Boundless Possibilities
Do mushrooms hold the secret to slowing human aging? Chemist Pinghua Liu has cofounded a company focused on answering that question.
For nearly two decades, Pinghua Liu searched for ways to regulate or reverse the human biological clock. His solution may come from an unlikely source: mushrooms.
Liu, an associate professor of chemistry, long wondered: If our bodies can grow from birth through puberty—and later break down—is there a way to disrupt and slow the aging process? With the creation of Ergo-health, the company he cofounded with Mark Grinstaff, a professor of chemistry at Arts & Sciences and biomedical engineering at BU’s College of Engineering, Liu has taken a major step toward answering that question.
The basis of the company’s work is ergothioneine, an amino acid that naturally occurs in low concentrations in mushrooms. It’s a common ingredient in modern cosmetics and dietary supplements; reishi mushrooms, known as “the mushroom of immortality,” have been a staple of Eastern medicine for centuries. But ergothioneine’s cost—$50,000 per gram—has made large-scale studies unfeasible.
In a collaboration with a team of colleagues and peers, Liu developed a method to mass produce synthetic ergothioneine. Within two years of that discovery, he had found that ergothioneine could extend a mouse’s median lifespan by nearly 40 percent.
“The question remains what this means for understanding aging in humans,” he says. “You can’t run human trials for longevity. It takes too long and there might be ethical issues.”
Instead, Ergo-health will focus on the potential to use ergothioneine-based longevity compounds to study the aging process and to treat aging-associated cardiovascular and neurological diseases.