Young Blood for Old Brains
Tony Wyss-Coray
Khaoula Ben Haj Frej
Last week, I attended Tony Wyss-Coray’s seminar, titled “Young Blood for Old Brains.” As though the title weren’t intriguing enough, Wyss-Coray, a Stanford School of Medicine professor, described his study of the use of the blood from young, healthy mice to cure Alzheimer’s in older mice. He spoke of the “Fountain of Youth,” a mythical fountain that revitalizes the elderly and frail who bathe in it and compared it to the current advancements being made in neuroscience. As the human mind ages, it is often plagued by degenerative diseases. He goes so far as to suggest his study’s capacity to reverse the effects of such impairments.
One such example of an attempt at rejuvenation is parabiosis, a method that surgically connects a young and old mouse, creating a shared internal environment in animals (Paul and Reddy, 2014). According to Wyss-Coray, in stem cell studies involving parabiosis, when the older animal was injured, the wound healed similarly as in the young mouse. Similar effects were seen in the pancreas, liver, heart, and most applicable here, the brain. Simply through exposure to a young environment, demyelination and vasculature in the brain can potentially be rejuvenated to the point where they mirror the younger model. After all, in parabiosis studies, anastomosis occurs, where blood is shared between the animals. Backing this up, Wyss-Coray performed an experiment where two old mice were joined by parabiosis and one old and one young mouse were joined and the pairs were compared; incredibly, only the older mouse connected to a younger specimen expressed increased synaptic plasticity (Villeda et al., 2014). Such a discovery could revolutionize the way age-related mental degeneration is viewed. Similarly, according to Wyss-Coray’ presentation, in a comparable but less drastic experiment, human plasma was administered to old mice caused a very distinct gene signal in the brain, strongly supporting the belief that blood content could impact the brain.
Of course, it would not be at all acceptable or very much useful to surgically attach two humans, but that does not mean that the early stages of this research cannot be applied to people with Alzheimer’s. The research is still in its fairly early stages and even Villeda et al., (2014) recognizes the multitude of questions that have yet to be answered, like what exactly the revitalizing factors in blood are or, even more broadly, if they would have the same impact in humans as in mice. Only after answering these questions and others would research be able to progress to the level of manufacturing a new subgroup drugs that could reverse Alzheimer’s, as opposed to those that thus far can only attempt to slow down its progression.
Works Cited
Paul, Steven, and Kiran Reddy. “Young Blood Rejuvenates Old Brains.” Nature
Medicine (2014): 582-83. Print.
Villeda, Saul A, Kristopher E Plambeck, Jinte Middeldorp, Joseph M Castellano, Kira I
Mosher, Jian Luo, Lucas K Smith, Gregor Bieri, Karin Lin, Daniela Berdnik,
Rafael Wabl, Joe Udeochu, Elizabeth G Wheatley, Bende Zou, Danielle A Simmons, Xinmin S Xie, Frank M Longo, and Tony Wyss-Coray. “Young Blood Reverses Age-Related Impairments in Cognitive Function and Synaptic Plasticity in Mice.” Nature America (2014): Print.
