Amazing stuff! Towards the fountain of youth!
I blogged here a few months ago about a video showing this research.
"UK researchers have rejuvenated the skin cells of a 53-year-old woman so they are the equivalent of a 23-year-olds. This could also be done with other tissues in the body to develop treatments for age-related diseases such as diabetes, they argue. The technology is based on the techniques used to famously clone the sheep more than 25 years ago. ...
Now ... team used the IPS [induced pluripotent stem cells] technique on 53-year-old skin cells. But they were able to reduce the chemical bath from 50 days to just 13. They were surprised to find that the cells didn’t turn into embryonic stem cells ... Instead, they rejuvenated the skin cells that looked as if they came from a 23-year-old.
This precise technique can’t be used out of the lab yet as the IPS method increases the risk of cancer. But the researchers are confident they will find an alternative and safer method. Some of the first applications could be to create medicines to rejuvenate skin in older people in parts of the body that were cut or burned as a way to speed healing. ..."
From the abstract:
"... At the cellular level, ageing is associated with reduced function, altered gene expression and a perturbed epigenome. Recent work has demonstrated that the epigenome is already rejuvenated by the maturation phase of somatic cell reprogramming, which suggests full reprogramming is not required to reverse ageing of somatic cells. Here we have developed the first “maturation phase transient reprogramming” (MPTR) method, where reprogramming factors are selectively expressed until this rejuvenation point then withdrawn. Applying MPTR to dermal fibroblasts from middle-aged donors, we found that cells temporarily lose and then reacquire their fibroblast identity, possibly as a result of epigenetic memory at enhancers and/or persistent expression of some fibroblast genes. Excitingly, our method substantially rejuvenated multiple cellular attributes including the transcriptome, which was rejuvenated by around 30 years as measured by a novel transcriptome clock. The epigenome was rejuvenated to a similar extent, including H3K9me3 levels and the DNA methylation ageing clock. The magnitude of rejuvenation instigated by MPTR appears substantially greater than that achieved in previous transient reprogramming protocols. In addition, MPTR fibroblasts produced youthful levels of collagen proteins, and showed partial functional rejuvenation of their migration speed. Finally, our work suggests that optimal time windows exist for rejuvenating the transcriptome and the epigenome. Overall, we demonstrate that it is possible to separate rejuvenation from complete pluripotency reprogramming, which should facilitate the discovery of novel anti-ageing genes and therapies."
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