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Tokyo (AFP)
Scientists said on Wednesday they restored sight in mice using ‘milestone’ treatment that returns cells to a younger state and could one day help treat glaucoma and other age-related diseases .
The process offers the enticing possibility of effectively turning back time at the cellular level, helping cells regain the ability to heal damage from injury, disease and age.
“I am delighted to be able to rejuvenate organs and tissues that fail due to aging and disease, especially where there are no effective treatments, such as dementia,” the AFP told AFP. lead author of the study David Sinclair.
“We hope to treat glaucoma in human patients (at the trial stage) in two years,” added Sinclair, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School.
The treatment is based on the properties of the cells when the body is developing as an embryo. At this time, cells can repair and regenerate themselves, but this ability quickly declines with age.
Scientists believed that if cells could be brought back to this youthful state, they would be able to repair the damage.
To go back in time, they altered a process commonly used to create the “blank slate” cells called induced pluripotent stem cells.
These cells are created by injecting a cocktail of four proteins that help reprogram a cell.
The team did not want to reprogram the cells to their virgin slate status, but to restore them to a younger condition.
So they tweaked the cocktail, using just three of the “youthful regenerating” proteins – dubbed OSK – in the hopes they could set the clock back on time.
They targeted the retinal ganglion cells in the eye, which are linked to the brain by connections called axons.
These axons form the optic nerve – and damage to these from injury, aging, or disease results in poor vision and blindness.
To test the effects of the cocktail, they first injected OSK into the eyes of mice with optic nerve damage.
They saw a doubling of the number of surviving retinal ganglion cells and a five-fold increase in nerve regrowth.
“The treatment allowed the nerves to push back to the brain. Normally, they would just die,” Sinclair said.
– “Great excitement” –
With signs that OSK could reverse injury damage, the team turned to tackling the effects of the disease – specifically glaucoma, which is the leading cause of blindness in humans.
They reproduced the disease conditions, where a buildup of pressure in the eye damages the optic nerve, in several dozen mice.
Those who received the OSK treatment saw “significant” benefits, according to the study published in the journal Nature.
Tests showed “that half of the visual acuity lost as a result of increased intraocular pressure was restored”.
The treatment offered equally promising results in elderly mice with poor vision due to aging.
After the cocktail was injected, the mice ‘vision improved and their optic nerve cells displayed electrical signals and other characteristics similar to those of younger mice.
The study was conducted over one year and the mice showed no side effects.
Andrew Huberman, a neuroscientist at Stanford University School of Medicine, who was not involved in the research, said the findings were “intended to generate great excitement.”
The results will need to be confirmed in further animal testing, with a potentially long road before humans can be treated, but Huberman said they represent “a milestone in the field nonetheless.”
“The effects of OSK in humans remain to be tested, but existing results suggest that OSK is likely to reprogram brain neurons across species,” he wrote in a review commissioned by Nature .
“For decades, it has been argued that understanding normal neural developmental processes would one day lead to the tools to repair the aged or damaged brain… (this) work clearly shows: this era has now arrived.
© 2020 AFP
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