In Back to the Future II, Christopher Lloyd‘s Doc Brown explains that when he got to 2015, he got a real glow up at a rejuvenation clinic: Among other tweaks, they swapped out his blood and added “30 to 40 years” to his life.
In real life, scientists now say they’ve found a drug that can actually freshen up your own red stuff — and could someday be used as an anti-aging technique.
According to researchers at Columbia University in New York, infusing blood from a healthy younger person has been known to have “a rejuvenating effect when infused into older bodies: Aging hearts beat stronger, muscles become stronger, and thinking becomes sharper.”
However, the scientists say an anti-inflammatory drug called anakinra, which is already used in patients who have rheumatoid arthritis, has been proven to refresh the system that makes your own blood.
At the center of their investigation was the hematopoietic system — basically, the machinery that creates the blood pumping through your veins. As we age, this system begins to break down: The stem cells in your bone marrow degrade, and they produce fewer red blood cells and fewer immune cells. In short, the degraded cells they do produce make fighting infection harder, make a person more resistant to vaccines and can cause blood cancer.
Previous attempts to improve those stem cells through exercise and even transfusions of younger blood didn’t improve the stem cells, because they’re hidden away in bone marrow.
However, the researchers found anakinra in mice “remarkably returned the blood stem cells to a younger, healthier state.”
In the short term, they hope clinical testing in elderly human patients could improve their health, but in the long term, they posit someday treating people as young as 50 with the drug.