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Elderly Mice Perk Up With Transfused Blood
Some exciting news, as reported by the Wall Street Journal, might make you glad that human blood is a renewable resource: "Giving old mice blood from young ones makes them smarter and improves such functions as exercise capacity, according to reports from two research teams that point to new ways to study and potentially treat diseases of aging. In one study, researchers at Stanford University and the University of California, San Francisco found that blood transfusions from young mice reversed cognitive effects of aging, improving the old mice's memory and learning ability. The report was published Sunday in the journal Nature Medicine. Two other reports appearing in Science from researchers at Harvard University found that exposing old mice to a protein present at high levels in the blood of young mice and people improved both brain and exercise capability. An earlier report by some of the same researchers linked injections of the protein to reversal of the effects of aging on the heart. ... What isn't known from all this research, said Buck Institute's Dr. [Brian] Kennedy, is whether young blood might also increase the life span of mice and, if so, what such implications for humans might be."
I can see the dystopia: Young people selling blood to old folks to pay the interest on student debt, mortgage debt, credit card debt... the old generation literally sucking the blood of the new generation.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303417104579541950544978572
... that they got from another study: http://www.grg.org/SMelov.htm
but at least these mice weren't genetically engineered to only live a week to begin with so this result may have a (lot) more relevance.
Fortunately despite the worries of the (first!) poster, hopefully we won't descend into a civilization where the old literally becomes a vampiritic parasite on the young. They've already identified, isolated and synthetically produced (the?) protein which causes this effect so we'll be able to get the benefits without bloodletting. Still makes (made?) a great premise for science fiction/vampire movies.
As an aside, I'm impressed by how Harvard, a decade or two ago, seemed to make the decision not to go into (what I thought) was the trendy/hot science of genetic engineering but instead has invested hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars into becoming the(?) center for stem cell research. Meanwhile, genetic engineering seemed to have been sidetracked by "junk DNA" and epigenetics and in general the overwhelming complexity of the human genome (although the invention of CRISPR is a major major advance). Was it obvious to biologists that this was the right decision? Go Crimson!
maybe vlad the impaler's wife was on to something!
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
The injected 'young' plasma, which improved the ability of the hippocampus, which improved learning and memory. Obviously they are trying to isolate what exactly is different about the blood that is different.
The focus is on the protein GDF11, which seems to cause improvements. The article suggests it will be three years before human testing of GDF11.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
You do realise that the rich and powerful can easily pay the fast and the strong to catch you so that they can drain your precious bodily fluids so that they can prolong their own lives. Still like the idea?
She would recover for about six weeks.
But on the third time- she died of blood poisoning- which is a risk from getting a blood transfusion.
But it was kinda like I got to see her again after she had been gone for a long time, replaced by a sort of dotty, eccentric person. She was suddenly sharp, intelligent and the fuzziness went away.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Isolate the protiens the young mice have that the old mice don't have. Blood transfusions aren't necessary... Just saline and protien.
The previous studies that had the same result eventually concluded that it was the pluripotent stem cells in the blood which had come out of the marrow as part of normal blood production.
On this basis, a treatment was developed (and insurance approved) using autologous stem cell transplantation; it's a common treatment for some types of cardiac events. There are also transplants involving harvesting of marrow stem cells, and then separating leukotic stem cells from those which are non-leukotic, and then growing and storing them while the patient undergoes radiation or chemotherapy to kill of their remaining marrow (this requires frequent transfusions to keep the blood volume of functional cells up, as the body is no longer replacing them itself at a high enough rate). Subsequent to this, the saved and separated cells are then transplanted back into the long bones (the rest of the interior areas of the smaller bones are allowed to be recolonoized by stem cells that escape the long bones). Since the treaments are autologous, you about conditions like interstitial pneomonitis, or the need for anti-rejection therapy, which is sometimes problematic when using a heterologous cell source.
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
As it stands, hundreds of thousands of people in the United States donate blood and plasma everyday, not out of goodness of heart, but for the quick $50 you get. If it turns out that this procedure not only works on humans, but that the effects are substantial, and the FDA actually approved the practice, the value and price of blood would go up and the number of donors would skyrocket. This could cause problems like increasing the cost of a blood transfusion for someone who is bleeding out from a bad accident. It may introduce social problems like a suddenly expanding elderly population, but perhaps they would be better able to take care of themselves and would require less age-disease related medication. Then their is the problem of who pays for it. People who retired with a lot of money may be able to pay what could be a hefty price, but what of people in lower classes? If this extends life, would it not be a right to life issue where anyone past a certain age is guaranteed the procedure? Would Medicare pick up the bill? What about retirement and the employment market? Ideally we will discover that a whole blood transfusion is not necessary but that instead there is just one component of young blood that would need distilled, cloned, grown in a lab and infused in smaller amounts then a full transfusion.
At the end of the day, life extension is one of the major goals of modern medicine, and aging itself is increasingly be viewed as a disease. Whether or not this pans out, eventually something will, and we will then enter into stranger times then we already live. Cheers to the future for better or worse.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
Most of the coverage of this story is reporting the "Happy happy joy joy!" aspects (cure heart disease! reverse aging! improving mental agility!), but a few outlets are reporting that there's also a risk for cancer.