Intervene Immune

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The Thymus, Thymus-Mediated Immunity, and the Problem of Thymic Involution

Intervene Immune is dedicated to reversing a process called "thymic involution" in people. Here is why.

The thymus is considered by many the master gland of immunity. It is largely responsible, by educating bone marrow-derived cells to become the T cells that carry out cellular immune functions, for protecting you from foreign invaders such as bacteria and viruses, and it is also responsible for attacking tumors. B cells, which are not educated by the thymus, are responsible for "humoral immunity," which is mediated by antibodies. T cells, however, "talk to" B cells and regulate their function, so the thymus has powerful control over most immune system functions.

The thymus undergoes an apparently programmed process of atrophy called involution, particularly around the time of puberty, both shrinking and gradually being replaced by fat. This results, finally, in a massive and fairly abrupt collapse of immune system competence sometime between the ages of 65 and 75. Unfortunately, impaired immune system competence is strongly associated with a greatly increased risk of death in humans, both when it happens at younger ages (as in AIDS patients or after irradiation prior to bone marrow transplantation) and when it happens as a result of getting older following thymic involution in youth.

What this research suggests is that, if thymic involution is not corrected, you will eventually die from it, if nothing else kills you first. We believe thymic involution is a major but under-recognized limiting factor for human longevity and health maintenance into old age today, contributing to, for example, the fact that 90% of all flu-related deaths happen in people over the age of 65.

We intend to change this. We believe thymic involution is reversible using techniques that are available today. To prove this, we completed a human clinical trial, the TRIIM trial, to reverse thymic involution in 50-65 year-old normal healthy men.

On Sept. 8, 2019, we published our results from the TRIIM trial.  We documented a variety of effects that are consistent with reversing thymic involution, and beyond this, we also demonstrated an unprecedented reversal of epigenetic aging.  This amounted to a more than two year increase in predicted human lifespan for the trial volunteers, results based upon the most accurate measures of biological age available today.

The full trial results are published in the journal Aging Cell, and available here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/acel.13028