It’s not the fountain of youth, but when it comes to anti-aging serums, Pitt researchers might… It’s not the fountain of youth, but when it comes to anti-aging serums, Pitt researchers might have made a breakthrough.

Two Pitt researchers have launched a collaborative effort between their stem cell research center and aging lab to discover the impact that stem cells could have on aging mice. The research resulted in mice living two to three times longer than they otherwise would have, and researchers said that in some time, the results might be applied to slowing human aging.

Johnny Huard, senior researcher and director of Pitt’s stem cell research center, and Laura Niedernhofer, senior researcher and associate professor for the department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics at Pitt’s Cancer Institute, began their four-year experiment to study the effects of muscle-derived stem/progenitor cells (MDSPCs) on the health and life spans of mice. The researchers infected mice with progeria — a rare genetic disease that causes accelerated aging — in order to parallel the animals’ aging process to that of humans.

Neidernhofer said the mice with progeria age similarly to adult humans.

“They start to tremble. They get a hunched back because they have osteoporosis, and they don’t move as quickly,” she said, adding that the injected mice found significant relief from many of the symptoms associated with aging.

Mice affected by progeria live an average life of 28 days, Neidernhofer said, as opposed to normal mice that typically live between one-and-a-half to two years. She and Huard were surprised to see that the mice were living longer after being injected with the stem cells.

“At one point, I looked at the animals, and they were at 45 days post-implementation. I thought it was a mistake,” Huard said. “It seemed too good to be true, but it wasn’t a fluke. That’s what was happening.”

Huard said the mice that received stem cells lived approximately two to three times as long as they should, between 45 to 60 days.

The researchers are optimistic that the results will have similar benefits and slow down the aging process in humans.

“A lot of science needs to be done, but maybe in the next 10, 15, 20 years we harvest your stem cells, we freeze them down, and when you turn 45 or 50, instead of doing all this cosmetic surgery, you re-infuse yourself with your own stem cells to rejuvenate yourself,” Huard said.

Still, their research is far from a personal time machine.

“We are not going to take someone who is 50 and make them look 25 again, but it’s possible to take someone who is 45, inject them with stem cells from when they were 20 and try to delay the aging process,” Huard said.

The experiment operated under several controls. The researchers separated the mice into two groups: those affected by progeria and those who were healthy. Each group had between four and nine mice. Those with progeria were then divided into two groups: one that was simply injected with a saline solution and the other that was given the MDSPCs injection into each mouse’s abdominal cavities.

Huard likened his research discoveries to learning to play an instrument. “It’s like learning to play the guitar. You learn your first few notes and think, ‘Man, I’m so good,’ but then you quickly realize how little you know,” Huard said.

The next phase of his research involved harvesting stem cells and progeric cells and cultivating them together to determine if a growth factor was secreted that “rescued” the aging cells, allowing them to spread and differentiate.

“If we can identify and purify that factor, then we may have found an anti-aging protein or an anti-aging factor that we can use in the drug store without having stem cell consultation,” Huard said.

Huard also noted that the stem cells caused the aging mice to develop blood vessels in the brain and muscles post-injection, which led his team to believe the number of blood vessels is related to the beneficial effects and production of stem cells.

Huard hopes to further pursue research about the potential beneficial effects of stem cells. He and Niedernhofer are currently in the application process for more research grants.

The National Institute of Health, the Ellison Medical Foundation, the Henry J. Mankin endowed chair at Pitt and the Jean W. Donaldson endowed chair at the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh funded the project.

“I would like to project myself 50 years from now reading a science paper coming out and see what those cells are secreting because we are going to know, maybe in my lifetime. The young generation is going to say, ‘Oh my, those were the factors,’” Huard said.