A Popular Science Article on Young Blood versus Old Blood in the Development of Treatments for Aging

The popular science article I'll point out today does a fair job of following the past decade or so of work arising from heterochronic parabiosis, in which the circulatory systems of a young animal and an old animal are joined. The young animal exhibits some degree of accelerated aging, while the old animal exhibits some degree of rejuvenated function. The question all along has been why exactly this happens: what are the underlying mechanisms, and can they be replicated as a basis for therapy. The obvious first approach was to transfuse young donor blood into old recipients, as positive results would mean that the existing blood transfusion infrastructure could be used to provide a relatively low cost therapy to large number of older people. Unfortunately, this doesn't work. The results from animal studies and human trials indicate that if there are benefits, they are too small and unreliable to care about. There is something about parabiosis that isn't captured by transfusion. Otherwise, initial research focused on factors in young blood that might be beneficial. This gave rise to the identification of GDF11 as one such factor, followed by considerable debate over whether this work was flawed, in parallel to the establishment of Elevian, a company that continues to work on therapies based on delivery or upregulation of GDF11. Researchers later provided compelling proof that the effect of beneficial factors in young blood is small in comparison to the effect of...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs