“It’s a loss of information that drives aging cells to forget how to function, to forget what type of cell they are. “I call it the information theory of aging,” he said. That discovery indicates there is a “backup copy” of youthfulness information stored in the body, he added. The tail of a fish will grow back a finger of a mouse will grow back.” “We think we’re tapping into an ancient regeneration system that some animals use – when you cut the limb off a salamander, it regrows the limb. “Somehow the cells know the body can reset itself, and they still know which genes should be on when they were young,” Sinclair said. Since that original study, Sinclair said his lab has reversed aging in the muscles and brains of mice and is now working on rejuvenating a mouse’s entire body. “Normally they are only on in very young developing embryos and then turn off as we age.”Īmazingly, damaged neurons in the eyes of mice injected with the three cells rejuvenated, even growing new axons, or projections from the eye into the brain. It could be any chemical really, just a way to be sure the three genes are switched on,” Sinclair said. After injecting the virus into the eye, the pluripotent genes were then switched on by feeding the mouse an antibiotic. The virus was designed to deliver the rejuvenating Yamanaka factors to damaged retinal ganglion cells at the back of an aged mouse’s eye. Looking for a safer alternative, Sinclair lab geneticist Yuancheng Lu chose three of the four factors and genetically added them to a harmless virus. 'Ghost heart': Built from the scaffolding of a pig and the patient's cells, this cardiac breakthrough may soon be ready for transplant into humans A study published in 2016 by researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, showed signs of aging could be expunged in genetically aged mice, exposed for a short time to four main Yamanaka factors, without erasing the cells’ identity.īut there was a downside in all this research: In certain situations, the altered mice developed cancerous tumors. Labs around the world jumped on the problem. You don’t want Brad Pitt in “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” to become a baby all at once you want him to age backward while still remembering who he is. They forget they are blood, heart and skin cells, making them perfect for rebirth as “cell du jour,” but lousy at rejuvenation. However, adult cells fully switched back to stem cells via Yamanaka factors lose their identity. The 2007 discovery won the scientist a Nobel Prize, and his “induced pluripotent stem cells,” soon became known as “Yamanaka factors.” Shinya Yamanaka had already reprogrammed human adult skin cells to behave like embryonic or pluripotent stem cells, capable of developing into any cell in the body. If that could be done, Sinclair asked his team, could the reverse be accomplished as well? Japanese biomedical researcher Dr. Yet they are brother and sister, born from the same litter – only one has been genetically altered to age faster. One is the picture of youth, the other gray and feeble. In Sinclair’s lab, two mice sit side by side. “I believe that in the future, delaying and reversing aging will be the best way to treat the diseases that plague most of us.” Memory comes back there is no more dementia. “We know that when we reverse the age of an organ like the brain in a mouse, the diseases of aging then go away. While modern medicine addresses sickness, it doesn’t address the underlying cause, “which for most diseases, is aging itself,” Sinclair said. Now he wants to change the world and make aging a disease,” said Whitney Casey, an investor who is partnering with Sinclair to create a do-it-yourself biological age test. “His research shows you can change aging to make lives younger for longer.
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