Have scientists really discovered a way to make skin cells act 30 years younger?
Researchers have developed a method that can turn back the biological clock on skin cells by 30 years, creating stem cells from mature ones, which could be used to treat skin conditions in the future.
The key aspect of this study was that they discovered a way to substantially rejuvenate cells without changing their identity or functionality.
In 2007, a technique that could transform adult skins cells into stem cells by inserting four specialist molecules that reverse cell development, dubbed “Yamanaka factors”, was developed by Shinya Yamanaka at Kyoto University in Japan.
It took around 50 days of exposure to these molecules for normal cells to be reprogrammed into induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). However, when you turn a cell into an iPSC, you lose the original cell type and its functionality.
Now Diljeet Gill and colleagues at the Babraham Institute in Cambridge have devised a technique that uses Yamanaka factors to rejuvenate skin cells without losing their previous functionality.
The researchers collected skin cell samples from three human donors that had an average age of around 50, then exposed these to the Yamanaka factors for just 13 days to partially anti-age the cells. They then removed the Yamanaka factors and left the cells to grow.
Gill and his team found that the epigenetic clock and transcriptome profiles of the partially reprogrammed cells matched the profiles of skin cells that belonged to people who were 30 years younger.
The rejuvenated cells also functioned like younger ones, too, creating more collagen than those that didn’t undergo reprogramming.