Hello this is Eric Topol and for this edition of Ground Truths. I’m so delighted to have with me Professor Tony Wyss-Coray of Stanford, a Distinguished Professor at Stanford and who directs the Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience.
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Question. You have said that the fountain of eternal youth is within all of us, but that it dries up over time. What do you mean?
Answer. The composition of blood changes dramatically as we age. We can take young blood and put it into an old person and make them younger. That suggests that what is in ourselves when we are young can keep the body young, but that we lose it with age. If you could continually give someone young blood, their body would not age so quickly.
The fountain of youth could come in the form of a familiar viscous fluid: blood. Studies dating back to the 1950s showed that the blood of a younger rodent rejuvenates the organs of an elderly one after scientists surgically joined the circulatory systems of two rodents in a procedure called parabiosis (1–3).
Steve Horvath of Altos Labs applies his work on epigenetic clocks to measure the rejuvenating effects of young blood on the epigenome.
“In a way, it’s nature’s cocktail or nature’s elixir,” said Tony Wyss-Coray, who studies brain aging and rejuvenation at Stanford University. “It’s almost like you have a polypharmacy in the blood.”
Since blood is chock full of nutrients, proteins, enzymes, platelets, and helpful immune cells, Wyss-Coray and other scientists study the possibility that youthful blood — or specific components of it — could help fight the effects of aging throughout the body. “The advantage is that it’s a natural composition,” said Wyss-Coray. “You’re not making it artificially, but you would use it the way nature made it.”
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