Many societies have added more than 30 years to average life expectancy in the past century. However, these longer lives have not necessarily meant healthier and more vital lives.

Therefore, a top priority for researchers is to determine how to create health and well-being across the full length of those lives. This will require research into the mechanisms of normal aging with the objective of achieving healthy longevity for all.

In pursuit of that objective, researchers have found that young blood has a rejuvenating effect when infused into older bodies, according to recent research.

Aging hearts beat stronger, muscles become stronger, and thinking becomes sharper. And many scientists are looking for the elements of young blood that can be captured or replicated and put into a pill.

According to new research just published in Nature Cell Biology, researchers at Columbia University have discovered that the best way to get the benefits of young blood may be rejuvenating the system that makes the blood.

An aged blood system, because it’s a vector for a lot of proteins, cytokines, and cells, has a lot of bad consequences for the organism. A 70-year-old with a 40-year-old blood system could have a longer health-span, and potentially a longer lifespan. 

An anti-inflammatory drug, already approved for use in rheumatoid arthritis, has been shown to turn back time in mice and to reverse some of the effects of age on the hematopoietic system. The researchers only identified the drug after a comprehensive investigation of the stem cells that create all blood cells and the niches where they reside in the center of the bones.

All blood cells in the body are created by a small number of stem cells that reside in bone marrow. Over time, these hematopoietic stem cells start to change.

They produce fewer red blood cells (leading to anemia). They produce fewer immune cells (which raises the risk of infection and impedes vaccination efforts). And they have trouble maintaining the integrity of their genomes (which can lead to blood cancers).

Blood stem cells live in a niche; what happens in this specialized local environment could be a big part of the problem. The researchers found that the aging niche is deteriorating and overwhelmed with inflammation, leading to dysfunction in the blood stem cells.

Specifically, they found that one inflammatory signal released from the damaged bone marrow niche, called IL-1B, was critical in driving these aging features. Blocking IL-1B with a drug, called Anakinra, remarkably returned the blood stem cells to a younger, healthier state.

Even more youthful effects on both the niche and the blood system occurred when IL-1B was prevented from exerting its inflammatory effects throughout the animal’s life.

The researchers are now trying to determine whether the same processes are active in humans. If so, treating elderly patients with anti-inflammatory drugs would block IL-1B function, helping them to maintain healthier blood production. Beyond that, rejuvenating the blood stem cell niche in middle age, could prove to be an even more effective strategy.

If all goes well, these findings will lead to clinical trials and eventual commercialization.

- NATURE CELL BIOLOGY, January 17, 2023, “Stromal Niche Inflammation Mediated by IL-1 Signalling Is A Targetable Driver of Haematopoietic Ageing,” by Carl A. Mitchell, et al. © 2023 Springer Nature Limited. All rights reserved.