… levels you'd see in a 30-year-old artery.Wow. Amazing. A friend of mine predicted that in our lifetimes we would see the reversal of major diseases and extensions of life. I thought he was way over his skis. https://t.co/uO2RhjgF0Y
— Barbara M Boyd (@BarbaraMBoyd) July 20, 2026
Published five days ago in Nature Communications. Revel Pharmaceuticals, with Calico and the University of Colorado.
Here's what they erased.
Sugar reacts with proteins in your body the same way heat browns bread — slowly, over a lifetime. It leaves behind a residue called CML, the most abundant advanced glycation end product in aging tissue. It welds itself onto collagen and elastin in your skin, your eye lens, and your arterial walls.
Two things follow. Your arteries stiffen. And CML latches onto a receptor called RAGE, which drives chronic inflammation — the exact fire I've been writing about for months as the engine of heart disease.
Since the 1980s this damage was considered permanent. Your body has no enzyme to remove it. Every existing approach only slows new damage from forming. Nothing touched what was already there. So they built an enzyme that doesn't exist in nature. They screened 45,000 protein structures, then ran five rounds of directed evolution across more than 500 million variants until they had CMLase — a molecular lawnmower that oxidizes the CML off the protein and restores the original, healthy lysine underneath.
Not patched. Reversed.
Over 70% cleared from elderly arterial tissue. Over 55% from elderly skin — below the levels found in 31-year-old skin. 45-78% in lens proteins. The CEO said they expected 20% and were floored. Arterial stiffness drives systolic hypertension, heart failure, and stroke, and I have no drug that reverses it. I can slow the process. I cannot undo it. This paper says undoing it may be possible.
The caveats are real and I won't skip them. This was done on donated tissue in a dish, not in a living person. No functional data yet — we don't know if that artery got measurably more elastic. Delivering a large enzyme deep into human tissue is a hard, unsolved problem. Clinical trials are years away.
But something considered permanent for forty years just came off human tissue. We spent a century learning to slow aging. Someone finally figured out how to erase it.
Friedberg: New study shows enzyme reverses skin age from 70+ years to 31
— The All-In Podcast (@theallinpod) July 18, 2026
Chamath: That’s a $2T market.
Did Scientists Just Discover How to Reverse Skin Aging!?
“CML is kind of the predominant molecule that gets formed in this extracellular matrix that's driving aging, and… pic.twitter.com/eYSv04AnXg
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 20, 2026