Blind old mice regain their sight and youth in Boston laboratories
Blind "old mice" regained their sight in Boston laboratories, developed smarter and younger brains, and built healthier muscle tissue and kidneys, amid talk of the possibility of applying the same experiments to humans in the future.
The joint experiments, published Thursday, "challenge the scientific belief that aging is caused by genetic mutations that damage our DNA," according to the scientific journal Cell.
"Experiments show that aging is a reversible process," said David Sinclair, an anti-aging expert and professor of genetics at the Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School and joint director of the Paul F. Glenn Center.
According to him, "Our bodies contain a backup copy of our youth that can be stimulated to regenerate," according to CNN.
In a related context, Jae Hyun Yang, a genetics research fellow in Sinclair's lab, who participated in the experiments, said that he expects that the results "will change the way we look at the aging process and the way we approach the treatment of diseases associated with it."
The genome literally turns genes on and off, and this process can be triggered by pollution, environmental toxins, human behaviors and diet.
Sinclair talked about the possibility of "returning the cell's ability to read the genome correctly again, as if it were small."
According to his speech, "It does not matter if the body is 50 or 75 years old, healthy or diseased, and once this process begins, the body will then remember how to regenerate and become young again."
When Sinclair was a graduate student and one of a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he discovered that there were genes to control aging in yeast.
And this gene is present in all creatures, so there must be a way to do the same thing in people, according to his talk.
To test this theory, he set out to try to speed up the aging of mice without causing “mutations or cancerous tumors.” With the help of other scientists, Sinclair and his Harvard team were able to determine the age of brain, eye, muscle, skin, and kidney tissue in mice.
The geneticist devised a "blend", which was injected into damaged retinal ganglion cells at the back of the eyes of blind mice and fed with antibiotics, according to CNN.
The results were astonishing, the mice regained "most of their sight", after which the team treated "brain, muscle and kidney cells" and restored them to much smaller levels, according to the study.
Today, a team is trying to find a way to deliver the genetic switch evenly to each cell, thus "rejuvenating the entire mouse at once."
"Not only does regeneration affect a few organs, it is able to rejuvenate the entire mouse," Sinclair said.
"His team reset the cells in mice several times, which showed that aging can be reversed more than once," he emphasized, and he is currently testing genetic reset in primates.
It may be decades before any human anti-aging clinical trials begin and, if safe and successful, are expanded to the size required for federal approval.
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