Living longer and better is a debate that has been at the center of biotechnological ethics for years. Increasingly, people seek to be healthy and away from death. Life expectancy is finite and human beings — or some — want to find the source of eternal youth, something that may sound like science fiction, but it isn't. Some billionaires, for example, have long been funding businesses on cell rejuvenation, the key behind what could be humanity's next step: immortality.
Now, a new finding joins this very important debate. A team from the Babraham Institute in Cambridge, United Kingdom, led by Wolf Reik, managed to make a 53-year-old woman 30 years younger, that is, to reach an age of 23 and published their results in the scientific journal eLife.
At least they have achieved this with skin cells, although the team believes that this discovery could be extended to other tissues of the human body. “We've been dreaming about this kind of thing. Many common illnesses worsen with age and thinking about helping people in this way is very exciting,” said Reik in dialogue with the BBC.
In experiments that simulated a skin wound, older cells were exposed to a mixture of chemicals that “reprogrammed” them to behave more like young cells and eliminated age-related changes. This was achieved earlier, but the new work was completed in a much shorter period of time (13 days compared to 50) and made the cells even younger.
Dr. Diljeet Gill, a researcher at the Babraham Institute, said: “Our understanding of aging at the molecular level has progressed over the past decade, leading to techniques that allow researchers to measure age-related biological changes in human cells. We were able to apply this to our experiment to determine the extent of reprogramming that our new method achieved. Our results represent a big step forward in our understanding of cellular reprogramming.”
Japanese scientist Shinya Yamanaka, Nobel laureate in 2012, created an erasure and reprogramming method focused on four key genes known as Yamanaka factors, which can “rewind” adult cells into young stem cells that are capable of forming almost any tissue in the body.
This new method from the Babraham Institute is based on the Nobel Prize-winning technique that scientists use, which is inspired by how old parental cells become the young tissues of a newborn, to produce stem cells. They are a kind of biological “blank slate”, without the markers of aging.
Babraham's research represents a step forward because this technique does not completely erase the original cell. Instead, the reprogramming process is partially halted, allowing researchers to strike a balance between making cells biologically younger and preserving their specialized cell function.
Ageing with better health, an acceptable goal
Aging is the gradual decline in the fitness of the organism that occurs over time and leads to dysfunction and disease of the tissues. At the cellular level, it is associated with reduced function, altered gene expression and a disturbed epigenome. Somatic cell reprogramming, the process of converting somatic cells into induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), can reverse these age-associated changes.
The key to the research, according to Reik, is not that people extend the length of their lives, but that they live as long as possible in acceptable health. To a certain extent, it would be something like improving the quality of life to the fullest extent during old age. For this purpose, the team used the same technique that was used with the famous Dolly sheep, improved in 2006 with the IPS method, developed by Shinya Yamanaka, at that time at Kyoto University in Japan.
“The long-term goal is to extend the duration of human health, rather than the length of life, so that people can age in a healthier way,” he added. In this regard, although the study is in its early stages, the earliest applications could be in treatments for older people who have suffered burns or cuts, as the experiment showed promising signs that rejuvenated cells would be better at healing wounds. The reprogrammed cells produced more collagen proteins, which help heal wounds, compared to cells that did not undergo the reprogramming process.
The researchers also noted that their method had an encouraging effect on other genes related to age-related diseases and symptoms. These included the APBA2 gene, which is associated with Alzheimer's disease, and the MAF gene, which plays a role in the development of cataracts.
However, the researchers said the mechanism behind reprogramming is not yet fully understood, as it could cause cancer, and should be further explored before the findings can be applied to regenerative medicine.
The next step for researchers is to extend these tests to cells in other tissues such as muscles, liver, or blood cells. This was explained to the BBC by Melanie Welham, president of the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council. “If similar approaches or new therapies could rejuvenate immune cells, which we know become less sensitive as we age, it may be possible in the future to increase people's response to vaccination, as well as their ability to fight infections.”
How to reverse the aging process is a scientific question that has attracted enormous attention and investment in recent years. Since then, several of the researchers who worked on the Babraham Institute experiment left to join Altos Labs, a £2.2 billion Silicon Valley billionaire-backed startup, which has hired numerous Nobel laureates to work on the rejuvenation of human cells in a attempt to prevent diseases of old age that result in death.
Unfortunately, big questions remain unanswered in the biology of aging. In short, it is still difficult to ensure that one manages to find a pill to ensure health at late stages of life. Even so, the case of this 53-year-old woman is an example of what biotechnology can achieve, and it is already achieving.
Certainly, some debates arise here ranging from biotechnological possibilities to ethical implications. Who could access these supposed services? Only those people with great fortunes? For now, great fortunes are focusing on directing their scientific capital to these investigations as there is a silent revolution in studies on our understanding of the biology of aging.
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