We're looking for rejuvenation,
but what's the plan?
Young small extracellular vesicles
are small packages of less than 200 nanometers excreted by the cells of our bodies, which carry different types of signals through the blood to the whole body, such as DNAs, RNAs, proteins and lipids.
Recent studies have shown that small extracellular vesicles extracted from young animals, when injected into old animals, prolonged the animals' lifespan, improved the mitochondrial energy metabolism, mitigated senescent phenotypes and ameliorated the functional decline associated with aging in various tissues, including the hippocampus, muscles, heart, testes and bones. Thus, our plan is to test the hypothesis that among the young small extracellular vesicles there are age signaling pathways.
Of all the strategies analyzed by the ICR, young small extracellular vesicles are the one we consider most promising. The reasoning behind this therapy is based on the scientific theory that aging is controlled by age signals, which in mammals, for example, are transported and distributed to the cells via the bloodstream. Thus, the ICR is already carrying out experiments to see if the results published by other scientists can be reproduced.
ICR's current objective is to reproduce the seminal experiment carried out by Harold Katcher published in the scientific journal Geroscience, in which the researchers extracted small extracellular vesicles from the blood of young pigs and injected them into old Sprague-Dawley rats, reporting that they managed to rejuvenate the animals according to a series of parameters, including memory, grip strength, blood markers, senescent cells, and others.
And the first steps have already been taken: we recently completed the first phase of the reproduction of Harold Katcher's experiment. With the help of Unicamp, ICR isolated extracellular particles from the blood of a young pig (PPEPs) and injected them into 3 young Sprague-Dawley rats in order to assess possible toxic or immunological effects, using 3 other animals as a control. The results were encouraging: we observed no signs of acute toxicity or immunogenicity in the treated animals. Click here to read the scientific article related to this experiment.
In addition to those from young animals, small extracellular vesicles from other young sources, such as young stem cells, neonatal cells and the amniotic fluid, have also shown regenerative and rejuvenating effects in various scientific studies.
ICR is also studying these other sources of young small extracellular vesicles, and even the possibility of discovering which are the age-signaling biomolecules within young small extracellular vesicles that could then be synthesized in the laboratory, without the need to extract them from animal sources.
