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Scientists have turned back the aging clock on adult stem cells
Last reviewed: 30.06.2025
Scientists have conducted a study that has proven that the aging process of stem cells, which are responsible for the restoration of damaged tissues, can be reversed. Perhaps this discovery will give impetus to the development of new methods of treating diseases caused by natural human aging, such as myocardial restoration after a heart attack, arthritis and osteoporosis.
The current understanding of the role of stem cells in aging is that an organism is only as old as its tissue-specific adult stem cells. Therefore, discovering the molecules and understanding the processes that allow adult stem cells to initiate self-renewal—to multiply and then differentiate to rejuvenate worn-out tissue—may become the basis for regenerative medicine and the cure of many age-related diseases.
Scientists at the Buck Institute on Aging and the Georgia Institute of Technology have conducted a study that explains the mechanisms that prevent adult stem cells from dividing as they age—their biological clock. By interfering with the activity of non-protein-coding RNAs that come from regions of the genome previously thought to be inactive “genomic junk,” the scientists have shown that the aging process of human adult stem cells can be reversed.
Scientists have suggested that age-related DNA damage in the stem cell genome should differ from damage in the body's somatic cells. It is known that in normal cells, telomeres - the end sections of chromosomes - shorten during aging, unlike adult stem cells, whose telomere length does not change. Therefore, another mechanism underlies the aging of stem cells.
In the study, the scientists compared two samples of adult stem cells: young stem cells that are capable of self-renewal and cells that had undergone a long-term passaging procedure that depletes the cells' regenerative properties. As a result, the scientists found that most of the DNA damage in the stem cells was concentrated in a region of the genome known as "retrotransposons," which were previously thought to be nonfunctional and were referred to as "junk DNA."
Unlike young adult stem cells, which could suppress retrotransposon activity and repair DNA damage, old stem cells were unable to suppress this process, which triggered the process of cellular aging.
By suppressing the accumulated toxic transcripts of retrotransposons, scientists were able not only to reverse the aging process of adult human stem cells, but also, to the great surprise of the authors themselves, to return them to an earlier phase of development by activating the pluripotency of stem cells, which plays a very important role in the self-renewal of embryonic stem cells.
In the near future, scientists want to determine the suitability of rejuvenated stem cells for clinical tissue regeneration.
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