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Bonn team reports slow lab reversal of age markers in human cells
Wired reports that Oliver Brüstle’s group at the University of Bonn partly reprogrammed blood cells from donors up to 101 years old, reversing some DNA-age markers by decades without making pluripotent stem cells.
- New headline Was: “A New Benchmark for De-Aging Comes From Slowly Turning Back Cells’ Clocks”
- Our desk filed its story
Researchers at the University of Bonn steered human blood cells toward a younger state without turning them into embryonic-like stem cells, and they used that slower process to watch DNA-based age markers recede, Wired reported Saturday1.
The work, published in Aging Cell, started with blood cells from people of various ages, including an infant and a 101-year-old donor, according to Wired1. Oliver Brüstle, a stem-cell professor at Bonn, told the magazine that fully pluripotent cells are not wanted in the body because they can become many cell types, and that genes used in classic stem-cell conversion can promote cancer if they stay on1.
The team instead guided the cells partway, including toward a type of cell that can produce neurons1. Wired said chemical signals on DNA that help estimate a cell’s age changed as the conversion progressed, and that in less than two months of reprogramming one biomarker was set back as far as 60 years1.
Those signs of aging continued to reverse even when the scientists sharply reduced the cells’ ability to multiply, Wired reported, so the apparent rejuvenation cannot be explained only by cells dividing and making new cells1. The mechanism that erased the aging marks is still unclear, the magazine said1.
Brüstle told Wired the hope is that such a process could one day be applied throughout an animal, but that a patient treatment would require knowing the mechanism rather than treating it as a lab experiment1. Wired also noted a caveat the authors themselves flagged: blood cells and neurons age on different timelines, so converting blood cells toward a neural identity could exaggerate the reversal if the wrong clock is used, though the write-up said that mismatch would not account for every biomarker that reversed1.
Wired said converting adult cells into stem cells has been possible for about two decades, but the usual conversion is fast, which leaves little time to study how age markers fade1. Because this conversion ran slowly, Brüstle said researchers can now try to dissect the process more easily than if it were an instantaneous event1.
The magazine did not report independent outside comment or full sample sizes beyond the donor age range1. Whether the same slow reset can be produced in intact tissue, or in people, remains unshown in the Wired account1.
