BEIJING – Scientists in Beijing have developed a new gene therapy that can reverse some of the effects of aging in mice and extend their lifespan, findings that could one day contribute to a similar treatment for humans.
The method, described earlier this month in a paper in the Science Translational Medicine journal, involves inactivating a gene called kat7, which the scientists found is a major contributor to cellular aging.
The specific therapy they used and the results were a world first, said project co-promoter Professor Qu Jing, 40, a specialist in aging and regenerative medicine at the Institute of Zoology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS).
“These mice show an overall improvement in appearance and grip strength after 6-8 months and, most importantly, they have a longer lifespan by about 25 percent,” said Qu.
The team of biologists from various CAS departments used the CRISPR / Cas9 method to screen thousands of genes for genes that were particularly strong drivers of cellular senescence, the term used to describe cellular aging.
They identified 100 of the approximately 10,000 genes, and cat7 was the most efficient at contributing to cell aging, Qu said.
Kat7 is one of tens of thousands of genes found in mammalian cells. The researchers inactivated it in the livers of the mice using a method called a lentiviral vector.
“We just tested the function of the gene in different types of cell types, in the human stem cell, the mesenchymal progenitor cells, in the human liver cell and the mouse liver cell and we saw no detectable cellular toxicity for all of these cells. And in the mice we also saw no side effect. “
Despite this, the method is far from ready for human trials, Qu said.
“It is still imperative to test the function of cat7 in other human cell types and other mouse organs and in the other preclinical animals before using the human aging strategy or other health problems,” she said.
Qu said she hopes to be able to test the method on primates next, but it would require a lot of funding and a lot more research first.
“Ultimately, we hope that in the future we can find a way to delay aging even by a very small percentage.”