In England, researchers rejuvenated the skin cells of a 53-year-old woman to the equivalent of those of a 23-year-old woman.
Scientists in the city of Cambridge believe they can do the same with other tissues in the body.
Research; It aims to develop treatments for age-related diseases such as diabetes, heart disease and neurological disorders.
The skin cell rejuvenation technology builds on the techniques used to create the cloned sheep Dolly over 25 years ago.
The head of the team from the Babraham Institute, working in partnership with Cambridge University, is Prof. Wolf Reik told the BBC he hopes this technique can be used to keep people healthy longer as they age.
prof. “Many common diseases get worse with age, and it’s very exciting to be able to help people in this way,” said Wolf Reik.
Reik notes that the study, published in the journal eLife, is still at a very early stage. According to Reik, there are a few scientific issues that need to be resolved before this work moves out of the lab and into the clinic, but it’s an important step in showing for the first time that cell rejuvenation is possible.
Getting Started Dolly
The origins of the technique date back to the 1990s, with Dolly the cloned sheep. Researchers at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh developed a method for transforming a skin cell from a sheep into an embryo, creating Dolly.
The goal of the Roslin team was not to create sheep or human clones, but to create embryonic stem cells with this technique. They hoped these stem cells could be transformed into specific tissues, such as muscle, cartilage and nerve cells, to replace diseased organs.
The dolly technique was simplified in 2006 by Professor Shinya Yamanaka at Kyoto University. The new method, called IPS, involved adding chemicals to adult cells for about 50 days. This resulted in genetic changes that turned adult cells into stem cells.
In both Dolly and IPS techniques, the stem cells created need to be replicated to turn into cells and tissues that the patient needs. This proved to be difficult. Despite decades of effort, the use of stem cells to treat diseases is currently extremely limited.
chemical bath
Prof Reik’s team used the IPS technique on 53-year-old skin cells. However, he reduced the chemical bath applied to produce stem cells from these cells from 50 days to 12.
Dr. Dilgeet Gill was surprised to find that the cells did not develop into embryonic stem cells, but that these cells were rejuvenated and yielded skin cells that looked and acted as if they had been taken from a 23-year-old.
“I remember the day I got the results, and I didn’t quite believe some cells were 30 years younger than they should have been. It was a very exciting day,” says Gill.
Because the IPS method increases the risk of cancer, the technique cannot be put into clinical use immediately. But according to Prof Reik, now that it is known that it is possible to rejuvenate cells, his team may find an alternative, safer method:
“The long-term goal is to get people to age more healthily, prolonging healthy lifespan rather than lifespan.”
First application potential
Prof Reik says the first applications of this technique could be to develop drugs to rejuvenate the skin as a way for older people to speed healing on cut or burned areas of the body.
In experiments simulating a wound, the researchers found that rejuvenated skin cells move faster, showing that this is possible in principle.
The next step is to see if this technology will work on other tissues such as muscle, liver and blood cells.
Professor Melanie Welham, chair of the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, which partially funded the research that revealed Dolly the Sheep, says the long-paused clinical benefits of this technology may not be so far off with this new development.
“If similar approaches or new therapies can revive immune cells that become less functional as we age, it may be possible in the future to increase people’s capacity to respond to vaccines as well as their ability to fight infections.”
Any chance of rejuvenated body?
The question is whether research efforts in this area will lead to a whole-body regeneration method, a youth elixir, or an anti-aging pill. prof. Reik states that this idea is not far from complete.
“When the technique was applied to genetically modified mice, some signs of rejuvenation were seen. One experiment showed signs of rejuvenated pancreas for its diabetes-fighting potential.”
But Prof. from the Crick Institute in London. According to Robin Lovell-Badge, the scientific barriers between Reik’s results in the lab and the simplest clinical applications are significant.
Lovell-Badge thinks it would also be important to translate the rejuvenation process into other types of tissue, or an anti-aging pill:
“If you can find other chemicals that will do the same, that’s fine, but they can be just as bad. So it’s a forward goal to think you’ll find these chemicals easily and be safer.
“Other cell types may also require different conditions that are difficult to control. Whether this can be done safely in the whole body is such a remote possibility that I would think it would be pure speculation.”