Imagine a 60-year-old person taking suddenly their 40 years old in their skin. As is the case with most cutting edge science now, it is coming out of China, not out of the United States. In this particular case, the study was done on engineering stem cells that were then placed into the bodies of monkeys and reversed the age of these monkeys. On the order of what would be the equivalent of humans of several decades of age. It's a pretty amazing and astounding result. In this particular case, this team focused on a specific gene. It is known that when this gene is expressed or overexpressed, meaning the gene is turned on, it actually creates a whole bunch of signaling molecules, little tiny molecules that then get absorbed by other cells and tell those cells to start acting young again and reset those cells. And that gene is called Foxo3. So, what this research team did is they took stem cells and they engineered them using CRISPR to get them to overexpress Foxo3. And so now the cells start making this Foxo3 protein. And when that cell starts making this Foxo3 protein, it actually makes a whole bunch of other molecules, little small molecules, little molecules that they then get packaged up into what are called exosomes. These are like little packets that get spat out of the cell and they get absorbed by other cells and trigger those cells to start acting young again. We don't know how, we don't know why necessarily, but they can start acting young again. So they engineered these stem cells, overexpressed Foxo3, and then put these stem cells into these monkeys. And these monkeys were kind of the equivalent of being 60 years old. And they looked at what happened. They looked at tissue, they looked at blood and they did MRIs and scans of the brain. And what they found is that the monkeys' brains effectively started to rewire and act like young again. They were able to increase their memory, increase their responsiveness, their age-related atrophy reversed, so their brains actually grew. Their muscles started to grow. Their blood cells started to reverse aging signals. So across bone degeneration reversed by 60% of the tissue, they saw a 4-year age reversal, which is the equivalent of 18 years in humans. Skin reversed by 6 years, which is the equivalent of 15 years in humans. So imagine going from being 60 years old to having the body of a 40-year-old in terms of muscle, the spleen, the brain, all across these different systems, they saw significant signals of age reversal. And they identified these little exosomes, these little sacs that are spun out of the cell and then go into other cells and then trigger all this age reversal cascade that happens. And by the way, they saw no side effects, no negative health effects. They saw no increase in cancer, those are the sorts of things you typically look for. And in tissue, in blood cells, in MRI across the board, they saw age reversal. So it was a really kind of incredible result and I think that it opens up the door for this idea of using self-therapy based on stem cells that are engineered to be injected into blood to actually reverse aging in humans. And I think that we should expect over the next couple of years these sorts of trials to kind of begin to see if we can see similar results. So background work, background work, Foxo3 and this particular gene, a lot of background work predicted this, but this particular paper I think put a lot of things together and showed some pretty nice results. So they looked at tissue, they looked at blood and they did MRIs and scans of the brain. And what they found is that the monkeys' brains effectively started to rewire and act like young again. They were able to increase their memory, increase their responsiveness, their age-related atrophy reversed, so their brains actually grew. Their muscles started to grow. Their blood cells started to reverse aging signals. So across bone degeneration reversed by 60% of the tissue, they saw a 4-year age reversal, which is the equivalent of 18 years in humans. Skin reversed by 6 years, which is the equivalent of 15 years in humans. So imagine going from being 60 years old to having the body of a 40-year-old in terms of muscle, the spleen, the brain, all across these different systems, they saw significant signals of age reversal. And they identified these little exosomes, these little sacs that are spun out of the cell and then go into other cells and then trigger all this age reversal cascade that happens. And by the way, they saw no side effects, no negative health effects. They saw no increase in cancer, those are the sorts of things you typically look for. And in tissue, in blood cells, in MRI across the board, they saw age reversal. So it was a really kind of incredible result and I think that it opens up the door for this idea of using self-therapy based on stem cells that are engineered to be injected into blood to actually reverse aging in humans. And I think that we should expect over the next couple of years these sorts of trials to kind of begin to see if we can see similar results. So background work, background work, Foxo3 and this particular gene, a lot of background work predicted this, but this particular paper I think put a lot of things together and showed some pretty nice results.
