Mr. Lu has made a groundbreaking contribution to rejuvenation science and eye research. While completing his PhD at Harvard Medical School in 2018, he used a cellular age-reversal technique known as reprogramming to repair damaged optic nerves in mice. After crushing the animals’ optic nerves to cause blindness, he delivered a gene therapy designed to restore the cells to a younger, more functional state. Within 16 days, the nerves began to regenerate, with newly formed axons appearing under a microscope as delicate, web-like orange filaments.
Amid the growing excitement surrounding age reversal, Lu is focused on developing what he calls “the next generation of rejuvenation therapies.”
David Sinclair, the lab’s director and a leading longevity researcher, still remembers when Lu sent him an image of the regenerated nerves. Follow-up experiments placed the mice in front of a rotating light rod to test their vision. The animals tracked the changing light, indicating that their eyesight had returned.
This year, a gene therapy closely based on Lu’s original mouse research entered human clinical trials. On June 9, Life Biosciences, a biotechnology company co-founded by Sinclair and partly backed by Lu, announced that it had administered the treatment to patients with glaucoma. The trial attracted widespread attention in the field of age-related vision loss and regenerative medicine, with some commentators describing the technology as a potential step toward a “fountain of youth.”
“It’s amazing that something he developed as a student is now being tested in humans,” Sinclair said of the treatment, now known as ER-100. “Not much has changed since he first developed it.”
Cellular reprogramming is based on a natural process that takes place during embryonic development. Although embryos begin as a single cell, their cells are reset to a youthful state before developing into specialized tissues. In 2006, Japanese researchers demonstrated that scientists could recreate part of this process in the laboratory by introducing four key genes, commonly known as OSKM. When added to cells from older adults, these genes can convert the cells into stem cell-like cells that behave similarly to those found in embryos.
Source: www.technologyreview.com