How Does Age Affect Induced Pluripotency for Regenerative Medicine?

One of the more intriguing discoveries relating to the cell reprogramming used to produce induced pluripotent stem cells is that this process appears to reverse some aspects of cell aging. It perhaps triggers some fraction of the mechanisms at work in early embryonic development, those that ensure that children are born young, with nowhere near the load of persistent damage present in the adult parents. This is not a well-explored topic, unfortunately - it is still too recent for much to be said in certainty, and a sizable fraction of the evidence is conflicting. Related to all of this is the question of how exactly the age of the donor affects the reprogramming of donated cells. Near all potential uses of regenerative medicine based on reprogrammed cells involve age-related disease and older individuals. It is important to understand whether it is safe to proceed, how effective approaches might be in practice, and where the problems lie, so that they can be addressed. Induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) avoid many of the restrictions that hamper the application of human embryonic stem cells, and the donor's clinical phenotype is often known when working with iPSCs. Therefore, iPSCs seem ideal to tackle the two biggest tasks of regenerative medicine: degenerative diseases with genetic cause (e.g., Duchenne's muscular dystrophy) and organ replacement in age-related diseases (e.g., end-stage heart or renal failure), especially in combination with recently developed ...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs