About a year ago, a series of startling papers came out. They describe how a single protein circulating in the blood of young mice can impose youth on the organs of older mice. Effects were found on muscles, the heart, and the brain, all of which appeared to revert to a more youthful state following exposure to the signaling protein GDF11.
At the time, the results seemed to be a solid extension of a lot of incremental work. And it was obvious that a lot of labs would be interested in following up on this, given the potential implications of the finding. So, we shouldn't have expected to wait very long to see whether GDF11 is really everything it appeared to be. And now, some of the first results are in, and they don't seem that promising.
A group of researchers, primarily at the pharmaceutical company Novartis, looked into GDF11's role in keeping muscles youthful. They found that the original tool used to track GDF11 wasn't very specific. GDF11 is part of a large family of related proteins, and the detection method picked up other members of the family. When a more specific test was used, GDF11 levels appeared to go up with age—the exact opposite of what you'd expect for a factor of youth.
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