Researchers Train They Are Shut To Reversing Aging

Harvard scientist David Sinclair has spent the last 20 years working to defy aging how many times have have you heard if you're over the age of 40 well you're getting sick you're getting this pain your eyesight's degrading don't worry that's just normal aging I really don't agree with that approach Sinclair believes the root cause of aging and.

Health decline stems from damage to the so-called epigenome the part of our cells to turn genes on or off our bodies have two different types of information we all know about the DNA now there's another type of information that most people don't know about it's called the epigenome and it's the reader of the DNA like if you have a compact disc it's.

Like scratches on the compact disc so you can't read the music as we get older we lose the ability to read our DNA correctly and so how do we get those scratches off we had this breakthrough a couple of years ago and so we found that there was a way to get the scratches off and reverse the age of cells in his study Sinclair restored optic nerve.

Cells and site in mice with vision loss from both aging and a condition that stimulated glaucoma the way we did that in the mice and we cured blindness with them was to turn on three genes that's not that are normally on in embryos and when we turn those three genes back on in the adult tissue the the mice regenerate and they get their Vision.

Back and now in what the researchers are calling the first study of its kind Sinclair and his team were able to age the mice and then make them younger again in this video shared by Harvard these mice are the same age yet one is visibly older how did they do it by literally breaking up the DNA forcing the body to repair itself which he says.

Accelerates aging the mice actually do not just look old but they literally are older by about 50 percent they get gray hair they get wrinkled skin their organs are old the results were shared at a conference earlier this year and are under review for publication this groundbreaking technology Builds on the Nobel prize winning work of Japanese.

Scientists shinya yamanaka who discovered how cells can be reprogrammed to be stem cells which then can develop into cells of any type in the body using this method Sinclair showed me how his team is trying to study memory loss by turning skin cells into tiny brains and here they are these little beauties so these are many human brains we've.

Grown for a number of months and these ones have been aged so that they're 70 years old and we can measure their activity and their brain activity is slowing down as they get older they're full of inflammation like a normal old brain would be and in this experiment when our testing can we reverse the age of those brains.

So they work again and the answer is yeah we can do that in early experiments his team says they're using electrodes to measure activity in cells from the brain as those get older actually they fire less and then we can reverse that and get them to work again and so you've seen that by reversing it they start firing more that's right yep.

We can make them young again and work like they used to while much more research is needed Sinclair hopes that one day reversing aging could be as simple as a pill at the doctor's office so maybe once a year you go get a get a prescription for your doctor you take it for a week and it reverses your aging is that your vision here well it's not just.

A vision it's going to happen it's like asking the Wright brothers are we going to fly well of course we are just a question of when Dr Akshay sale joins us now I I have seen Resident Evil too many times so of course I'm wondering you want to edit my genes even for anti-aging what this sounds like it's both really tough.

Science and potentially quite risky like what's the flip side of all this well so you know the qualifier here is there's a lot more work that needs to be done but to your point I mean it's it sounds like science fiction I mean he's taking these mice who couldn't see from getting older from getting glaucoma which is damage to the optic nerve and he's restoring their.

Vision I mean it does it does sound a little bit like science fiction to your point what is the timeline though for making this a reality I mean for something like a a drug like there's a whole process phase one two three trials but what does the doctor say the timeline is for this yeah so you know he's he's hopeful in the next 10 to 15.

Years but the thing is you do need more rigorous studies than animals you really need to prove that this works and then after that you need to trial this in humans you need to prove it's not only you know working as it should but it's also safe and it doesn't cause any unwanted side effects like you just talked about you're editing your genes I.

Mean that's probably going to be a big concern for a lot of people although on the flip side just so the Sci-Fi nerds among me don't have the last word we have come a long way in terms of what we can do with genetic editing with you know procedures like crispr and so on really being able to manipulate genetic codes in Fairly stable and replicable.

Ways right yeah and so you know Sinclair has been Dr Sinclair has been studying this for the last 20 years he started out at MIT and he's had this lab at Harvard for for decades now and you know what he's basically saying is that if if you'd asked him 20 years ago would I be here today would I have restored Vision in mice I think he'd tell you he was.

Pretty surprised you know he didn't think we'd come this far so quickly so you know yes it does sound like science fiction but it's it's really really promising at this point how does this compare to some of the other science that's going on in terms of anti-aging actual laboratory bench science not like The infomercials we see at 2 am where.

Else does the research lie you know I think you and I could do a whole show on you know the creams that are available in the posts they sell over the counter about you know take this and you reduce your aging pills and potions and lotions and everything and anything but setting all that aside yeah where's the sign no we'll leave that to Professor Snape you.

Know exactly this is this is you know it's it's a harvard-funded lab this is these are people who are actually going in and altering your DNA in a way that you know they can you know they've developed these biological clocks and these are you know to be fair things that need to be validated still but they've come up with a way that they.

Think is you're able to tell somebody's age just by looking at a DNA sequence so you know when you compare that to these creams and these things that you're selling over the counter it's it's a it's a separate world and there are other other applications for this kind of epigenetic Technology other than anti-aging this isn't new technology as.

You mentioned this is just a new application you know so it's it's been a theory for a long time and we're still working to to you know to prove that theory but it is something that Sinclair is you know Cohen called the information theory of each of Aging where you take these epigenetic changes and that you know accelerates aging as we've seen in.

The mice that's coming out um but you know um to answer your question it's the uses outside of this it's still so new that we really don't know yet I know that he mentioned kind of like popping a pill but is is that what we expect it would be like a pill or more like a treatment like dialysis or something long-term like what what.

Would the delivery device potentially be yeah so you know the delivery device so far in the mice has been you it's actually an injection um it's a harmless virus encoded with three reprogramming genes and you take that injection and then you take an antibiotic called doxycycline so it's an antibiotic that you would give by mouth.

Um that turns on those genes and allows the anti-aging process to commence so we don't really know what the future is going to look like but that's what they've done so far in the animals now you already said a virus and I know that immediately made some people's ears perk up but this is just kind of a a genetic vessel basically because the virus is.

Just kind of a bundle of of genetic material yeah it's a harmless version of it's an adenovirus it's commonly used in science you know has other applications as well but you know I don't want people thanks for watching our YouTube channel follow today's top stories and breaking news by downloading the NBC News app

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