Israeli Researchers are Studying Whether Aging can be Reversed
Explorers have spent lifetimes seeking the Fountain of Youth that could reverse aging and restore health and vigor. This mythical place was never found but that hasn’t stopped people from trying to turn back time and reverse aging.
Now, a peer reviewed study from Bar Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Tel Aviv University, and the US National Institute on Aging, that was published in Nature Communications, is asking the same question. Can aging be reversed? The study suggests that biological changes associated with old age might not be a one-way process, reported Ynet.
Researching Aging
In recent years, scientists have been looking at aging as not the body’s gradual breakdown but as a change in the way cells read and trigger their genetic material. The study looked at whether it is possible to influence this mechanism after it has deteriorated.
The researchers found a protein that is associated with longevity was able to restore the activity in the livers of aging mice to a state that resembles a younger liver.
This was done by increasing a protein called SIRT6 which affects the chromatin – the way DNA is packaged in the cell. Chromatin determines which genes are active and its function deteriorates during aging.
Research supervisor professor Haim Cohen, director of the Sagol Healthy Human Longevity Center at Bar-Ilan University had previously experimented with the life expectancy of mice by increasing their SIRT6 levels.
“We previously showed that SIRT6 is a key player in longevity and that mice engineered to overexpress it live 30 percent longer,” Cohen told Ynet. “It causes a variety of positive health changes: lower cancer risk, improved blood chemistry, more efficient sugar and fat metabolism and, of course, better use of energy reserves. When we’re young and exhausted, we know how to find and use energy sources in the body. In old age, we fail at that. This protein enables that process.”
About the study
The current study was led by Cohen and doctoral students Ron Nagar and Zacharia Schwartz. It continued Cohen’s earlier work.
Since aging reduces the effectiveness of chromatin in mammals, reported The Times of Israel, the researchers took mice and allowed them to age for around 24 months – the equivalent of 70 to 80 years in people – and increased the levels of SIRT6 protein by injecting it in the livers of one group.
They found that the group of older mice that received the SIRT6 showed that many of the age-related changes actually reversed. The protein reactivated the DNA to go back to a healthier and youthful state.
“To put it simply,” Cohen told The Times of Israel, “We took an old liver and restored its DNA organization toward a much younger state.”
To continue his work, Cohen founded biotechnology and longevity company SirTLab at Bar-Ilan to find ways to increase or restore the level SIRT6 because as people age. He said, “This is the hidden language of longevity.”
