165: Improving Cellular Cleanup to Extend Healthspan with Dr. Ana Maria Cuervo

Aging begins when cellular quality-control systems lose their precision. In this episode, Professor Ana Maria Cuervo outlines how chaperone-mediated autophagy (CMA)—a selective lysosomal degradation pathway essential for proteostasis—progressively declines with age, triggering downstream failures across neuronal and metabolic tissues. Reduced LAMP2A availability, impaired lysosomal docking, and disrupted protein triage lead to toxic proteotoxic burden, mitochondrial dysfunction, and metabolic inflexibility. Emerging evidence shows that preserving CMA activity can improve healthspan, attenuate neurodegenerative pathology, and restore metabolic homeostasis. Learn more about Dr. Ana Maria Cuervo: https://einsteinmed.edu/faculty/8784/ana-maria-cuervo