The medicine of the future could be driven by mechanical cell memory
Wrinkle loss, better exercise and new cancer treatments could all come from mechanical cell memory
It’s not a cure for baldness.
But it might eliminate your crow’s feet and laugh lines by telling the tissues in your face how to remember their more elastic youth.
It might develop into ways for older people to exercise for a few minutes and get the results of an hour.
And it could possibly lead to new medicines that would teach your body’s immune system to target drug resistant melanoma cancer cells and kill them.
It’s called cell memory and it’s the focus of research by Ning Wang, a Northeastern University professor of bioengineering and director of the Institute for Mechanobiology.
“My goal is simple: help keep people healthy,” he said.
A host of cells, along with the neurons in the brain, already have recall. “Memory T cells” or “T lymphocytes” in the blood, for example, are front and center in remembering past infections in the body and are part of the body’s adaptive immune system attacking foreign cells.
But Wang and his co-authors have found that many other cells have this so-called “mechanical memory,” which is the ability to remember that recent physical force was applied and continue to react as if the force is still there.
When force such as exercise or other energy stimulation is applied to cells, the inner workings of the cell kick into gear and they cook up a host of proteins that affect the body, such as telling it to build more muscle. The reaction is not permanent, lasting short while, but what’s important is that the reaction in the cell wasn’t thought to continue at all, Wang said.
Wang demonstrated mechanical memory in the lab using hamster cells. Microscopic magnets were attached to the cells, which were then agitated in a lab for certain periods of time. The experiment showed that the force applied in short doses of 2-to-10 minutes, repeated over an hour, gave the same cellular results as one hour of continuous stimulation.
That helped prove his theory. This new knowledge can help in several ways.
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“When you age, your body doesn’t function so well, not like when you’re young,” explained Wang. “But we have discovered mechanical ways to influence your genes. Cell behaviors are controlled by genes.”
One such treatment could involve fibroblast cells, which have a number of biological jobs including wound repair. They could be stimulated to create more collagen that can make the face muscles and tissues more elastic, like when young, Wang said.
As for people with limited mobility or older people wanting to get better results from exercise, Wang said that mechanical memory can also work its magic here.
Low-impact exercises, such as standing up and sitting down in a chair repeatedly for a few minutes, done several times during a day, has a cumulative effect, he explained, and it’s because of mechanical cell memory.
The biology of it is when you exercise the initial push-pull force causes the cells in the muscles to make filamental actin and it activates a cell building YAP protein, which is kind of a bundle of cellular instructions. It tells the body to make its cells and internal cytoskeletons, or internal cellular scaffolding, stronger. That, among other things, makes muscles stronger, Wang explained.
And it turns out that the cells continue to make their protein stew to build muscle even when the energy force is no longer there.
“The cells remember and act on that memory,” Wang said.
