Steve: Right now there is an idea in the aging field to rejuvenate people by leveraging this fundamental insight. It's called reprogramming. You can take an old cell, you administer certain factors as you mentioned, four factors or three factors or other variants, you know, and by administering this cocktail of factors for just a few days, not too long...because if you administer it for too long you greatly increase the risk of cancer, you know, because the cells lose their identity, the skin cell forgets that it's a skin cell. It thinks it's a stem cell, you know. But if you do it briefly for let's say 5 days, you get the benefit of rejuvenation, you may have rejuvenated the cell by 5 years or 10 years, you know, but it still remembers its identity.

Rhonda: So, does the epigenome reset a little bit? Like, it only...

Steve: Yes. Yes. So, there are a couple of groups that are working on it and have already shown that effect, you know.

Steve: Yes. So, I analyzed fibroblasts and endothelial cells from such an intervention. It's called sometimes interrupted reprogramming or transient reprogramming, you know, and sure enough, you know, that idea worked. It reset the age, but the cells still remembered their identity and therefore arguably will not become malignant. Rhonda: Right. Yeah. That's super interesting.

Steve: In the past, people were wondering, you know, are there interventions that actually reset the epigenetic clock? And the number one proof of principle study is really the administration of these Yamanaka factors because it completely resets the age actually to a 📍 prenatal stage, you know. And the epigenetic clock is the ideal biomarker for that kind of a study, in my opinion, because as I said, it very much tracks the state of the cell, but we will see. Hopefully, in 5 or 10 years, it turns out that this strategy turns into a viable anti-aging intervention that can be used in the clinic. But at this point, these are all proof of concept studies that have been done in the dish or in mouse studies, you know.