Scientists Rewind The Clock of Human Skin Cells to Make Them Act 30 Years Younger

It is not a fountain of youth but it is a start, as scientists have been able to engineer human skin cells to reverse 30 years of aging.

The technique could play a major part in efforts to produce rejuvenative medicine that can be reversed.

The research is notable because the skin cells were reprogrammed to be biologically younger while still keeping some of the functions that made them skin cells in the first place.

The cells are being restored with the production of lysine. The Babraham Institute has a woman named Fátima Santos.

The process used here builds on Yamanaka's work in 2007, where he was able to turn normal cells with a specific function into stem cells that can develop into any type. The cell would lose its identity.

Our understanding of aging on a molecular level has progressed over the last decade, giving rise 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 the new method achieved.

The new method works more quickly and stops before the stem cell state is reached, allowing the cell to retain its original identity and function.

A variety of measures, including the epigenetic clock and transcriptome, were used to confirm that the skin cells had indeed been rolled back in biological age by three decades.

The youthful cells were observed to be still pumping the stuff out of the skin cells, which is a key function of the skin cells. They showed that they were able to heal wounds more quickly and that they were producing more collagen than the skin cells that hadn't undergone the process.

Gill says that cells can be rejuvenated without losing their function and that rejuvenation looks to restore some function to old cells.

The reverse of aging indicators in genes associated with diseases is promising for the future of this work.

The scientists don't fully understand how the mechanism behind maturation phase Transient Reprogramming works, but they think that certain key parts of the genome, which help controls cell identity, might be able to escape the reprogrammed cells.

As we get older, there are a lot of health issues that need to be addressed, from heart disease to Alzheimer's.

One of the next steps will be to try and apply the techniques used here to other types of cells in the body, and to make sure the processes are completely safe before moving them out of the lab and into clinical trials.

Wolf Reik from the Babraham Institute says that eventually we may be able to identify genes that don't need to be reprogrammed.

This approach holds promise for valuable discoveries that could open up an amazing therapeutic horizon.

The research has been published.