Harvard scientists achieve a feat: reverse aging with a simple injection

Scientists

 in the United States have reached a key milestone in learning to reverse aging after a series of experiments with mice.

It is that with an injection they have managed to double the life that some very old mice had left, after a work that took 13 years of development and that was published this week in the

The study, led by researchers from the start-up

, which emerged from Harvard's Wyss Institute, injected three of the four Yamanaka factors – OCT4, SOX2 and KLF4 – into mice aged 124 weeks, about 77 human years.

In the study they used old mice of 124 weeks of life, the equivalent of 77 years in a human being.

Australian genetics professor

and his team realize that they can not only manipulate old age in rodents in an accelerated period of time, but also reverse the effects of such a process and

of youth in animals.

While it's often assumed that aging is the result of genetic mutations that cause our bodies to deteriorate and die,

The study

that degradation in the way DNA is organized and regulated, known as epigenetics, can cause aging in an organism, independent of changes in the genetic code itself.

Dr. Sinclair had been arguing for years that aging is the result of the loss of critical instructions that cells need to continue functioning: he defined it as the

The result of the study showed that aged and blind mice managed to recover their sight and developed younger and more intelligent brains in a short time.

To test their hypothesis

, they mimicked the effects of aging on the epigenome by injecting breaks into the DNA of young mice.

Once 'aged' in this way, within weeks the animals were observed to begin to show

: gray fur, lower body weight despite an unaltered diet, reduced activity and increased frailty.

The researchers then gave the mice a gene therapy that reversed the epigenetic changes caused by the DNA breaks.

As a result,

and developed younger, more intelligent brains.

Sinclair summed it up like this: "It

that doesn't work correctly."

The specialist said that his work supports the hypothesis that

maintain a kind of backup copy of epigenetic 'software' that, when accessed, can allow an aged and epigenetically scrambled cell

​Professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, collector of awards for his scientific advances and one of

Time magazine 's

in 2020, David Sinclair has developed his career in pursuit of the same goal reach the secret of eternal youth, or at least the formula to delay aging as much as possible.