…
“There is something in the old blood”, said Professor Irina Conboy.
Conboy is a bioengineer and researcher at Cal. Along with her husband Michael Conboy, they are exploring how aging is simply not a progressions of time. They found it could go back and it can go forward experimentally.
They believe the answer is not mixing young plasma into the veins of older individuals, but to recalibrate the older blood of the older individuals.
“We know that there is bad stuff that accumulates in blood, in the blood of old people. So we’d like to identify those, pick out the most essential ones. and remove them.” explained Professor Michael Conboy
The Conboys explained how various proteins, peptides, and other molecules accumulate in our blood over time and as we age. The higher the levels of certain deleterious proteins, the more likely a big problem. It’s kind of like adding salt to a favorite dish. Add too much, and it makes the dish inedible. Too high a level of certain bad stuff in the blood, and our stem cells – which repairs our tissues – go to sleep and no longer work to repair parts of our body.
They propose filtering out levels of the protein in the blood to more youthful levels, and replenishing some of the beneficial proteins that decline in old age. That appears to wake up stem cells in animal studies, and the animal returns to a more youthful state: the heart, liver, lungs, skin, bones all become more youthful.
“You can have the person’s own blood being purified and rejuvenated and returned very safely to the same person in the state when the person was 20 years old.” declared Professor Irina Conboy.