

Biotime Reverses the Aging of Human Cells - ca98am79
http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/04/biotime-reverses-aging-of-human-cells.html

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reasonattlm
The important thing to recall here is that BioTime is the current home of
Michael West, who is a superbly skilled publicist.

In terms of the science, this isn't by any stretch of the imagination a
reversal of aging in cells. It is what it is, which is generating useful cells
with longer telomeres - if you want to define age as the length of telomeres,
then sure, let's say you've reversed aging. But that isn't a useful
definition.

The question of how telomeres fit into the bigger picture of aging is still
very much debated. Their average length in some tissues decreases with age,
but that might be a secondary result of other processes such as accumulated
mitochondrial DNA damage. Lengthening telomeres with telomerase in conjunction
with cancer suppression genetic engineering has increased mouse life span by
50% - but here again there is the possibility that the telomerase isn't
extending life by extending telomeres, but by doing something else.

Biology is complicated.

~~~
keefe
It still appears to be a significant breakthrough. The style of this
information leaves me feeling trolled, though.

EDIT : if I were less drunk, I could probably figure out if this was a troll.
I'm rather excited if it's real, I'm obsessed with longevity.

------
DenisM
any bio geeks here to clue the rest of us in?

~~~
bshep
There's a theory that since telomeres decrease in size every mitosis that they
are the reason for the Hayflick limit (the max number of times a cell can
divide). The theory then says that as cells reach the limit you 'age'.

The article says they figured out a way to increase telomeres in the lab, this
is not very new though there are known telomerase inducers out there.

I'm not sure how revolutionary it is though the article has very little info
and I've read about this topic since more than 10 years ago.

EDIT: Found this from 2007:

"Since 2007, several compounds have been discovered that cause somatic cells
to express higher levels of telomerase than usual. In April 2007, Geron
Corporation licensed New York-based company TA Sciences to conduct human
trials on a molecule called TA-65, a derivative of Astragalus propinquus, that
acts as telomerase activator"

\--
[http://www.lef.org/news/LefDailyNews.htm?NewsID=5216&Sec...](http://www.lef.org/news/LefDailyNews.htm?NewsID=5216&Section=AGING)

~~~
thisisnotmyname
It is impossible to tell from their website what they did. My institution does
not have a subscription to "Future Medicine" so the best I can get is the
abstract.

It sounds like they've altered the expression of 3 key developmental genes
(none of which are telomerase, but may be upstream of it). These genes
transform the cells into an induced pluripotent stemcells (iPS). They created
6 lines, five of which showed telomere shortening to similar levels of that
seen in other iPS lines. However, one of the iPS lines they created the TRF
(dna that telomerase acts on) continued to lengthen for 60 days.

The flowchart picture is science fiction - they haven't done anything like
that in this study.

