Year: 2020

By HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL 

• Proof-of-concept study represents first successful attempt to reverse the aging clock in animals through epigenetic reprogramming.
• Scientists turned on embryonic genes to reprogram cells of mouse retinas.
• Approach reversed glaucoma-induced eye damage in animals.
• Approach also restored age-related vision loss in elderly mice.
• Work spells promise for using same approach in other tissues, organs beyond the eyes.
• Success sets stage for treatment of various age-related diseases in humans.

Harvard Medical School scientists have successfully restored vision in mice by turning back the clock on aged eye cells in the retina to recapture youthful gene function.

by University of Glasgow

A new type of energy-generating synthetic skin could create more affordable prosthetic limbs and robots capable of mimicking the sense of touch, scientists say.

In an early-view paper published in the journal IEEE Transactions on Robotics, researchers from the University of Glasgow describe how a robotic hand wrapped in their flexible solar skinis capable of interacting with objects without using dedicated and expensive touch sensors.

Instead, the skin puts the array of miniaturized solar cells integrated on its soft polymer surface to a clever dual use. The cells generate enough energy to power the micro-actuators which control the hand’s movements, but they also provide the hand with its unique sense of ‘touch’ by measuring the variations in the solar cells’ output.

by Ryan Jaslow , Harvard Medical School

The team’s work, described Dec. 2 in Nature, represents the first demonstration that it may be possible to safely reprogram complex tissues, such as the nerve cells of the eye, to an earlier age.

In addition to resetting the cells’ aging clock, the researchers successfully reversed vision loss in animals with a condition mimicking human glaucoma, a leading cause of blindness around the world.

The achievement represents the first successful attempt to reverse glaucoma-induced vision loss, rather than merely stem its progression, the team said. If replicated through further studies, the approach could pave the way for therapies to promote tissue repair across various organs and reverse aging and age-related diseases in humans.

“Our study demonstrates that it’s possible to safely reverse the age of complex tissues such as the retina and restore its youthful biological function,” said senior author David Sinclair, professor of genetics in the Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School, co-director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for Biology of Aging Research at HMS and an expert on aging.