Anti-ageing technique makes skin

Researchers have developed a method that can turn back the biological clock on skin cells by 30 years, creating stem cells from mature ones, which could be used to treat skin conditions in the future.

In 2007, Shinya Yamanaka at Kyoto University in Japan developed a technique that could transform adult skins cells into stem cells by inserting four specialist molecules, dubbed “Yamanaka factors”, that reverse cell development. It takes around 50 days of exposure to these molecules for normal cells to be reprogrammed into what are known as induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs).

“When you turn to a cell into an iPSC, you lose the original cell type and its functionality,” says Diljeet Gill at the Babraham Institute in Cambridge, UK. Gill and his colleagues have now devised a technique that uses Yamanaka factors to rejuvenate skin cells without losing their previous functionality.

The researchers collected skin cell samples from three human donors that had an average age of around 50, then exposed these to the Yamanaka factors for just 13 days to partially anti-age the cells. They then removed the Yamanaka factors and left the cells to grow.