Your skin is constantly renewing.
Already during your youth, a slow aging process is started in which your cells gradually produce less collagen and elastin. And that makes your skin flabby and wrinkled.
But now researchers at the Barbraham Institute in Cambridge have found a method that reverses aging by 30 years and may even drastically change the treatment of serious wounds.
Famous cocktail turns back time
In this new study the researchers used a special cocktail of proteins known as the Yamanaka factors.
The miracle cure was discovered in 2007 by Japanese stem cell researcher and Nobel Prize winner Shinya Yamanaka.
He showed at the time that four proteins can change our mature skin cells into immature and unspecialized cells – so-called stem cells.
We recently described how the Yamanaka proteins could reverse aging signs in multiple mouse organs. READ IT HERE!
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It takes 50 days to transform skin cells into stem cells. But with Yamanaka’s method, the cells also lose their original function – so they no longer behave like skin cells.
And that is a problem if we want to use the elixir to treat people.
13 days was enough
During the new experiment, the researchers discovered how the Yamanaka factors can be used to combat skin aging without the cells losing their function.
The researchers collected skin cells from three subjects of about 50 years of age. They then exposed the cells to the protein cocktail for 13 days, after which the cells had to continue without the proteins themselves.
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When the researchers then measured the various chemical markers in the cell’s DNA, they saw that the cells suddenly resembled skin cells from people 30 years younger.
The treated cells behaved as if they were younger: they made much more of the connective tissue-producing protein collagen. And when the researchers released them on a fake wound in the lab, the opening healed much faster than with old cells.
The researchers hope that the discovery can stimulate a new treatment for burns, for example, with the advantage that the cells are not rejected because they come from the patient’s own body.
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