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Medicine Science

Researchers Rejuvenate Skin Cells of 53-Year-Old Woman To the Equivalent of a 23-Year-Old's (bbc.com) 63

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Researchers have rejuvenated a 53-year-old woman's skin cells so they are the equivalent of a 23-year-old's. [...] The scientists in Cambridge believe that they can do the same thing with other tissues in the body. The head of the team, Prof Wolf Reik, of the Babraham Institute in Cambridge, told BBC News that he hoped that the technique could eventually be used to keep people healthier for longer as they grow older. [...] Prof Reich stressed though that the work, which has been published in the journal eLife, was at a very early stage. He said that there were several scientific issues to overcome before it could move out of his lab and into the clinic. But he said that demonstrating for the first time that cell rejuvenation is possible was a critical step forward.

Prof Reik's team used [a method, called iPS, that involves adding chemicals to adult cells to turn them into stem cells] on 53-year-old skin cells. But they cut short the chemical bath from 50 days to around 12. Dr Dilgeet Gill was astonished to find that the cells had not turned into embryonic stem cells -- but had rejuvenated into skin cells that looked and behaved as if they came from a 23-year old. He said: "I remember the day I got the results back and I didn't quite believe that some of the cells were 30 years younger than they were supposed to be. It was a very exciting day!"

The technique cannot immediately be translated to the clinic because the iPS method increases the risk of cancers. But Prof Reik was confident that now it was known that it is possible to rejuvenate cells, his team could find an alternative, safer method. "The long-term aim is to extend the human health span, rather than the lifespan, so that people can get older in a healthier way," he said. Prof Reik says some of the first applications could be to develop medicines to rejuvenate skin in older people in parts of the body where they have been cut or burned -- as a way to speed up healing. The researchers have demonstrated that this is possible in principle by showing that their rejuvenated skin cells move more quickly in experiments simulating a wound. The next step is to see if the technology will work on other tissues such as muscle, liver and blood cells.

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Researchers Rejuvenate Skin Cells of 53-Year-Old Woman To the Equivalent of a 23-Year-Old's

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  • hey /. boys (Score:5, Funny)

    by OrangeTide ( 124937 ) on Thursday April 14, 2022 @10:36PM (#62448596) Homepage Journal

    I'm going to have the skin of an 11 year old boy. Before you get too excited I'll be dry with eczema and have hives from mosquito bites and poison ivy.

    • Uhh, probably quite a few SlashDotters have the skin of an 11 year old boy...fashioned into lampshades in their basement.
  • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 14, 2022 @10:46PM (#62448622)

    The easy way to get the skin of a 23 year old woman is to use the hose to get it to rub the lotion on.

    • It adds the lotion to the basket.

      What, you think _I'm_ going to pay for it? That stuff is really expensive.

  • Dupe story. (Score:5, Informative)

    by gurps_npc ( 621217 ) on Thursday April 14, 2022 @10:54PM (#62448640) Homepage

    But better written with more information. As I wrote previously, all techniques like this risk cancer. As people age they accumulate genetic damage, but because they are old, the cells stop reproducing. That is what we call age - the cells stop making new, younger ones. A single cell (or hundred) scatter about your body that have stopped doing what they are supposed to do is not a problem. Even if they are heart cells. Even if they make a few copies, it isn't a problem. They call it benign.

    But if those cells suddenly become young enough to reproduce then they turn into a huge mass of cells, called a malignant tumor. This Cancer is a parasite that absorbs your nutrients without doing any work.

    Basically, age is just one of natures way of turning malignant cancers into something you can live with. If we didn't have cancer there would be much less reason for cells to age.

    All of this only applies to multi-cellular organisms. Single cells can never grow into a mass, so they can live forever without worrying about a parasitic neighbor.

    • Why don't trees die of cancer? Some tree species routinely grow to several hundred or even a few thousand years old. Some vineyards are several hundred years old. They are complex organisms with sexual reproduction and everything. Does it only apply to high metabolism organisms like animals?
      • Re:Dupe story. (Score:5, Informative)

        by Joce640k ( 829181 ) on Friday April 15, 2022 @01:37AM (#62448774) Homepage

        Tress get cancer, they just don't die of it as easily as humans do.

        https://www.google.com/search?... [google.com]

      • Isn't that partly what makes an 'annual' an 'annual' instead of a 'perennial'?

        In Florida, for example, we don't have winter to kill things like marigolds. But... if you plant marigolds & just leave them for a year or two, they get REALLY 'scraggly' & 'unhealthy-looking' after their first bloom, and start getting weird growths on them that look like what I envision 'plant cancer' looking like. Ditto, for lettuce & corn. I tried planting them once, and let one of each just keep growing. After a fe

        • Yeah annuals die off every year, but perennials live for more than one year. I was thinking of perennials. Coast redwood trees (which surround me right now) live for hundreds of years. Numerous other species can live for a very long time (over 1000 years). Giant redwoods, bistlecone pines, etc. I think some vineyards in italy and france are hundreds of years old also. There may be some olive trees older than one thousand years also.
    • It still doesn't bother making it clear that they took a sample from the woman and did this in a lab. The title makes it seem like they rejuvenated the skin she's still wearing, which isn't the case.
  • SIde effects? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by spineboy ( 22918 ) on Thursday April 14, 2022 @11:07PM (#62448652) Journal

    Cells have a determined lifespan, as after repeated cell divisions, DNA replication errors occur. Errors are proportional to cancer.

    Maybe having the cells age protect us from cancer.

    No such thing as a free lunch.

    • by Curtman ( 556920 ) *
      These people have clearly not seen enough zombie movies.
      • I bet it's more like an actual vaccine for a global pandemic was developed and distributed, and you still had large groups of people all over not willing to take it. You have to wonder if biomedical researchers are looking at that situation and going, "Meh. It's not like I can change the way people behave either way, so I might as well at least have fun doing the research in the meantime."
      • Or Star Trek Insurrection
    • No such thing as a free lunch.

      Oh trust me. It definitely will not be free. Rates will depend upon credit rating and collateral.

    • What do you mean no such things as a free lunch. Look around you, humanity has managed to extend average lifespan. We can detect and fix replication errors. Cancer too will be cured. In fact 99% of cancers caught in Stage I can be cured. The numbers flip when the cancer is caught in stage IV .. but there are many cancers that can already be cured even at stage IV and newer technologies and approaches are coming onstream that will cure most cancers.

      • The vast majority of our improved lifespan is from improving life expectancy at birth, by eliminating smallpox and reducing all the other diseases of childhood that used to kill half the population before they reached age 20. But we've done very little to move the needle on maximum life span. Wealthy people who managed to live to adulthood 250 years ago tended to live to a similar age to people nowadays (check the lifespan of most of the U.S. Founding Fathers; if they didn't die fighting, most of them made
        • Yes I try to read the "fine" print on those cancer drugs on tv. Most seem to add about 6 months.
        • by jbengt ( 874751 )

          The vast majority of our improved lifespan is from improving life expectancy at birth, by eliminating smallpox and reducing all the other diseases of childhood that used to kill half the population before they reached age 20.

          Yes, but over the last 100 to 150 years the survival rate of all age groups except the oldest has dramatically improved. [ourworldindata.org]

          Let’s see how life expectancy has improved without taking the massive improvements in child mortality into account. Child mortality is defined as the share of children who die before reaching their 5th birthday. We therefore have to look at the life expectancy of a five-year-old to see how mortality changed without taking child mortality into account. This is shown by the yellow line. In 1841 a five-year-old could expect to live 55 years. Today a five-year-old can expect to live 82 years. An increase of 27 years.

          The same is true for any higher age cut-off. A 50-year-old, for example, could once expect to live up to the age of 71. Today, a 50-year-old can expect to live to the age of 83. A gain of 13 years.

        • First, have a look at the medical reports documenting the chronic conditions the founding fathers faced. Second, even if life expectancies at any given age have improved over what it used to be. Yes, at the older ages we have not improved dramatically yet, but if you look at the age at deaths of the founding fathers, it is clear the modern presidents live quite a few years longer. Most of them aside from John Adams died in their 80s.) Sure, John Adams got to 90, but no other president until Herbert Hoover m

          • A third point is that the presidents who were elected previously tended to be older (for the most part) therefore life expectancy at that age gives them a higher chance at loving longer. But even so, more of our recent presidents got to their mid or late 90s. Whereas none of the pre-1970s presidents did.

    • by NFN_NLN ( 633283 )

      > Maybe having the cells age protect us from cancer.

      Correct. Having cells that age and reset on new births does protect the human species. But it kills the individual.

    • This seems too simplistic. What about long lived plants like trees? Do they somehow not accumulate genetic errors? Even if the replication errors don't produce cancer in plants, shouldn't they have some other deleterious effect?
    • Cells have a determined lifespan, as after repeated cell divisions, DNA replication errors occur

      This is not true because of telomerase.

    • I propose DNA RAID 10
  • Silverchair did this 25 years ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
  • Surely this is just copying work already done by the boffins at Laboratoires Garnier?

  • so basically they've created a proto bacta tank...

  • by sabbede ( 2678435 ) on Friday April 15, 2022 @06:13AM (#62449024)
    Send me some now! Her birthday is coming up and I deserve an amazing present. Err... I mean she deserves an amazing present.

    And don't anybody tell her I said this.

    • Nah; she likely already has a drawer full of expensive cosmetic creams that apparently give the same results.
    • by ebvwfbw ( 864834 )

      Don't worry. As you get older, older women look a lot more attractive. Young women keep getting younger. Today some of them are not even women LOL.

  • I will be the first candidate for his service if it is accurate. I am 22 years, and I am already scared of old age.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Rich old women's beauty products, and rich old men's dicks.

    Once upon a time, medical science cured diseases. Since nature hasn't fundamentally changed, the total failure to repeat the successes with smallpox and polio tells me the problem is on our end.
  • All these treatments are impossible in vivo because they cause wild amounts of cancerous tumors. The reason your body doesn't do this naturally is because it causes cancer. You live longer with senescence than without it. This has been the consistent conclusion of all experiments of this kind. Virtually all the tricks that can make an animal live long have been flipped on in humans by evolution already. It's why we're one of the longer lived species already.

    In order for a human to live longer you would hav

  • I can say for sure that cbd products work great and support your health, I think you should try full spectrum cbd oil [cornbreadhemp.com] as it works great. The ability of CBD to affect the endocannabinoid system and other signaling systems in the brain may benefit people with neurological disorders.

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