We rejuvenated cells! Mathilde Fontez, editor-in-chief of the scientific magazine Epsiloon tells us about a discovery that will make everyone dream.
franceinfo: Biologists have succeeded in reprogramming cells to make them rejuvenate!
Mathilde Fontez: They rejuvenated 30-year-old cells, yes! A team of British researchers succeeded in reprogramming skin cells that had been taken from a 53-year-old person. And after analysis, they were able to confirm that these cells have all the characteristics of a person in their twenties: they produce collagen like young cells – yes, goodbye wrinkles. And they also have more technical characteristics: their methylation rate, their transcriptome, all these elements present inside the cell behave as if it had become young again!
How did the researchers do to rejuvenate these cells?
They applied a proven method: it received the Nobel Prize in 2012, but they hijacked it. This method involves taking adult cells from a patient and subjecting them to a cocktail of biochemicals for about fifty days to reprogram them into stem cells. Stem cells, you know, are the basic building blocks of the human body: cells which are present in the embryo, and which can be transformed to then give any cell, a skin cell, a heart cell, a cell blood.
There, Wolf Reik, the biologist who led this research at the Babraham Institute in Cambridge, had the idea of applying this technique to adult skin cells, but for less time, only 13 days instead of 50. And this What the researcher observes is that the cells retain their identity: they do not turn into stem cells, they remain skin cells, but they rejuvenate. It’s as if they have been reprogrammed back to their original state, when they were working well. Before getting old.
This biochemical cocktail is an elixir of youth!
It really makes you think of that, yes. We immediately imagine the cocktail transformed into an anti-aging cream: an anti-aging cream that really works. But we are not there yet. Already, researchers must understand what happened: the mechanisms that come into play in this reprogramming of cells are not yet understood. You have to study them. To check in particular that there is no risk of causing cancer on the way.
And there is also a lot of work to see how we could transpose this technique to cell types other than skin cells. Because in fact, that’s what this research is all about: reprogramming pancreatic cells to cure diabetes, heart cells for heart disease, brain cells to fight age-related neurological disorders. We are still far from it. But this study is a first step!