A team at the University of British Columbia may have stumbled upon an anti-aging solution for the skin, thanks to mice that aged without developing wrinkles.
The discovery was made quite by accident while a team led by David Granville, a researcher at the Centre for Heart Lung Innovation of UBC, was conducting experiments on blood vessel damage prevention.
"I've always had an interest in aging and how blood vessels age and how they become injured and how they repair themselves in the context of atherosclerosis," Granville told CTV's Canada AM from Vancouver.
The team was working with mice that had been genetically engineered to not produce Granzyme-B, an enzyme that can destroy key proteins in blood vessels.
"We found that, by knocking out this enzyme, we had an effect on blood vessels. But we also had this really striking appearance of the skin, where we noticed the skin didn't appear to be aging in these mice," he said.
To study their accidental finding in more detail, Granville’s team constructed a sort of simulated tanning bed for the mice.
Each mouse was put in a carousel that slowly turned under lamps that produced ultraviolet light similar to the sun's UV light. They were exposed for just a few minutes a day, three times a week – enough to cause skin redness, but not cause a sunburn.
After 20 weeks, the skin of mice lacking Granzyme B had aged much less compared to the other mice.
"These mice didn't exhibit visible signs of aging in their skin. They didn't exhibit the loss of collagen that is normally associated with skin aging," Granville said.
The findings were published last week in Aging Cell.
Granville explains that Granzyme B is released in the skin when it's exposed to sunlight. The enzyme then moves through skin cells "like molecular scissors," cutting up the proteins that act as the scaffolding holding skin cells together. This ultimately leads to wrinkles and skin damage.
Now, a biotech company that Granville founded is working on creating a Granzyme-B inhibitor drug that could be used in a topically applied skin cream.
Rather than focusing on the anti-aging cosmetic market though, his team wants to focus on creating drugs that could be used for patients with the autoimmune disease lupus, for example, which makes skin extra sensitive to the sun.
It could also be developed to help people with discoid lupus erythematosus – the skin disease that the singer Seal has, which can cause disfiguring facial scarring.
A drug might also be developed to help prevent loss of skin thickness in the elderly, who often suffer from bed sores in their old age.
