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NEW YORK, Dec 3 – Scientists said yesterday they restored vision in mice using a “milestone” treatment that restores cells to a younger state and could someday help treat glaucoma and other age-related diseases. .
The process offers the tantalizing chance to effectively go back in time at the cellular level, helping cells regain the ability to heal damage caused by injury, disease and age.
“I am thrilled 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,” senior study author David Sinclair told AFP.
“We hope to cure glaucoma in human patients (in the trial phase) in two years,” added Sinclair, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School.
The treatment is based on the properties that cells have when the body develops as an embryo. At that time, cells can repair and regenerate, but that ability rapidly declines with age.
Scientists speculated that if the cells could be induced to return to that youthful state, they would be able to repair the damage.
To go back in time, they modified a process usually used to create “blank slate” cells known as induced pluripotent stem cells.
These cells are created by injecting a cocktail of four proteins that help reprogram a cell.
The team didn’t want to reprogram the cells to a clean slate state, but to restore them to a younger condition.
So they tweaked the cocktail, using just three of the “youth-restoring” proteins – nicknamed OSK – in hopes of being able to reset the clock to the right point.
They targeted the retinal ganglion cells in the eye, which are connected to the brain through connections called axons.
These axons form the optic nerve, and their damage from injury, aging, or disease causes vision problems and blindness.
To test the cocktail’s effects, they first injected OSK into the eyes of mice with optic nerve injuries.
They saw a twofold increase in the number of surviving retinal ganglion cells and a fivefold increase in nerve regrowth.
“The treatment allowed the nerves to grow back to the brain. Normally they would just die, ”Sinclair said.
“Great excitement”
With signs that OSK could reverse the damage caused by injury, the team turned to counter the effects of the disease, particularly glaucoma, which is the leading cause of blindness in humans.
They replicated the conditions of the disease, in which a build-up of pressure in the eye damages the optic nerve, in several dozen mice.
Those who received OSK treatment saw “significant” benefits, according to the study published in the journal Nature.
The tests showed “that half of the visual acuity lost from the increased intraocular pressure was restored”.
The treatment offered equally promising results in aged mice with age-related vision problems.
After the cocktail was injected, the eyesight of the mice improved and their optic nerve cells showed electrical signals and other characteristics similar to those of younger mice.
The study was conducted over the course of a 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 are “bound to arouse great excitement.”
The findings will need to be confirmed in further animal tests, with a potentially long path before humans can be cured, but Huberman said they nonetheless represented “a milestone in the field.”
“The effects of OSK in people have yet to be tested, but existing results suggest that OSK is likely to reprogram brain neurons between 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 tools to repair the aging or damaged brain … (this) work makes it clear: that era has now arrived.” – AFP-Relaxnews
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