Eternal youth – yours for a fee?

By Michael Hanlon

A future where the human race divides into two species – genetic haves and have-nots – has been a trope of science fiction ever since HG Wells populated the distant future with the childlike Eloi and the cannibalistic, troglodyte Morlocks. 

More recently, the American biologist Lee Silver predicted, in his book Remaking Eden, that future advances in genetics and cloning would allow the rich of the 22nd century and beyond to produce “boutique babies” – disease-resistant, genetically enhanced for strength, attractiveness and IQ, and perhaps even unable to mate with the un-enhanced Untermensch majority. 

Speculation and sci-fi aside, the fact is that health and wealth have been positively correlated for a long time. We in the rich world live longer, healthier lives than those in poor countries thanks to our better diets, medicines and sanitation. 

But in the past decade or so, scientific advances in genomics and stem-cell therapies have promised – or threatened – a future much like that predicted by Prof Silver and others, where the hyper-rich can buy their way out of senescence (biological ageing) and live, if not forever, then into a hale and healthy old age. 

Yesterday, it was announced that a French genomic technology company called Cellectis is to launch a service in Britain whereby a sample of cells will be taken from your skin, turned into a special tissue called Induced Pluripotent Stem (IPS) cells, with almost magical properties of regeneration, and frozen. In the future, doctors will be able to take some of these cells and use them to culture replacements, to exchange with those damaged by the ravages of time. 

Because of its hefty price tag – the procedure costs £38,400 – the company anticipates that only the rich will avail themselves of this service, raising the prospect of a future world dominated by healthy-but-ancient rock stars, hedge-funders and oligarchs. 

The basic science is sound. Stem cells can develop into any kind of tissue, meaning that a patient suffering the early signs of Alzheimer’s could be treated by an injection of their own healthy tissue to replace the damaged, senile brain cells. It may even be possible to grow whole organs – hearts and kidneys, say – derived from frozen IPS cells. 

So how solid is the science behind this? Or is it just another version of cryonics, the process whereby American companies take huge sums of money to freeze people’s bodies (or, for a lower price, just their heads) in the hope that unspecified “medical advances” will be able to revive them. 

Certainly, Cellectis is a serious outfit, with heavyweight scientists on its payroll. It will be utilising very recent breakthroughs in stem cell research. Last year, a Japanese scientist, Prof Shinya Yamanaka, won the Nobel Prize for medicine after he showed that it was possible to convert adult, specialised cells (those that make up one kind of tissue) into general-purpose (or “pluripotent”) stem cells by injecting just four genes – called Klf4, Oct4, Sox2 and c-Myc. In effect, these “Yamanaka factors” tell the cell nucleus to “forget” that it is a bit of brain, skin or blood and to reboot genetically, returning to the state it was in the embryo – capable of becoming almost any kind of tissue. 

The process is extremely clever. The genes, identified by studying the stem cells found naturally in embryonic tissue, are cultivated in bacteria, and then transferred into retroviruses – agents similar to HIV, but disabled so they cannot cause disease. These are then used to infect the adult cells, and turn them back into stem cells. 

Previously, the best hope of obtaining stem cells was to harvest them from embryos. However, this process is time-consuming and riddled with ethical problems, not least that you have to create embryos in order to destroy them. Many faiths, including the Catholic Church, oppose such research. 

Another stem-cell “insurance policy” is cord-blood banking, popular in the US, whereby blood from the umbilical cord is extracted at birth and stored for future use. Cord blood contains stem cells – but of a type that could only treat a limited range of blood disorders. 

The real question is how wide the gap is between Prof Yamanaka’s Nobel-winning breakthrough and a therapy that will change lives. According to Prof Wolf Reik, a geneticist at the Babraham Institute in Cambridge, there are many hurdles before IPS becomes a routine treatment. 

“While producing IPS cells is straightforward, there are real safety issues,” he says. For a start, the genes from the virus remain in the cell, to unknown effect. “You can carry out additional manipulations to excise the viral DNA, but so far no one has made a completely clean cell.” 

It is also not clear how much of the “memory” of its differentiated state remains in an IPS cell derived from the donor’s skin. Some studies have shown that, in fact, these cells do not completely forget what tissue they came from. Reprogramming cells to be able to turn into any tissue also raises the risk of cancer. Overcoming this will take years of further research. 

Scepticism aside, there is no doubt that stem cell treatments represent a possible new dawn in medicine. In July, a pilot study in Japan was approved in which IPS cells will be used to generate retinal cells to treat volunteers suffering from age-related macular degeneration. 

If this is successful then, just perhaps, we could be seeing the dawn of something very exciting. If you have got a spare £38,400, you may well feel it’s a future worth investing in.