Scientists Discover a Way to 'Recharge' Aging Human Cells

New research shows how human cells can be effectively 'recharged' by replacing their internal batteries – microscopic power stations called mitochondria – and the discovery could have wide-ranging benefits across healthcare and medical treatments.

The stacks of mitochondria in most of our cells naturally decline in numbers, slow down, and wear out with age. Once they start operating below peak capacity, they can contribute to multiple diseases everywhere from the heart to the brain.

In this latest study, researchers from Texas A&M University used special flower-shaped particles called nanoflowers to scavenge damaging oxygen molecules, triggering genes that increase the number of mitochondria in human stem cells. 

Crucially, those energy-boosted stem cells could then share their mitochondria with old and damaged neighboring cells. It's more of a battery swap than a recharge, but it means existing cells that have stopped functioning can get back to work.

"We have trained healthy cells to share their spare batteries with weaker ones," says biomedical engineer Akhilesh Gaharwar.

"By increasing the number of mitochondria inside donor cells, we can help aging or damaged cells regain their vitality – without any genetic modification or drugs."

Made from the compound molybdenum disulfide, the nanoflowers were developed with tiny holes that made them act like sponges capable of soaking up stressful reactive oxygen species in target tissues. This removal was found to trigger the expression of genes that kick mitochondria production up several notches in the experiment's stem cells.

Stem cells are naturally built to share mitochondria, but in these lab experiments, they had many more power stations to spare than normal, which improved the recharging effect on other cells.

Around two times more mitochondria were shared than would normally be expected, the researchers report, and smooth muscle cells, found in the heart, increased by three- to four-fold. In heart cells exposed to damaging chemotherapy, the survival rate of the treated cells improved significantly.

The researchers suggest the approach could be used to rejuvenate cells anywhere in the body: close to the heart for cardiovascular problems, for example, or directly into muscle for cases of muscular dystrophy.

"It's pretty promising in terms of being able to be used for a whole wide variety of cases, and this is just kind of the start," says geneticist John Soukar.

"We could work on this forever and find new things and new disease treatments every day."

This is all very positive, but the researchers themselves admit they're still at the early stages. While the current study supports the possibility of using nanoparticles to enhance mitochondria transfer, the next step is to get it working in animals and people.

Those future tests should tell us more about where the beneficial stem cells could be implanted in the body, and what level of dose would be safe and appropriate. The longer-term impacts of the process also need to be studied.

"This is an early but exciting step toward recharging aging tissues using their own biological machinery," says Gaharwar.

"If we can safely boost this natural power-sharing system, it could one day help slow or even reverse some effects of cellular aging."

The research has been published in PNAS.

 

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Aging Is Reversible—at Least in Human Cells and Live Mice

Research suggests it is possible to slow or even reverse aging, at least in mice, by undoing changes in gene activity—the same kinds of changes that are caused by decades of life in humans.

By tweaking genes that turn adult cells back into embryoniclike ones, researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies reversed the aging of mouse and human cells in vitro, extended the life of a mouse with an accelerated-aging condition and successfully promoted recovery from an injury in a middle-aged mouse, according to a 2016 study.

The study adds weight to the scientific argument that aging is largely a process of so-called epigenetic changes, alterations that make genes more active or less so. Over the course of life cell-activity regulators get added to or removed from genes. In humans those changes can be caused by smoking, pollution or other environmental factors—which dial the genes’ activities up or down. As these changes accumulate, our muscles weaken, our minds slow down and we become more vulnerable to diseases.

The study suggests the possibility of reversing at least some of these changes, a process researchers think they may eventually get to work in living humans. “Aging is something plastic that we can manipulate,” says Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte, the study’s senior author and an expert in gene expression at Salk. In their study Belmonte and his colleagues rejuvenated cells by turning on, for a short period of time, four genes that have the capacity to convert adult cells back into an embryoniclike state.

In living mice they activated the four genes (known as “Yamanaka factors,” for researcher Shinya Yamanaka, the Nobelist who discovered their combined potential in 2006). This approach rejuvenated damaged muscles and the pancreas in a middle-aged mouse, and extended by 30 percent the life span of a mouse with a genetic mutation responsible for Hutchinson–Gilford progeria syndrome, which causes rapid aging in children.

Because the Yamanaka factors reverse changes made to gene regulators, some scientists see the study as further evidence that aging is driven by epigenetic changes. “I do think that epigenetic reprogramming is the ultimate way to reverse aging,” says David Sinclair, a Harvard University geneticist and anti-aging researcher who was not involved in the study but is doing similar work. “My lab has a lot of evidence that the primary driver of what we call the hallmarks of aging is the epigenetic change.” Sinclair says his lab is preparing a paper explaining what causes these changes as we age.

The Salk study was conducted on middle-aged mice. But in theory, reprogramming epigenetics should work on mice and people at any age, says first author Alejandro Ocampo, adding that even cells from human centenarians could eventually be rejuvenated. He and Belmonte say they think they can improve the efficiency and results of the technique with more research—and that they can undo the epigenetic changes responsible for aging by using easier-to-handle chemicals instead of the Yamanaka factors, hopefully moving toward the possibility of treatment for people.

Matt Kaeberlein, a molecular biologist at the University of Washington who studies aging but was not part of the work, says other researchers have found that the Yamanaka factors can rejuvenate cells—so in some ways this study is not surprising. But Kaeberlein says no one else had yet shown that the factors can treat age-related diseases in an animal by making the same changes. “That’s the wow factor,” he explains.

Kaeberlein says the study suggests it may be possible not just to slow aging but to actually reverse it. “That’s really exciting—that means that even in elderly people it may be possible to restore youthful function,” he says. Plus, it is easier to imagine a treatment that makes changes to the epigenome than to consider going into every cell and changing its genes. He also notes that the results of the new study are very similar to those seen when senescent cells—those that have lost function due to aging—are removed from an organism. It is not yet clear, he says, whether “this is another way to shut down or maybe reprogram senescent cells.”

Manuel Serrano, an expert on senescence at the Spanish National Cancer Research Center in Madrid, was not associated with the new research but says he is impressed with the study and its results. “I fully agree with the conclusions. This work indicates that epigenetic shift is in part responsible for aging, and reprogramming can correct these epigenetics errors,” he wrote in an e-mail. “This will be the basis for future exciting developments.”

The study also showed how fine the line can be between benefit and harm. When the researchers treated mice continually, some developed tumors and died within a week. When the scientists cut the treatment to two days out of seven, however, the mice benefited significantly. Sinclair says this should be taken as a note of caution by anyone trying to increase the human life span. “We’ve all been playing with fire,” he says, adding that this fine line will make it challenging to get a drug approved by regulatory agencies. “This is going to be what we spend the next 10 years figuring out: how to reprogram cells to be young again without taking it too far so they become tumors.”

Both Sinclair and Kaeberlein say they wish Belmonte’s lab had shown that a normal mouse could live longer after the gene tinkering—instead of just reversing an aging-related illness.

Belmonte, like some other anti-aging researchers, says his initial goal is to increase the “health span”—the number of years that someone remains healthy. Extending life span, the number of years someone remains alive, will likely take longer to achieve. Most major killers, including heart disease, cancer and Alzheimer’s, are diseases of aging that become far more common past middle age. “This is not just a matter of how many years we can live but how well we can live the rest of our life,” Ocampo says.

Belmonte says his team is also trying to determine if aging is a process that occurs simultaneously throughout the body. Or, as he puts it, “Is there some tissue that regulates aging—and when that goes bad, the entire organism goes bad?” He says they currently think the brain’s hypothalamus—known as the seat of control for hormones, body temperature, mood, hunger and circadian rhythms—may also act as a regulator of aging.

Other approaches that have been discovered to have anti-aging benefits in animals include calorie restriction, the drug rapamycin and parabiosis—the practice of giving old mice a blood supply from younger ones. The fact that these diverse strategies all seem to work suggests there may be more than one way to age, and that multiple complementary therapies may be needed to significantly extend longevity, Kaeberlein says.

Some compounds such as resveratrol, a substance found in red wine that seems to have anti-aging properties in high concentrations, appear to delay epigenetic change and protect against damage from epigenetic deterioration, Sinclair says. These approaches can reverse some aspects of aging, such as muscle degeneration—but aging returns when the treatment stops, he adds. With an approach like the one Belmonte lays out in the new study, theoretically “you could have one treatment and go back 10 or 20 years,” he says. If aging starts to catch up to you again, you simply get another treatment.

“This work is the first glimmer that we could live for centuries,” Sinclair says, adding that he would happily do so himself: “Forty-seven years went by pretty quickly.”

 

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How to track the coronavirus: dashboard, built by a team at the Johns Hopkins delivers a live view of the deadly virus

Did you know? 2019-nCoV coronavirus penetrate and attack human cells. Coronavirus is a challenge for many health leaders and are determining ways to respond to Coronavirus. It is essential to learn what coronavirus is - it is ultimately a virus. A virus is hard to define but ultimately a parasite - and are very diverse.

Researchers are working actively for Coronavirus tracking around the planet. John Hopkins University has contributed well to this development and has invented a real-time tracker explaining coronavirus moves.

This gives a comprehension of situational outbreak where it transports data unfolds and present real-time information regarding Coronavirus and which area, country or particular province has been affected.

The purpose of this Coronavirus dashboard is to predict the next targeted area - the pattern will predict the growing movement and where is it expected to spread next - it is an emerging outbreak modelling process.

Coronavirus live updates are visualized through this infographic information system - real-time, powered by Esri. The data is extracted from disease control centres in China, Europe, US and the WHO (World Health Organization).

Apparently, there have been 16 coronavirus cases in the United States of America. Whereas, unfortunately, one of the American couldn't bare coronavirus and passed away abroad. As of now, through this stage, the coronavirus has depicted pneumonia symptoms, which includes breathing issue, cough and fever.

History of Coronavirus

The US CDC has kept up the position that the open risk which is prone to the public from coronavirus in the US presently is as yet thought to be very low. Dr Nancy Messonnier, the executive of the CDC's National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said the coronavirus methodology in the US is to slow and limit the spread of the infection, not to stop it.

Coronavirus includes the deadly SARS and the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) - where the first case regarding Coronavirus has been reported to the World Health Organization on 31st of December, 2019. The Chinese investigators linked this particular "Corona" labelled virus to other virus families.

This "never been encountered before" virus emerges from animal and initially infected Huanan seafood wholesale market workers in the Chinese city centre. This virus emerged global pandemic in the financial market - as well as exacerbated the fears throughout other than financial markets. The Iranian Rial has devalued sharply as of 21st of February' 2020.

Symptoms of Coronavirus

As told earlier, it is much pneumonia-like virus. Unfortunately, antibiotics are of no use. Interestingly, people migrating from mainland China; Republic of Korea; Singapore; Macau; Malaysia; Taiwan to their country of origin are likely to report any suggested to communicate their mild cough, flu and breath shortness to their respective medical centres - for instance, NHS 111 in the UK. Chinese national health commission also ensured that there is human-to-human transmission.

Coronavirus live update

There have been 74,576 cases reported in China, as confirmed by Health officials, while 12,000 were recovered. Unfortunately, there has been recorded 2,118 deaths in China as of 20th of February from the Covid-19.

The coronavirus has spread to various countries - numerically 28 in total. Highest cases have been reported in Japan - with reportedly 607 cases; whereas 542 initially originated from Yokohama's cruise ship dock. The UK has reportedly 9 cases, but no fatalities took place.

WHO warns: Is Coronavirus Pandemic?

WHO's director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has expressed sensitive concerns against Covid-19 tackling. The opportunities are shrinking. This is something serious where four new cases have been reported in Iran, and the epidemic is increasing towards the Middle East.

Preventative Measures

Practically, there are vaccination or preventative COVID-19 measures - the only cure is to limit the exposure to the virus.

Here are some recommendations as per the CDC to prevent or keep respiratory diseases or coronavirus at not even a proximity:
o Stay away from sick people,

o Do not touch your nose, mouth and eyes,

o Try to stay at your home when you are sick,

o Use a tissue when you sneeze or cough; afterwards, throw it in the trash,

o You should watch hands for almost around 20 seconds, also before eating, sneezing, after getting to the bathroom, or when there is no soap and water available, use a hand sanitizer - this should have 60% of alcohol available. We also know that once hands are visibly dirty - there is a DIRE need to wash your hand with soap and water,

o Individuals who have COVID-19 symptoms are suggested to wear a facemask. The Coronavirus is very active and tends to spread among others "hyperactively". CDC advises to wear mask in such cases - and is deemed necessary for health care expert, such as nurse etc.

o Those who are healthy and do not show any COVID-19 symptoms, or respiratory disease, are not recommended to wear masks.

Pre-emptive measures

Doctors run some relevant tests - the best treatment will be suggested by the doctor based on the symptoms and developing complications. These are unique to every individual. COVID-19 is an unwelcoming surprise given the pandemic or alarming rise.

Yes, there is no treatment. There is no cure for one who is infected. The treatment is orbiting around symptoms management. Vaccines treatment are available for SARS and MERS. Sadly speaking, SARS has remained unchecked in almost 37 countries - coronavirus is spreading, and MERS and SARS that comes from animal are not dealt with proper care.

As per the research, there have been 8,000 individual impacted by this and more than 750 killed. MERS is quick in the human-to-human transferring. Due to greater lethality, there has been reportedly 2,500 people inflicted by MERS - killing 35%.

Wrapping up

The 2019-nCoV's exploration comes with both the good and the bad. Since it is known now - experts can craft a suitable weapon against this virus. The bad news is that this unwelcomed "super-fast" enemy is spreading faster than we expect. Our current ammunition depot is not sufficient - yet efficient - to combat this.

This needs to be addressed at the earliest, and the invention of this dashboard is a way to combat this virus - no sooner than later.

https://coronavirus-live-updates.com/

The Shout out organization is a 501c3 nonprofit established in 2016 for the mission of supporting other non profit organizations and student organizations. We educate and bring awareness to different causes through music, arts, social media and the internet.

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