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Aesthetic Medicine Magazine UK reports that researchers have found a way for skin cells to rejuvenate by 30 years, by creating stem cells from mature ones.
This research was based on utilising the 2007 technique developed by Shinya Yamanaka at Kyoto University in Japan, known as ‘Yamanaka factors’, which could transform adult skin cells into stem cells by inserting four specialist molecules that reverse cell development.
Diljeet Gill and colleagues at the Babraham Institute in Cambridge have now devised a technique that uses Yamanaka factors to rejuvenate skin cells without losing their previous identity or functionality.
In the new study, skin cell samples from three human donors aged around 50 were exposed to the Yamanaka factors for just 13 days to partially anti-age the cells. Once the Yamanaka factors were removed, the cells were left to grow. Gill and his team found that the epigenetic clock and transcriptome profiles of the partially reprogrammed cells matched the profiles of skin cells that belonged to people who were 30 years younger.
The rejuvenated cells also functioned like younger ones, creating more collagen than those that didn’t undergo reprogramming.
Journal reference: eLife, DOI: 10.7554/eLife.71624