20 ms·
Anti-aging breakthrough: Stem cells reverse signs of aging in monkeys
Archive link: https://archive.md/uwR3d https://archive.md/uwR3d, Research Paper: https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(25)00571-9 https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(25)00571-9
- temporallobe 1y agoGreat now I can’t retire early.
- choeger 1y agoSo a question to the experts here: What's the catch?
- piker 1y agogotta be cancer
- tomhowsalterego 1y agoPersonally I’m holding out for something a bit more interesting like some even more macabre Picture of Dorian Gray type thing.
- PUSH_AX 1y agoWhen you extend human lifespan long enough, cancer becomes close to inevitable anyway.
- inglor_cz 1y agoOr maybe not. Some species are very resistant to cancer. For example, bats basically never get it, even though they live up to 40 years. Would they get cancer if they lived for 400 years? Maybe not either. Their immune systems are very good, better than ours. (We humans don't really want to acknowledge that some other animals may have better immune systems, or any other systems, at their disposal.) On the other end of the scale, mice die of cancer while not even three years old, because their immune systems are really bad at fighting cancer cells. Cancer in mammals seems to be a function of failing immune systems rather than raw age in numbers. In some species, including us humans, weakening of the immune system goes hand in hand with aging. But in others it does not.
- echelon 1y agoThe correct way to phrase this is that humans have a level of cancer that does not greatly impede the fitness of the species in having offspring. We didn't hill climb into other evolutionary protective mechanisms because they either were not discovered or did not convey appropriate fitness benefits. Our evolutionary biology doesn't "care" if we get cancer. Just that we have healthy children and can rear them for one or two generations. That was a (locally) optimal algorithm. We have plenty of in-built checks and protections in our molecular biology, and they are sufficient to expand the species.
- modius2025 1y ago[flagged]
- slater 1y agothanks for the a.i. slop?
- andrewl 1y agoSee Peto's Paradox for discussion of different cancer rates among species: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peto's_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peto's_paradox
- ACCount37 1y agoPeto's paradox - and the existence of whales in particular. If cancer really is an inevitability, then whales, who have both livespan limits longer than that of humans, and enormous bodies with a staggering amount of living cells, would be full of cancer. They aren't. Clearly, humans must have better innate cancer suppression than mice, and whales must have better innate cancer suppression than humans. There are some hints that this may come down to programmed cell death and DNA repair mechanisms (i.e. the p53 pathway) more than the immune system tweaks - with immune response being the "last resort" of cancer suppression. But we also don't know enough about the immune system to be able to examine it the same detail we can examine the DNA repair pathways.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> gotta be cancer "Notably, none of the cell transplant recipients developed tumors (n = 16)." https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(25)00571-9?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0092867425005719%3Fshowall%3Dtrue https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(25)00571-9?_re...
- mullingitover 1y agoIf a subset of the population stops dying, and that group grows, you've just invented cancer again on a different scale.
- fragmede 1y agoOkay Agent Smith.
- bitwize 1y agoSo the best way to get induced pluripotent stem cells is through the Yamanaka factors, which are proteins coded for by genes which are not expressed in mature cells. Using all four Yamanaka factors is a one-way ticket to tumor town. But, as it turns out, using three of the four still gets you IPSCs without the elevated cancer risk.
- paulpauper 1y agoMonkeys are not humans, anti-aging is imprecise and does not necessarily translate into longer life expectancies for people, and promises of extending life have always fallen short of hype, and odds are this will too.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> Monkeys are not humans The implanted stem cells, however, were human. (The fact that that the treatments did not cause "fever or substantial changes in immune cell levels (lymphocytes, neutrophils, and monocytes), which are commonly monitored for xenograft-related immune responses," is itself surprising.) > promises of extending life have always fallen short of hype, and odds are this will too Correct, though I'd say because this is early-stage medical research. Not because it's targeting longevity. I'd be similarly sceptical of an N = 16 early-stage drug trial for the flu.
- SubiculumCode 1y ago16 primates is not small when it comes to primate studies. In any case, knowing how expensive and rare primate research is to conduct, I doubt this is the first animal model used on this approach. In terms of replicatability, it is also not always the sample size, it is the effect size. Small samples do affect ability to generalize, but the point is that sample size isn't everything.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> its the effect size Which effect size do you find lacking?
- SubiculumCode 1y agoI was responding to the idea that listing a small sample size automatically means its shit science.
- 1y ago
- SubiculumCode 1y agoExamine your assumptions. There is no inherent reason that there has to be a catch. We are all from a long line of cellular reproduction that has lasted billions of years. There is no inherent reasons why cellular mechanisms can't keep maintaining/replacing a collection of those cell lineages...our relatively short lifespans are probably the products of evolutionary fitness functions acting on more fruitful strategies for reproductive success than staying off aging.
- lukan 1y agoMy assumption is, there are lots of rich people who want to live forever and lots of people who want their wealth and breakthroughs with anti ageing were quite rare or rather non existent as far as I know.
- SubiculumCode 1y agoMy assumption is that I'd feel more certain if this science had been conducted in the U.S. or Europe, but your assumptions is a little too conspiratorial for me.
- lukan 1y agoHow many breakthroughs have there been so far in anti-aging research that turned out to be real?
- jl6 1y agoWhen the upside is extraordinary, it’s very reasonable to expect some downside, just based on experience of, like, everything ever. As well as the undeniable benefit to individuals, a cure for aging would unleash a whole new bunch of problems that have been kept in check through the mechanism of people dying off regularly. A society of immortals could be quite alien to us.
- somesortofthing 1y agoBiology is one of very few areas of science where you do just find free lunches sometimes. Human bodies are adapted to environments with harsh constraints about injuries, pathogens, temperature, energy usage, etc. The only catch to counteracting those adaptations is that it makes you worse at being a hunter-gatherer.
- onionisafruit 1y agoIt delays that sweet eternal rest
- SirFatty 1y agoIt's really adrenochrome.
- chrisco255 1y agoThe title is overblown. This just improves certain biomarkers that are associated with aging. This might improve healthspan but there is no indication that these monkeys will live any longer than the natural range.
- nikkwong 1y agoThat might not be true, if you look at the paper: "The super stem cells prevent age-related bone loss while rejuvenating over 50% of the 61 tissues analyzed." (including the brain). What do people die of when they die of 'old age'? There's the 3 pillars: cancer, cardiovascular, neurodegenerative. These are often (but not always) metabolic diseases; i.e. cardiovascular death often arises from kidney insufficiency. If you can regenerate the liver, kidney, etc. indefinitely, a large vector of metabolic disease is probably diminished or disappears. In the paper, monkeys restored brain volume. They reduced the levels of senescent cells to youthful levels. They increased bone mass. This reduces or eliminates many of the threats that inflict casualties among the centenarian population. Sure, something else could come up that the monkeys start dying from instead. But, given the way humans and monkeys die of old age—by reducing or eliminating all known threats—it's hard to see how this wouldn't extend lifespan.
- chrisco255 1y agoThis paper doesn't prove that it extends lifespan. So to speculate on that extraordinary claim without extraordinary evidence to back it up is useless. It would be far easier to prove this out on a species with a much smaller lifespan like mice, not to mention cheaper, but so far we're unable to make a mouse live longer than 5 years.
- nikkwong 1y agoYes, I'm certainly speculating. It certainly seems that this could be a path to extending lifespan. I think the claim is less than "extraordinary" though. Many teams are working to figure out how to extend lifespan in many species—it seems likely that there will be meaningful progress in the coming years or decades.
- ikrenji 1y agoI skimmed the article looking for a lifespan plot. Didn't see one. Instead it is replaced by a "proprietary multidimensional primate aging clock measurement". Take it as you will...
- disambiguation 1y agoAging is related to shortening of telomeres - the speculated evolutionary advantage is that it's a mechanism to protect against cancer. Unclear from the study what the stem cells are doing to address either problem.
- pas 1y agothat's one small part of aging
- gennarro 1y agoLink doesn’t work?
- cheema33 1y agoAt the time of this writing, the link does not work. 504 Gateway Time-out nginx/1.18.0 (Ubuntu)
- btbuildem 1y agoThis is one of these scientific endeavours I cannot get behind. Sure, in theory, it would be amazing to live a thousand years -- but it reeks so strongly of the genie's bottle, I don't think we should pursue it. It would likely only be the uber-wealthy and powerful who would have access to this technology. Picture a world where a slew of today's despots (including the current American president) get to live for two, or three human lifespans. If that doesn't cool your jets, let's say the treatment is so cheap it can be widely available to everyone. Now you have prisoners, slaves, exploited labourers who live for centuries. It's madness. I don't think we've evolved enough, ethically speaking, as a species to wrestle with such long lifespans.
- vinni2 1y agoAnti aging is not just about living long. Having a good quality of life as long as you live is essential. The world population is ageing and costs of caring for them will be huge cost for humanity.
- henriquenunez 1y agoThat's why they analyze factors such as memory improvements and bone density.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> would likely only be the uber-wealthy and powerful who would have access to this technology If by uber-wealthy you mean most people in rich countries, sure. Otherwise, I don't see why this would progress in a way all other medicine has not.
- nonethewiser 1y agoWhere are the stem cells coming from?
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> Where are the stem cells coming from? This study appears to have used "human embryonic stem cells (hESCs)" [1]. We haven't tested this with iPSCs [2]. Even if it only works with hESCs, if the part of the population that thinks blastocysts are people wants to live a third or a quarter as long as the part that doesn't, I don't see a problem with that. We're basically going in that direction with vaccination anyway. [1] https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(25)00571-9?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0092867425005719%3Fshowall%3Dtrue https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(25)00571-9?_re... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_pluripotent_stem_cell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_pluripotent_stem_cell
- mkbelieve 1y ago[flagged]
- BoredPositron 1y agoWhy not experimental drugs for lunatics sounds exactly right for the timeline.
- jijijijij 1y agoWho needs permafrost, when you can have perma-musk?
- JumpCrisscross 1y agoHugged to death. But I think it refers to this study: https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(25)00571-9?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0092867425005719%3Fshowall%3Dtrue https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(25)00571-9?_re...
- SubiculumCode 1y agoand a write-up: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1088662 https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1088662
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- PUSH_AX 1y agoMaybe after this we can figure out how to reverse entropy. Edit: The Last Question reference seems to have not hit. My bad.
- tantalor 1y agoWe already figured that out a while ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_and_life#Negative_entropy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_and_life#Negative_entr...
- codesnik 1y agoI'd love the current generation of POSs in power to die off naturally before those advancements will be applied, thank you.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> love the current generation of POSs in power to die off naturally before those advancements will be applied These treatments aren't panaceas. The benefit would almost certainly accrue inversely with age.
- mupuff1234 1y agoTo make room for a new generation of POSs?
- carabiner 1y agoIn 200 years, we're going to look at our lack of checks and balances against gerontocracy as naive as trusting monarchy in the middle ages.
- luxuryballs 1y agowe may alternatively end up with even older elders because of general lifespan increases, it just so happens people with more experience are older, if you think older people being in charge is bad just wait until you see how the younger ones do
- computerphage 1y ago[flagged]
- SirFatty 1y ago[flagged]
- muhammedbash 1y agoToo late... Putin is already all over this. No need for organ transplants :) 150 is the new 70
- 1970-01-01 1y agoWake me when you have J. Fred Muggs[11] riding a horse on TV and asking his doctor if stem cell injections are right for him. Until then, I'll remain skeptical, thanks. [11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Fred_Muggs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Fred_Muggs
- ourmandave 1y agoThe break even point on this is when it costs less than just replacing one of the infinite monkeys working on the Shakespeare project. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem
- dwa3592 1y agoSo the only way to get rid of humans will be to kill them?
- optimalsolver 1y agoYou'll slip in the shower sooner or later.
- asdfman123 1y agoNo more new generations, no more change. Just immensely powerful old people who look young grabbing ever more tightly onto power. Right now generational wealth fizzles out due to idiot heirs eventually appearing. Imagine if someone could ride a thousand years of exponential gains.
- optimalsolver 1y agoI'm annoyed to have been born early enough for biological life extension to not be available, but late enough to actually consider it a possibility.
- deepsun 1y agoEternal life would be disastrous for humanity. Imagine all the elderly autocrats got to rule forever, utterly bored, with no hope in sight.
- Barrin92 1y ago>Imagine all the elderly autocrats got to rule forever since the end of monarchies autocracy has been impersonal and institutionalized. You can think of the Pope or Dalai Lama as software, the latter literally being rebooted when the last one kicks the bucket, the substrate doesn't matter much. In the words of Jung: people don't have ideas, ideas have people. Big Brother is a program, not a person and so physical death doesn't help you much in that regard.
- alexey-salmin 1y agoIt's quite the opposite. Since the end of monarchies we actually don't observe stable autocracies anymore. They used to last for millennia, now they don't even get to a century. An autocracy is an idea but an autocrat is a human who cares about himself. Anyone capable of carrying the torch is seen as threat and gets exiled, imprisoned or killed. In the end it's scorched earth within the current elites so instead of succession you get revolution with say 40-50% chance. You may get the succession to work once, maybe two-three times if you're lucky, but that's it. Now contrast it with a world where an autocrat doesn't actually need a successor and can run the country indefinitely.
- 1718627440 1y agoMonarchies are autocratic, but I don't think it's fair to throw them in the same bucket as modern autocracies. They came in many flavours and shapes. Often they had some checks and balances and due to the ruler not fearing for loss of power, they often had the intention to actually invest in their country and make their peoples live better. A modern autocracy has the incentive to keep the population dumb to stay existing. Old monarchies have the incentive to make their population more intelligent, so it has more power than the neighbor.
- Jenny858 1y ago[dead]
- raffraffraff 1y agoIf you had asked me how I reckoned they reversed aging in Monkeys, I honestly would have said "stem cells". But then again, my answer to a lot of questions these days is "stem cells".
- giarc 1y agoIt the same with CRISPR. If you see a headline about "curing" this or that, good chance you'll see the word CRISPR in the article.
- scoopdewoop 1y agoIf Larry Ellison outlives me so help me god
- maxk42 1y agoDid nobody notice that this is a spam blog designed to sell NAD+ supplements?
- pedalpete 1y agoI noticed the domain and assumed it was another of Dr David Sinclair's scams https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/resveratrol-research-scandal-oh-joy https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/resveratrol-resear...
- emeril 1y agomaybe but the article is on cell?
- mike_apostol 1y agoThe referenced journal article is published in Cell: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867425005719?via%3Dihub#abs0020 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009286742...
- henriquenunez 1y agoI don't thing they did a bad job in scicomm even though it's a commercial blog
- Tade0 1y agoInteresting. Appears that we'll sooner solve ageing than ageing of societies. If this ever goes mainstream, I'll head off to live on Mars - provided that is solved beforehand.
- RivieraKid 1y agoWe're nowhere close to solving aging. We don't even understand aging and understanding the problem should be much easier than solving it.
- fivestones 1y agoA lot of things in science/technology have been invented essentially by accident though, with little to no understanding of why it worked. Who’s to say aging can’t be similar.
- overfeed 1y agoI hope you're ready to worship or be of direct service to the capricious god-emporor of Mars, in exchange for your daily 500l oxygen supply, and 2000 calories.
- billfor 1y agoI'm not clear why they didn't continue the treatment to see if it prevented the monkeys from dying at all?
- fivestones 1y agoMaybe they did but when they realized it was working decided not to publish /joking
- blobbers 1y agoIt's a real research paper, but a bit of a hokey one. The spam blog is just promoting it. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40516525/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40516525/
- chris_va 1y agoMaybe someone with more of a bio background can comment on the actual paper. When I look through the figures, I don't see a strong an evidence as they are claiming in the text. E.g. figure 1G... naive image analysis (to me) does not match the claimed statistics. And the statistics are all on n<10, which also adds a lot of uncertainty.
- eweise 1y agoDarn why couldn't I be a monkey?
- ascendantlogic 1y agoNo thanks, I've seen enough already. I'm ready to go.
- esseph 1y agoI read this and feel very sad, though I understand the sentiment.
- ascendantlogic 1y agoThe world I knew in the 90's and 2000's is long gone and people are celebrating cruelty now. I want out.
- mediaman 1y agoConsider looking at social media less and reading more history. The idea that people are recently celebrating cruelty, but did not earlier, is charmingly nostalgic but not exactly historical.
- sleight42 1y agoThe scale of it, in the US, is new. Social media has enabled this scale. Before that, we had... mailing lists? Web forums? Before that? BBSs and in-person meetings. Cheap and easy world-scale communication has fucked us at the same time it has helped us.
- ascendantlogic 1y agoI'm talking about in my lifetime. Your nihilism may comfort you but it doesn't comfort me.
- v3ss0n 1y agoWhat about people celebrating burning women alive back In medieval times?
- 1y ago
- zeroday28 1y agoNot every problem must be solved. Death is essential.
- pokstad 1y agoImagine a future world where the richest people never die and rule over the poor mortals.
- WorkerBee28474 1y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Time
- djtriptych 1y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elysium_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elysium_(film)
- nicce 1y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altered_Carbon_(TV_series) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altered_Carbon_(TV_series)
- henriquenunez 1y agothere's also that love death robots episode about not allowing people to have kids
- m3kw9 1y agoThey should call it anti aging finding
- anigbrowl 1y agoOutstanding visualization work in this paper. I didn't go through them all individually because I'm not competent enough in biology to evaluate the claims, but this is one of the most data-rich papers I've seen in a while. If the results hold and the process is as straightforward as it sounds, this could be a big step forward.
- modeless 1y agoNever thought I'd see so many people rooting for death here on HN. What a dour, pessimistic place this has become.
- drooby 1y agoThere is plenty of reason to welcome death. And be optimistic about its presence. As Max Planck observed: "Science progresses one funeral at a time". And really, the same can be said for political beliefs. Humans are stubborn creatures that stratify power. Death has always been the great equalizer. But perhaps soon, no longer.
- ants_everywhere 1y agoScience progresses because it makes a disciplined study of the world with numerical predictions that are checked for accuracy. Politics is treated by most people as essentially a religion. And religion does not progress with death. It just cycles through periods of greater fundamentalism and less fundamentalism. There aren't enough people studying political science and studying it rigorously enough for the Planck observation to apply.
- scoopdewoop 1y agoThat is a really naive epistemology. Science as an objective methodology that churns out truth doesn't exist. Its a human endeavor full of interests. Religion is also a human endeavor full of interests, and can also ascertain certain truths. Often people who subscribe to scientism gloat that even in the farthest reaches of space, other aliens will arrive at the same equations. Similarly, I think at the farthest reaches of space aliens will have to reckon with wickedness, duty, hospitality, forgiveness, etc. It can even make numerical predictions like "there will always be the poor". So far so true.
- ants_everywhere 1y agoThis is just a bunch of cold-war style anti-science critique stuff. It's frankly not worth responding to. There are reasonable things to say about science, but the anti-objectivity bit was an attempt to undermine science and reduce opposition to political rule by fiat. The rise in authoritarian rhetoric and beliefs is why we're seeing the anti-science and anti-expert ideas become fashionable again. Notice that the anti-expert/anti-intellectual/anti-science people always have something else they're selling you that conflicts with the experts/intellectuals/science. Anyway, good luck.
- gaoshan 1y agoThe site that is linked here is a site dedicated to the sale of the drug NAD so it is not objective on the topic of aging. Not trying to debunk anything but let's put on our skeptic hats here and be extra vigilant, given the source. Regarding NAD, not the article but it pertains to the subject, I actually think it has promise and as an older person take NMN to very (like... WOW, very) positive result (an NAD precursor that is arguably better as it is used by the body to create NAD whereas the consumption of NAD itself via the digestive system is in need of study as the suspicion is that it doesn't make the journey very successfully).
- groby_b 1y agoWait, aren't stem cells supposed to reverse aging since at least the 2000s? (https://www.nature.com/articles/nature09603 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature09603)
- joshdavham 1y agoThe archive link isn't loading and I'm not educated enough to understand the paper. Can you someone provide a summary of this breakthrough?
- galangalalgol 1y agoChina isn't as interested in immortality as they are in their aging workforce being fully productive right up until they die. So even if that is by turning into a giant ball of cancer, it still does what they need. What most all of the world needs actually.
- tom_alexander 1y ago> aging workforce being fully productive right up until they die China has one of the lowest retirement ages in the world for men[0] and they have the lowest retirement age in the world for women[1] [0] https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/retirement-age-men [1] https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/retirement-age-women
- thatgerhard 1y agowe're never going to get rid of the boomers are we?
- UltraSane 1y agoI wonder how humanity will react when the richest can live much longer than everyone else. Knowing that the current group of billionaires might still be alive hundreds of years from now is very depressing.
- prinzmaus 1y agoI want back the decades of stem cell research opportunities wasted by hand-wringing conservatives who placed the potential for life above the actuality of life. https://healthland.time.com/2012/08/21/legitimate-rape-todd-akin-and-other-politicians-who-confuse-science/slide/bush-bans-stem-cell-research/ https://healthland.time.com/2012/08/21/legitimate-rape-todd-...