Biologists and geneticists at Harvard Medical School have found a way to reverse the aging process in mice, helping them to regain their eyesight, form sharper brains, and produce healthier muscle and kidney tissue. Their paper, published last week in the journal Cell, details the “information theory” of aging: a new theory from genetics professor David Sinclair that links the aging process with a loss of information. The paper also describes a pair of experiments in which Sinclair’s team accelerated and reversed aging in mice.
Sinclair’s information theory of aging proposes that cells “forget” how to read the body’s DNA. The epigenome, a group of chemical compounds that tell the genome what to do and when to do it, can activate or deactivate a single gene. But the epigenome is highly reactive to external circumstances, like environmental toxins or a person’s tendency to smoke or skip sleep. (This is why people who live in highly polluted areas or engage in a lot of unhealthy habits have higher “biological ages.”) This means a person’s epigenome rarely ends up performing long-term in the way biology originally planned, losing individual genetic functions along the way.
(Credit: dra_schwartz/Getty Images)
Sinclair and his colleagues have tested this theory by developing ICE, short for inducible changes to the epigenome. ICE changes the way DNA is folded by making fast-healing cuts that they say advance aging at the physiological, cognitive, and molecular levels. In the lab, this effectively sped up animals’ aging clocks, resulting in mice that looked and acted twice their chronological age.
The latest advancement from the team at Harvard Medical School comes from their effort to reverse their previous ICE experiments. They reprogrammed a handful of human adult skin cells to behave like stem cells, which gave them the potential to develop into virtually any cell in the body. Then the team injected these engineered cells into a cohort of blind mice (specifically, into the damaged retinal ganglion cells at the backs of their eyes). This restored most of the cohort’s eyesight.
The process has similarly helped to restore brain, muscle, and kidney tissue by anywhere from 50% to 75%. By the time the cells reach this level of youthful rejuvenation, they stop turning the clock back. Sinclair and his colleagues are still working to figure out how the cells know to slow the aging reversal process at that point.
As with any other scientific breakthrough, it’ll be quite some time before the public sees a “cure” for aging. And that’s if such a product or procedure is ever brought to market at all. A process like this one is bound to face countless regulatory hurdles, and then there’s the matter of rodent testing’s shaky reliability when it comes to human-centered treatments. In the meantime, Sinclair’s team suspects their procedure could eventually help prevent or treat dementia, vision loss, and other conditions.
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