Protein from human umbilical cord blood could be the answer for brain rejuvenation

A new study reveals that one specific protein contained in the human umbilical cord blood could hold the answers for boosting the cognitive performance of aging brains. Laboratory tests in mice has shown that the protein helped the animals’ brain function.

Our cognitive performances start declining with old age but scientists are constantly looking for ways in which humans could enhance their brain functions and a new Stanford study might have just given researchers clue. A protein contained in the human umbilical cord has been proven to boost the cognitive performance of old mice.

According to the study, human umbilical cord blood can rejuvenate learning and memory in older mice. Lab tests allowed scientists to be able to isolate the protein responsible of this brain-rejuvenation process.

The findings make scientist optimistic about finding a new treatment for age-associated mental decline.

“Neuroscientists have ignored it and are still ignoring it, but to me it’s remarkable that something in your blood can influence the way you think,” said the study’s senior author, Tony Wyss-Coray, PhD, professor of neurology and neurological sciences and a senior research in a Stanford article.

The lab run by Wyss-Corey published the results of the study in the Nature magazine and according to them, the direct infusion of young mice’s plasma, the cell-free portion of blood, benefited old mice. Those benefits extended beyond biochemistry and physiology to actual performance on tests of memory and learning, the researchers found.

The new study marks the first demonstration that human plasma can aid older mice’s memory and it makes scientists hopeful that this could also benefit humans.

Scientists looked at blood samples from 19- to 24-year-olds and compared them with those of 61- to 82-year-olds and, together with research of umbilical cords,  identified age-associated changes in a number of proteins.

And researchers suspected that this change in the blood could also have an impact on one specific region of the brain which we use for transforming experiences into long-term memories, the hippocampus.

“For largely unknown reasons, the hippocampus is especially vulnerable to normal aging, said Wyss-Coray. “With advancing age, the hippocampus degenerates, loses nerve cells and shrinks.”

And this  deterioration is also an early manifestation of Alzheimer’s disease and it leads to problems with learning and memory.

The same is observed in mice when their performances on tests meant to measure learning and memory are getting lower with age. So scientists gave old mice injections of human plasma  and found that while those that received plasma from older humans performed exactly like old mice that did no receive any transfusions, the mice that were given plasma from young individuals, actually had improved learning and memory abilities.

This made scientists look closer to umbilical cord blood and they started searching for the proteins that the two species have in common.  And this is how they found that TIMP2, a tissue inhibitor of metalloproteases 2, belonging to a well-known family of four TIMPs , is the one that could be responsible for brain rejuvenation.