ALAMEDA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--AgeX Therapeutics, Inc. (“AgeX”; NYSE American: AGE), a biotechnology company focused on developing therapeutics for human aging and regeneration, announced a new paper co-authored by two AgeX scientists that could lead to new insights into the fundamental mechanisms of aging and why super-centenarians not only live the longest, but also experience extraordinary healthspans; an extension of the healthy years of life that compresses morbidity to a very short period near the end of life. The paper, “Induced pluripotency and spontaneous reversal of cellular aging in supercentenarian donor cells,” is published online in the peer-reviewed scientific journal “Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications” from Elsevier. The senior author is Dana Larocca, PhD, VP of Discovery Research at AgeX, and the first author is Jieun Lee, PhD, Scientist at AgeX.
“Clearly, we can learn a lot about aging and longevity from the longest of the long-lived, the supercentenarians, and we hope that this paper accelerates such research,” commented Dr. Larocca. “Now that we have converted the cells of one of the longest-lived people in history, a deceased 114-year-old American woman, to a young pluripotent state, researchers can do so with cells from other supercentenarians. The goal is to understand specifically how these “extreme agers” manage to avoid the major chronic illnesses of aging better than any other age group including centenarians. We can essentially put their cells in a time machine and revert them to an earlier state, then study their biology to help unlock the mysteries of super-longevity. Scientists have long wondered, and now we know that we can indeed reset the developmental state and cellular age in the ‘oldest of the old.’”
By way of comparison, the paper also describes undertaking a similar process with cells from two other donors: an eight-year-old with a rapid-aging syndrome commonly known as Progeria, and a 43-year-old, healthy disease-free control (HDC) subject. The paper notes that the supercentenarian’s cells reverted to induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells at the same rate as the HDC subject and the Progeria patient. However, there may be some negative impact of extreme age on telomere resetting as this did not occur as frequently in the supercentenarian as in the other two donors.
The donated cells were from “the longevity collection,” a cell bank established by the NIH’s National Institute on Aging.
About AgeX Therapeutics
AgeX Therapeutics, Inc. (NYSE American: AGE) is focused on developing and commercializing innovative therapeutics for human aging. Its PureStem® and UniverCyte™ manufacturing and immunotolerance technologies are designed to work together to generate highly-defined, universal, allogeneic, off-the-shelf pluripotent stem cell-derived young cells of any type for application in a variety of diseases with a high unmet medical need. AgeX has two preclinical cell therapy programs: AGEX-VASC1 (vascular progenitor cells) for tissue ischemia and AGEX-BAT1 (brown fat cells) for Type II diabetes. AgeX’s revolutionary longevity platform induced Tissue Regeneration (iTR™) aims to unlock cellular immortality and regenerative capacity to reverse age-related changes within tissues. AGEX-iTR1547 is an iTR-based formulation in preclinical development. HyStem® is AgeX’s delivery technology to stably engraft PureStem cell therapies in the body. AgeX is developing its core product pipeline for use in the clinic to extend human healthspan and is seeking opportunities to establish licensing and collaboration agreements around its broad IP estate and proprietary technology platforms.
For more information, please visit www.agexinc.com or connect with the company on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube.
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