A new study conducted by Chinese scientists has shed more light on how people age, especially the immune system. What’s even more interesting is that they found a way to slow down the process.
Immune cells are an essential part of the body that maintains human health. But this also means that as cells get older, the body becomes weaker, and the aging process accelerates. Specifically, scientists note that aging of the immune system is what drives the aging of organisms.
But for a long time, measuring immunosenescence in humans or even identifying druggable targets for repair has been difficult due to the diversity of cell types and the complexity of the system as a whole. Traditional methods have relied on single biomarkers, which rarely paint an accurate picture of the immune system.
This is the difficult problem that Chinese scientists have just discovered, he says Study report Published in Immunity this week.
Chinese scientists develop a watch that tracks immune aging
Scientists have been able to create a so-called Human Immune Senescence Clock (HIAC) that can accurately map immune aging.
HIAC was generated from a single-cell multiomics dataset of approximately 1.2 million human peripheral blood mononuclear cells collected from 230 individuals, aged ≥60 years.
The study also led to the important discovery that immune cells reach an inflection point around age 40, where they rapidly begin to remodel and age. It also identified T-cell transcriptomes as key indicators of immunosenescence. As the immune system ages, the proportion of naïve T cells also tends to decrease.
The scientist found that people with slowed immune aging had higher percentages of T cells and appeared more youthful.
RUNX1 has been discovered as a factor that can slow down immune aging
The study identifies RUNX1 as a central regulator, which is key to slowing immune aging in humans. RUNX1 is one of the specific transcription factors that keeps T cells young. However, its expression in T cells has been found to decrease with age.
Scientists discovered that when RUNX1 was removed from young T cells, they began to show signs of aging. However, it was restored in aged T cells, and those marks were attenuated, enabling the cells to maintain their youth. Animal studies have already proven its success.
“Our study provides a quantitative tool to evaluate immune senescence and nominates RUNX1 as a target for immune regeneration in elderly people,” the scientists wrote in the report.
The interesting summary of the study will be that by restoring RUNX1, old T cells will function like younger ones. This, in turn, will help slow down immune aging and perhaps the body’s aging process in general.
This study represents another advance in longevity research. Earlier this month, Cryptopolitan You mentioned another big eventwhere scientists at Life Biosciences plan to begin the first partial reprogramming trial in humans. The trial begins later this year, treating up to 12 people with glaucoma, with a treatment based on three Yamanaka agents, excluding c-Myc.
The treatment has already worked in animal studies, with scientists successfully restoring eye cells in mice to a younger state.
