Experts find a way to reverse aging.Diseases like Cancer, Alzheimer’s can make a person’s golden years bad.A research team at the University of Exeter has found a way to solve this problem.
They found a way to make older cells act and look like younger ones.Older cells have a tendency to stop dividing as people age, which can lead to a host of degenerative diseases. The body cleanses itself from these cells most the time, but they can begin to pile up as an older immune system starts to break down.
“We had seen from human populations and old cells that the splicing factors get downregulated as we age, so you can’t adapt as well to challenges in your internal and external environment,” study leader and University of Exeter Professor of Molecular Genetics Lorna Harries told Fox News. “What we didn’t know was whether these changes were a cause of aging or just an effect.”
The researchers found some inspiration from resveratrol, a chemical found naturally in dark chocolate, blueberries, and red wine. Harries had seen some reports that suggested the chemical was capable of switching back on a few of the 170 different splicing factors and wondered if resveratrol could moderate the levels of the rest of them as well.
“We really aren’t trying to tell people that chocolate or red wine makes you look younger or live longer,” Harries said. Harries and her team found that creating a compound that could mimic resveratrol’s regenerative mechanism was more effective than resveratrol itself. The team experimented with the new compound, testing its effects on living human cells in a lab. To their surprise, the cells began rejuvenating.
“I had anticipated that we might see some changes in splicing factor levels, but we really didn’t expect to see such marked changes in the levels of old cells in the cell population,” Harries added. “That was something of a surprise.”
The team now believes that rather than each degenerative disease of aging having a unique cause, a lot of them actually share common causes and that the changes in splicing factor expression could be just one of these. By addressing these causes, theoretically, you could attack a number of diseases at once– including common ailments in the elderly like cancer, cardiovascular disease, dementia, and diabetes.
So when can we see this technology at work? Unfortunately, Harries predicts it’s at least 20 to 30 years away.
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