A new report details how adult stem cells can be modified to grow younger, instead of growing older. Scientists at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging and Georgia Institute of Technology demonstrated how the aging process for human adult stem cells can be reversed. This breakthrough will open many new avenues for innovative therapies that could impact a wide range of disease, including anything requiring the repair of damaged tissues.

As our years pile up, our bodies lose their regenerative abilities; tissue and organ function declines. It is quite popular among scientists to say that we are only as old as our tissues and our adult stem cells are. Hence, in understanding the microscopic processes that allow these cells to regenerate and divide, proliferate and differentiate into other tissues, we could gain an enormous headway into the field of regenerative medicine. Indeed, understanding these processes could help us eventually find the cures for many age-related illnesses.

The researchers hailed from the Buck Institute for Research on Aging and the Georgia Institute of Technology and wrote about their recent discoveries in the journal Cell Cycle. The study’s primary aim was to determine just exactly what goes wrong with the biological clock that dictates the division of human adult stem cells as we get older.

An associate professor at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, Victoria Lunyak, Ph.D., said that, in the present study, the researchers were able to demonstrate an actual reversal of “the process of aging for human adult stem cells by intervening with the activity of non-protein coding RNAs originated from genomic regions once dismissed as non-functional ‘genomic junk’.”

That is, they found a new use for what was previously thought of as useless genetic material.

Adult stem cells are important for a few reasons. They keep our tissues healthy and functioning by replacing old cells that have become damaged. They also can grow into a wide variety of different cells in our body and replace any cells that need replacing. In fact, they are “multipotent,” meaning they can replace the damaged sections of a variety of organs.

Unfortunately, these same cells can become damaged as we age, which makes them less able to replace other damaged tissues. This process leads to other diseases. If we could find a way to prevent aging in seem cells, then we could find a way to prevent other diseases, like cardiovascular disease, diabetes, osteoporosis and arthritis—really any degenerative disease could be prevented.

There is only one question left: do these regenerated stem cells that the researchers have discovered contain the ability to fix other tissues? Or, does the invasive process that the researchers used actually remove the stem cells’ ability to differentiate and repair other damaged tissue? These questions, among others, are what the research teams from the Buck Institute and the Georgia Institute will be focusing on future research projects.