Renewal Bio’s breakthrough could transform transplants and anti-aging medicine.
Think about it for a moment: what if each of us could make our own replacement parts? Simply take a sample of our skin and turn it into a blood cell, a liver cell, or a heart cell. Instead of waiting for an organ donor and fearing rejection, we could repair our organs with cells from the original manufacturer, our own cells.
It may sound like science fiction, but that’s exactly what Renewal Bio is doing, a small startup from Rehovot, founded by Prof. Jacob Hanna of the Weizmann Institute and his first two doctoral students. “We’re creating a kind of fountain of youth,” admits Prof. Hanna. “We’re creating cells that are young and customized, which can replace aging tissues and slow down the aging process.”
Renewal Bio’s technology builds on groundbreaking research that won the Nobel Prize in 2012. The first laureate, John Gurdon, demonstrated in frogs that an adult cell placed inside an egg could produce an entire frog, essentially cloning it. “He showed that the egg can erase the entire memory of the cell,” explains Prof. Hanna, “like restarting a computer.”
The second laureate, Shinya Yamanaka, took it further, showing that with just four proteins, an adult cell can be reverted back into a stem cell, without the need for an egg. “You temporarily insert these four genes, and the cell knows how to return to the stem cell stage,” Hanna notes.
But here’s the challenge: how do you take a stem cell and direct it to become the specific cell you need? “I can’t just take stem cells and transplant them because they don’t know how to find their way around on their own,” Hanna says. “We use a method where the cells make their own decisions, mimicking what happens naturally in the womb.”
Read the full story: The Weizmann Institute startup building cells that can replace organs | Ctech
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