Scientists Are Closer Than Ever To Reverse Aging. How Does It Work? | Life Extended

imagine if you could turn back the clock to reverse aging get rid of wrinkles gray hair or see 2020 again well there's a handful of startups trying to do exactly that and billionaires are pouring money into this hoping the tech will be developed before it's too late for them these Tech billionaires they they like their lives a lot and they just don't want to give it up so they're driving a lot of this scientists are trying to manipulate human cells to rejuvenate your body body it's a technique they're calling cellular reprogramming and it could be

reality in just a couple of years I'm an apologetically afraid of dying if you cure aging and and people have the mortality of young adults then they would live thousands of years but how does this work should we worry about side effects and how close are we really to cheating death I'm Hillary brick and I'm a health correspondent here at Business Insider aging is as inevitable Progressive process of loss of viability and increase in vulnerability so once you reach about age 30 your chance of dying doubles roughly every 8 years and you see that across

populations from poor countries to wealthy countries it doesn't matter that's very consistent across populations but to understand aging we need to think about how it all starts because we start out in a much different more flexible shape picture a fertilized egg the single cell where we all be begin that cell could become anything it's what we call a stem cell stem cells are versatile and can turn into any type of cell your body needs and then as they develop the stem cells become more specialized scientists might say they're differentiated cells but really it's kind of

like they're getting job titles like a skin cell or a brain cell or a hair cell our stem cells are like our body's built-in Rejuvenation system they're constantly turning over making new stuff for us keeping our body going with new hair new skin fresh neurons these stem cells are required for regenerating tissue because our tissues you know our cells die and have to be constantly replaced that's why you know when you fall down and and get a bruise it quickly repairs itself as we age the number of these stem cells decreases and their efficiency declines

so our body has a harder time repairing and replacing tissues and this leads to slower healing and more signs of aging all over aging is really an accumulation of changes a lot of it is chemical damage and eventually things start becoming dysfunctional that buildup of damage over time as we age creates problems some scientists think of it kind of like a photocopier or something like where the more copies you make the more worn out it gets and the more little glitches and errors it has on it this damage in our DNA is kind of like

glitches in our human programming over time the errors cause issues because our bodies use that code to make the proteins that sustain our whole life and fight infections and Thrive as people when the instructions for our cells are damaged they stop working properly which is part of what happens during aging so when scientists talk about reprogramming what do they mean so this idea of reprogramming is could we take cells that are fully differentiated like the skin cell or muscle cell or whatever and program them to go backwards to the stem cell that originally generated them

or even you know make them somehow biologically younger the idea of reprogramming your cells to slow down aging is not that new in 2012 a Japanese scientist and former surgeon named shin yamanaka won the Nobel Prize for his Discovery yamanaka figured out that you can use four special genes to reset your cells back into stem cells and that set of four genes are called the yamanaka factors they contain instructions that can reset a cell back to an undifferentiated State making it like new again essentially rewriting the cell's program and guiding it back to a more

flexible stem-like State this was a big deal for aging science these newly reset cells known as induced plur poent stem cells can then turn into any type of cell you need and could potentially be used to grow new tissues or organs like younger skin or a new heart typically when researchers do cellular reprogramming in the lab they use an inactivated virus to inject the Amo factors it's pretty much the same technique they use when you get a vaccine so you have essentially have a virus and what is virus does that he has those four factors

and it transports them to the cells and you know they have to be regulated so you don't want too much of it not too little so you have to get it right but at least in animal models this is possible to do now in 2006 yamanaka showed this can be done in mice then in 2007 the next year he started on human cells first with skin and his experiment was quite successful what scientists and some startups are trying to do now is to partially reprogram some cells so they act younger but don't go all the

way back to being an embryonic stem cell again it retains its identity it remains a liver cell or a brain cell or a skin cell but it's rejuvenated and so that's that has a lot of potential because if you can rejuvenate cells without them losing their identity that's what you want but even if these kinds of treatments become available it wouldn't be like an 80-year-old can suddenly turn 20 again maybe it could be rewinding that receding hairline ditching arthri is regenerating heart muscle after a heart attack or healing neurons in your retina so you can

see better as you age I personally would love it if they could regenerate uh cartilage uh in my joints you know at my age that would be great and also if if while they're at it they could also regenerate hair you know so that would be a billion dollar multi-billion dollar Discovery if you could safely regenerate hair and bald men okay they're even loftier goals like curing Parkinson's regrowing parts of the brain or rejuvenating your entire body if you have a young brain it doesn't develop Alzheimer's or dementia anymore so if you can turn your

brain young you will make you resilient to diseases maybe even you will treat and cure diseases we don't know so that is the promise of the field is that if you make your organs younger they'll be more resilient to diseases now most of these ideas are in the testing and research stage and not available as treatments to yet but some scientists are close I chatted with Johnny Huard who's restoring joint cartilage for elite athletes using their own stem cells we take your bone marrow that contains stem cells and we reject that into your knee he's

also experimenting with one form of cellular reprogramming using so-called epigenetic drugs which can change the way our genes behave in some cases making them act younger again we have used cells from old people they came in we took the cells came in the look that their epigenetic expression was going down use epigenetic drug to bring this back up and the cells look younger so would you say that that's a form of cellular reprogramming then what you're doing with those patients yes it is a form of cellular reprogramming because what I did is I Arvest St

from you take drugs to regulate your epigenetic expression and make those C younger so I rejuvenate your C but so far this treatment is just lab work it would eventually require FDA approval to put the reprogram cells back into people's bodies I'm not saying that you know this thing will never be approved 3 years from now but is not approved today but the potential of this technology has sparked Visionary ideas about the future I imagine a future where children or or babies even before they're born they're engineered not to age or at least engineered to

be resistant to diseases like Alzheimer's disease if you cure aging and and people have the mor ality of young adults then they would live thousands of years you could still die of course but you wouldn't have this exponential increase in mortality recently we've seen an explosion of research into this area and money is flocking into cellular reprogramming and other longevity treatments Jeff Bezos for example is an investor in Altos Labs Altos is a pretty secretive startup based in California that has recruited some of the most elite aging scientists in in the world the company has

at least $3 billion in funding another big deal longevity scientist is Harvard Professor David Sinclair he's behind a bunch of different longevity companies but he has experimented with cellular reprogramming already on mice and monkeys and he's hoping to do people next for example he conducted an experiment with two Mice from the same litter same DNA they're like twins except one is biologically older now because it's had its DNA manipulated to act older mimicking the stress that a body goes through as it ages then Sinclair's team says they use cellular reprogramming to restore the old Mouse's

organs back to a more youthful state for example they found that they could safely reverse age related blindness and rejuvenate the kidneys and the muscle in the mouse Sinclair started a private company called life biosciences it's raised at least $175 million so far they're going to get this technology into people's eyeballs and cure age related blindness he says the ey injection will be ready soon maybe within a year or two but it remains to be seen how quickly it can actually move from Labs into clinics and there are other people you may know of who

are investing in cellular reprogramming too you really think what it's like if um Sam Alman the billionaire behind chat PT is also gunning for cellular reprogramming he's poured $180 million into his lity startup retro biosciences I interviewed the CEO of of retro biosciences and he told me they're trying a slightly different approach to Cellular reprogramming take the cells out of someone's body then reprogram them and pop them back in he thinks it might be safer that way the field is maturing because people and investors and Rich folks think that there's going to be uh commercial

outputs in it that they'll be able to make money out of it that means that we're going to be able to have a product from the field which is what I want people love to that aging is going to be solved and we're all going to live healthily for a very long time but the reality is biology is kind of complicated tweak a gene here insert a new program there and you'll likely kick off multiple other processes in the body including some that could be harmful and may not be immediately obvious either mice have benefited

from this kind of reprogramming but to go from there to ask you know can we now start using this in humans it's a long stretch and the reason is that we would want to make sure that over decades you know it's not going to increase the risk of cancer what's the point of living an extra 10 years if it's going to cause cancer increase the risk of cancer before that the point ramach Krishan raises here is important in the early days of using yamanaka's reprogramming technique scientists often saw that cells they created could form teratomas

which are a type of tumor this happened because because two of the four genes used in the reprogramming process are enogen enogen are genes that can divide indefinitely and that poses a cancer risk always keep in mind that an immortal cell is a cancer cell so the big danger of partial reprogramming and cell Rejuvenation and reprogramming itself is cancer so we actually know from studies in mice that if you reprogram the cells a lot in a mouse they become cancer and obviously you don't want that so there is this this balance you have to achieve

you want to do it in a safe way that allows to rejuvenate cells without turning them into cancer there's also a chance that continuously expressing these yamanaka factors could lead to liver failure or make your intestine shut down and there may be other toxic effects we haven't even considered yet I think for several years now we've seen like the Silicon Valley billionaires trying to go after the medical field and pretty limited success one of the most stunning and memorable failures in recent memory was probably the blood testing company th which ended up basically being a

total sham these Tech entrepreneurs CEOs business people and billionaires have all been really successful in the world of computing technology and it seems like they're trying to take this very same technological approach to what are very complex poorly understood biological problems so it remains to be seen if you can reprogram a person like you would a computer but it's an idea that's attracting a lot of money and a lot of scientists I think it's wonderful that there is more activity there's more interest and there's more investment in the field it's just so that there's more

potential curing aging would be a Monumental achievement and it would be a huge um change in in medicine in health care in society and I think there would be magnificent and a huge Triumph of civilization [Music]