An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Researchers have rejuvenated a 53-year-old woman's skin cells so they are the equivalent of a 23-year-old's. [...] The scientists in Cambridge believe that they can do the same thing with other tissues in the body. The head of the team, Prof Wolf Reik, of the Babraham Institute in Cambridge, told BBC News that he hoped that the technique could eventually be used to keep people healthier for longer as they grow older. [...] Prof Reich stressed though that the work, which has been published in the journal eLife, was at a very early stage. He said that there were several scientific issues to overcome before it could move out of his lab and into the clinic. But he said that demonstrating for the first time that cell rejuvenation is possible was a critical step forward.
Prof Reik's team used [a method, called iPS, that involves adding chemicals to adult cells to turn them into stem cells] on 53-year-old skin cells. But they cut short the chemical bath from 50 days to around 12. Dr Dilgeet Gill was astonished to find that the cells had not turned into embryonic stem cells -- but had rejuvenated into skin cells that looked and behaved as if they came from a 23-year old. He said: "I remember the day I got the results back and I didn't quite believe that some of the cells were 30 years younger than they were supposed to be. It was a very exciting day!"
The technique cannot immediately be translated to the clinic because the iPS method increases the risk of cancers. But Prof Reik was confident that now it was known that it is possible to rejuvenate cells, his team could find an alternative, safer method. "The long-term aim is to extend the human health span, rather than the lifespan, so that people can get older in a healthier way," he said. Prof Reik says some of the first applications could be to develop medicines to rejuvenate skin in older people in parts of the body where they have been cut or burned -- as a way to speed up healing. The researchers have demonstrated that this is possible in principle by showing that their rejuvenated skin cells move more quickly in experiments simulating a wound. The next step is to see if the technology will work on other tissues such as muscle, liver and blood cells.
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