Biologists and geneticists at Harvard Medical School have found a way to reverse the aging process in micehelping them to restore sight, build sharper brains, and produce healthier muscle and kidney tissue.
The research, published in the journal Cell and cited in Extreme Techdetails the information theory of aging: a new theory from genetics professor David Sinclair that links the aging process to information loss.
Sinclair’s information theory of aging proposes that cells “forget” how to read the body’s DNA. The epigenome, a group of chemical compounds that tells the genome what to do and when to do it, can turn a single gene on or off. But the epigenome is highly reactive to external circumstances, such as environmental toxins or a person’s tendency to smoke or not sleep.
This means that a person’s epigenome rarely ends up working in the long term in the way biology originally planned, losing individual genetic functions. by the way.
The experiments
David Sinclair and his colleagues have tested this theory by developing ICE, short for inducible epigenome changes. ICE changes the way DNA folds by making fast-healing cuts that are said to accelerate aging on a physiological, cognitive, and molecular level.
At the laboratory, this effectively sped up the animals’ aging clocks, resulting in mice that looked and acted twice their chronological age.
The latest breakthrough from the Harvard Medical School team comes from their effort to reverse their previous ICE experiments. They reprogrammed a handful of adult human skin cells to behave like stem cells, giving them the potential to become virtually any cell in the body.
The team then injected these modified cells into a cohort of blind mice, specifically, into the damaged retinal ganglion cells at the back of their eyes. This restored most of the animals’ eyesight.
The process it has also helped restore brain, muscle and kidney tissue by 50% to 75%. When cells reach this level of youthful rejuvenation, they stop turning back the clock.
Sinclair and his colleagues are still working to figure out how cells know how to slow the reversal process of aging at that point. As with any other scientific breakthrough, it will be a long time before the public sees a “cure” for aging.
