The team of doctor Richard Lee of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute in Boston in the United States does not hold an elixir of youth, but they are approaching it. During their experiment, the feat of which was published in the journal Cell, the researchers identified a protein, GDF11, whose presence in the blood decreases with aging. This protein belongs to a family of molecules involved in particular in tissue repair.
Based on this observation, scientists set out to rejuvenate elderly mice suffering from cardiac hypertrophy by increasing the concentration of this protein. Characterized by thickening of the walls of the heart, hypertrophy is one of the causes of heart failure, a disease that prevents the stiffened heart from doing its normal pumping job.
For a month, scientists injected the GDF11 protein from the blood of young mice into the blood of old mice daily via “parabiosis”. This surgical technique allowed several young and old mice to “share” their bloodstream. This exchange of blood was very beneficial since after a month the cardiac hypertrophy decreased and the size of the heart of old mice approached the size of young mice. It is as if the hearts of sick mice had rejuvenated.
It is still too early to extrapolate these results observed on rodents on humans. But the researchers see behind this treatment a hope to cure theheart failure, a serious disease that affects more and more elderly people.
