Can We Reverse The Ageing Process By Putting Young Blood Into Older People?

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Ian Sample | The Guardian

A series of experiments has produced incredible results by giving young blood to old mice. Now the findings are being tested on humans. Ian Sample meets the scientists whose research could transform our lives.

On an August morning in 2008, Tony Wyss-Coray sat in a conference room at the Veterans Affairs hospital in Palo Alto, California, waiting for his lab’s weekly meeting to begin. Wyss-Coray, a professor of neurology at Stanford University, was leading a young group of researchers who studied ageing and neurodegeneration. As a rule, the gatherings were forgettable affairs – the incremental nature of scientific progress does not lend itself to big surprises. But a lab member scheduled to speak that day had taken on a radical project, and he had new results to share.

Saul Villeda, an ebullient PhD student with slick black hair and a goatee, had spent the past year engrossed in research that called to mind the speculative medical science of the middle ages. He was investigating whether the old and frail could be rejuvenated by infusions of blood from the young. The hypothesis was not as absurd as it might sound.

Villeda had conducted pilot studies with pairs of surgically conjoined mice that shared a blood supply for several weeks. Young mice received blood from older mice, and old mice received blood from younger ones. Villeda wanted to see the effect on their brains. Neurons in ageing brains lose their connections and start to die off; ultimately, the brain shrinks and becomes less effective. A region called the hippocampus, crucial for memory and learning, is one of the first to deteriorate with age, causing people’s memories and thought processes to falter.

Villeda’s work took skill. A mouse brain is the size of a peanut. To remove one for inspection is not difficult, but Villeda then had to cut each brain into wafers 1/25th of a millimetre thick using a cryomicrotome, a machine that resembles a benchtop deli slicer. Villeda took multiple slivers from about 40 mice and then stained them with a dye that binds to newborn neurons. Under a microscope the baby brain cells stand out like little brown trees.

The day before the lab meeting, Villeda and his colleague Kurt Lucin arrived early for work. With a small paintbrush, Villeda swept each brain slice, one after another, onto a microscope slide, and counted the tiny brown tree shapes. It took hours: he had about 200 slivers to inspect, from old and young mice. After totting up the newborn neurons in each section, he tapped the number into a statistics program. He finished after 10pm.

Though it was late, Villeda made Lucin stay with him to crunch the numbers. “It had been such a long experiment. I thought, if it doesn’t work, he’s here. We can go and grab a drink,” Villeda told me recently. He clicked a button on the screen marked “analyse”. The statistics program took all the data and calculated the average number of newborn neurons in the brains of each group of mice. A moment later, bar charts popped up on the screen.

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