The Elusive Philosopher’s Stone in Young Blood

How young of blood do you need to get the the rejuvenating power in the young blood? Our doctors should be extremely interested in this to actually help us recover.
http://circres.ahajournals.org/content/117/11/906.extract?etoc

1. Haipeng Sun,
2. Yibin Wang

+ Author Affiliations

1. From the Key Laboratory of Cell Differentiation and Apoptosis of Ministry of Education, Department of Pathophysiology, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, Shanghai, China; and Division of Molecular Medicine, Departments of Anesthesiology, Medicine and Physiology, David Geffen School of Medicine, University of California at Los Angeles, Los Angeles.

1. Correspondence to Yibin Wang, PhD, 650 Charles E. Young Dr, Room CHS 569, Los Angeles, CA 90095. E-mail yibinwang@mednet.ucla.edu

Key Words:

• Editorials
• aging
• Gdf11 protein, mouse
• hypertrophy
• rejuvenation

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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