Dr. Tony Wyss-Coray

Because for the first time, we could take an old brain and we could give factors from a young organism and ask, is that going to change the age of the brain?

And that's indeed what it did.

So we saw that there are stem cells in the brain of these mice that they got reactivated and

There was less inflammation, more activity that we can measure in the brain with electrical activity of neurons.

And then most importantly, we actually saw that their memory function improved.

And so to your question, is that relevant for humans?

We actually try to translate that and we can talk more about this, where the stage of that field is right now to see whether it can be translated.

Yeah.

I think that's really the fascinating aspect of this work that over the past few years people started to look at, that many of these proteins and probably other molecules in the blood, they're not just reflecting the status of the body, if you will, but they're actively influencing how it works.

And

the composition changes dramatically from young to old.

We have this picture that I always like to show when I give a talk about our work, where we have several thousand individuals and we measure 3,000 proteins in them.

And then we use collars to show low levels or high levels of proteins.

And you see this dramatic change from young people to old people in a way that you can pick one sample and you can say, this person must be about that old.

And we can talk more about what people call clogs.

But to your question, yes, there are factors in the blood that clearly can change the function of cells and organs.

And what the field is trying to figure out is what are the key ones, which ones could we use to slow down aging or to keep the body healthy as long as you live?

To try to translate that, we started a company, Alkahest, to see whether factors from the blood of individuals could influence, first of all, aging of a mouse brain.

So we took blood from young people or old people and injected it into mouse brains so that we could show that

could in fact mimic the effects of young mouse blood.