Dr. Sergiu Pașcă

On the other hand, what we're also seeing with some of the cell therapies that are just being developed now more broadly is that they don't have to be necessarily personalized.

So they don't have to be made from your own cells because, you know, you can use immunosuppression.

That's one way in which you can do it.

So you can transplant the cells from somebody else.

Of course, that poses more challenges if you think about the brain, replacing large parts of the brain, which certainly is like, you know, far into the future.

Yeah, certainly.

But in general, like, you know, you can see how in the future we may have like off-the-shelf

cells that have been made from a generic individual that you transplant with immunosuppression or cells that have been genetically modified so that they're not rejected by the immune system, so they're compatible with all of us.

It's much more likely

You know, think like for in vitro studies or for an additional study, when you immortalize something, it means that the cell is maintained forever.

But it generally involves using a cancer-like factor, giving them cancer properties.

I mean, the cells that are immortalized, if you think about it, are either the stem cells that we talked about or the cancer cells.

So we always have to be careful about like what it means to actually immortalize a cell.

Rejuvenate cells, that's kind of like an interesting concept.

Will we be able to actually rejuvenate our cells even if they're aged?

So a lot of discussions have been happening lately whether you can actually use the Yamanaka factors.

Not to the extent that you completely reprogram a cell, but that you just use them, you know, just a little bit so that you rejuvenate the cells, not fully.

But as you can imagine, those are complicated experiments, right?

They're going to have to be tuned.

You need to control very carefully the dial there.