http://circres.ahajournals.org/content/117/11/906.extract?etoc
+ Author Affiliations
- Correspondence to Yibin Wang, PhD, 650 Charles E. Young Dr, Room CHS 569, Los Angeles, CA 90095. E-mail yibinwang@mednet.ucla.edu
According to legend, soon after the
first Chinese Qin Emperor united China around 250 BC, he sent out a
troop of young men
and women to search for the elixir of life in
the eastern seas to extend his life forever. With great expectation and
fanfare,
the searching party departed but never returned.
However, our quests for the elusive life-renewing Philosopher’s Stone
have
never ceased either in Harry Potter’s wizard
world or in biomedical research, and a sighting of the magical
rejuvenating power
continues to generate excitement and
understandably high expectations.
Article, see p 926
In 2005, a landmark study by Conboy et al1
first demonstrated the rejuvenating power of the blood of young animals
using a heterochronic parabiosis approach where the
circulation of a young and an old mouse was
surgically joined together. This finding set off a race to find the
putative systemic
circulating factor(s) that can reverse aging.
Since 2013, in a series of reports, researchers, including Harvard
scientists
Amy Wagers and Richard Lee, have found that
blood from young mice could reverse aging-related pathological features
in muscle
and brain following a heterochronic parabiosis
procedure.2–4 In particular, circulating growth differentiation factor 11 (GDF11) was identified as the serum factor responsible for the
rejuvenating power in the young blood.2–4 These reports generated a wave of commentaries from leading scientific journals and sensational reports from mainstream news
outlets, relating these observations to the discovery of the mythic elixir of life given the …
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