interactions, proteostasis, dysregulated nutrient sensing, stem cell exhaustion, inflammageing and immuno-senescence. While our understanding of the molecular basis of ageing is improving, it remains a complex and multifactorial process that remains to be fully understood. A key aspect of the shortfall in our understanding of the ageing process lies in translating data from standard animal models to humans. Consequently, we suggest that a 'biomimetic' and comparative approach, integrating knowledge from species in the wild, as opposed to inbred genetically homogenous laboratory animals, can provide powerful insights into human ageing processes. Here we discuss some particularities and comparative patterns among several species from the animal kingdom, endowed with longevity or short lifespans and unique metabolic profiles that could be potentially exploited to the understanding of ageing and age-related diseases. Based upon lessons from nature, we also highlight several avenues for renewed focus in the pathophysiology of ageing and age-related disease (i.e. diet-microbiome-health axis, oxidative protein damage, adaptive homoeostasis and planetary health). We propose that a biomimetic alliance with collaborative research from different disciplines can improve our understanding of ageing and age-related diseases with long-term sustainable utility.