Scientists said on Tuesday they had transformed age-worn cells in people over 90 — including a centenarian — into rejuvenated stemcells that were “indistinguishable” from those found in embryos. The technical feat, reported in the peer-reviewed journal Genes & Development, opens a new path toward regenerative medicine, especially for the elderly, the researchers said.
“This is a new paradigm for cell rejuvenation,” said Jean-Marc Lemaitre, a researcher at the Institute of Functional Genomics at the University of Montpellier and the main architect of the study. “The age of cells is definitely not a barrier to reprogramming,” said.
That human embryonic stem cells (ESC) can potentially become any type of cell in the body has long held out the tantalising promise of diseased organs or tissue being repaired or replaced with healthy, lab-grown cells.
But the leap from theory to practice has proven difficult, and fraught with ethical and moral concerns because any such procedure requires the destruction of a human embryo.
The discovery in 2007 that it is possible to coax certain adult cells back into their immature, pre-specialised state has fuelled renewed efforts to generate brand new muscle, heart or even brain cells, this time from raw material provided by the patient. Experiments to date, however, have shown that the usual chemical recipe for generating these so-called induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) works less well or not at all with the elderly and very elderly.
The barrier was cellular senescence, a natural process linked to ageing that can trigger cell death when certain mechanisms within the cell become too degraded to function properly.