You've probably heard of cloning with Dolly the sheep. This experiment gave us the first mammal to be successfully cloned from an adult somatic cell. Scientists at the University of Cambridge, UK, took advantage of the technique used in this experiment and managed to rejuvenate human cells in 30 years. Check all about this new cloning technique and understand how they managed to make it possible.
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Discovery
The findings of this experiment were published in scientific articles for the scientific journal eLife and aim to help in the treatment of diseases, especially the most common in the elderly. This method had previously been used to transform a mammary gland cell taken from an adult sheep into an embryo. This was the experiment that led to the creation of Dolly.
Thus, to create this artificial gene, a technique called Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer (SCNT) was used. This technique basically consists of removing the cell nucleus with its corresponding DNA from a cell. For this, it is necessary that it is not an egg or sperm and implant an egg that has not yet been fertilized and that had its nucleus previously removed.
However, in this case of current research, the idea was to create human embryonic stem cells so that they could be transformed into new muscles, cartilage and nerve cells. For this, the team used skin cells from a 53-year-old woman in the experiment, who had already received a series of chemical substances over the course of 12 days.
The search result
To the researchers' surprise, the cells did not turn into embryonic stem cells, but rather rejuvenated to the point of resembling the skin of a 23-year-old woman. Still, as noted in the article, this method is capable of partially restoring some functions that were lost in older cells.
However, the experiment's researchers acknowledge that this method increases the risk of cancer and requires further research in the future. Therefore, an alternative method that is not so harmful to health is still being sought. The team guarantees that all these discoveries represent a great advance for regenerative medicine, especially if it can be replicated in other types of cells and other tissues in the body.
