Centenarians are a special subject of interest in the context of the study of physiological aging and its relationship with the disappearance of diseases that are associated with the process, including cancer, cardiovascular diseases, and Alzheimer’s disease, and absence of disability.
The problem with centenarians is that there are few genetic reference samples available from these healthy ageing donor populations, and this has been a major limiting factor for using centenarian-derived cells in lab studies. Researchers at the Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine and Boston Medical Center have sought to overcome this issue by building the largest iPSC library based on centenarian donors and their offspring. It appears in Aging Cell.
That is why, by deriving centenarian stem cells, one plans to learn how these people manage to escape age-related diseases and to develop or prove the efficiency of the drugs on equal footing.
This research makes a significant contribution to the knowledge on timely factors that contribute to centenarian longevity and resources that might help others extend their healthy lifespan,” stated first author Todd Dowrey, who is a Ph.D. candidate in the molecular & translational medicine department at the school.
They obtained and phenotyped over one hundred centenarian and offspring derived peripheral blood samples which contains information about that individual’s ability to withstand disability and cognitive impairment.
The researchers then studied how gene expression is regulated in molecular ageing clocks in order to gain insight and compare it with the between the two forms of ageing in those deep specialised fields of study.
As the scientists state, this work indicates extensive, and constantly growing, crosstalk between regenerative medicine and biology of ageing.
“By leveraging this capacity to examine centenarian resilience ‘in a dish,’ we aim to reveal precise guidance to healthy longevity, disease attenuation and human lifespan extension,” said corresponding author George J. Murphy, PhD, associate professor of medicine at the school and co-founder of the BU and BMC Center for Regenerative Medicine (CReM).
From all our participants we are always able to get the highest levels of cooperation and without them we could not do these special researches. Consequently, we are able to ennoble their gift in making stem cell lines derived from them last lifetime and these lines will be utilized by investigators across the globe,” said lead author Dr Thomas T. Perls who is a professor of medicine and the founding director of New England Centenarian Study at the school.
Reference:
Boston. Researchers establish largest stem cell repository focused on centenarians Medical Xpress
