Courtney Farrell

Scientists made 50-year-old skin cells behave like they’re 20 again. Researchers at the Babraham Institute in Cambridge have developed a groundbreaking method to reverse the biological aging of human skin cells by approximately 30 years, all while keeping them as fully functional adult skin cells. The team used a carefully controlled, short-term version of the Nobel Prize-winning Yamanaka reprogramming technique. By exposing adult skin fibroblasts to a specific set of reprogramming factors (the Yamanaka factors) for just 13 days—and then stopping the process early—they successfully “reset” many molecular markers of aging without pushing the cells all the way back to a stem cell state. After this brief treatment, the rejuvenated cells displayed a dramatically younger profile: their epigenetic clock (a measure of chemical tags on DNA that tracks biological age) and their gene expression patterns (the transcriptome) closely resembled those of cells from much younger individuals. Even more impressively, the cells behaved younger too. The treated fibroblasts produced significantly higher levels of collagen—the protein essential for skin firmness, elasticity, and wound healing—and they migrated faster to close an artificial “wound” in laboratory dishes compared to untreated older cells. The researchers also observed reversal of age-related changes in genes associated with diseases such as Alzheimer’s and cataracts, suggesting the technique could have broader therapeutic implications. While this work is still in its early stages and the precise mechanisms remain under investigation, the findings open exciting possibilities: one day, scientists may be able to selectively rejuvenate aging cells in the body to enhance tissue repair, improve healing, and potentially slow or mitigate some effects of age-related diseases—without the risks associated with fully reprogramming cells into stem cells. [Gill, D., Parry, A., Santos, F., Okkenhaug, H., Seale, M., Dobbs, L. J., Reik, W., & Ocampo, A. (2022). Multi-omic rejuvenation of human cells by maturation phase transient reprogramming. eLife, 11, e71624. DOI: 10.7554/eLife.71624]