 Aging is a process that each and every one of us is experiencing and if you're anything like me every once in a while you'll sneak a peek in the mirror and look for that gray hair or wrinkle. Now what if I tell you that when people my age in their early 30s reach 70 they may be able to look and function just like today. Sounds pretty crazy right? Well in my lab at the University of California San Francisco UCSF the question we're asking is can aging be reversed? But we're not just interested in the physical hallmarks like the gray hair or the wrinkle but also whether the aging process can be reversed in the brain. Our research focuses on ways in which to restore and in essence rejuvenate cognitive function. Well with age cognitive functions decline such as verbal processing and spatial learning and memory and with this functional decline comes susceptibility to neurodegenerative diseases. In fact aging is the most prominent risk factor for Alzheimer's disease. So let's put this into everyday context. Let's say that I'm driving in the morning to work to San Francisco and I park my hypothetical Tesla in a parking lot. Surrounding my car will be a number of familiar scenes such as the Goldigate bridge, a big rainbow flag, and hopefully my favorite taco truck. When I come back from work my brain has to remember where I park my car. Using spatial learning and memory my brain is going to recognize those familiar spatial cues bridge flag taco truck and guide me to my car based on its location with respect to those visual cues. At young ages this seems like a really simple task but you may have noticed that older people have a harder time oftentimes using their car alarm to figure things out. So the same exact age-related cognitive impairments that we see in humans are actually observed across species. Similar to finding a car in my lab we teach mice to find a hidden platform in a pool of water and just like us mice use visual cues to locate that platform. At young ages those mice quickly learn how to find that hidden platform but as the mice get older they have a much harder time finding that hidden platform. Now using those same simple behavioral tasks my lab investigates both what is driving aging in the brain as well as whether it's possible to restore cognitive function in old animals. Now in thinking about aging and rejuvenation in the brain we took a step back and we started thinking about aging as a global process really this systemic event that's altering every organ in our body and we thought what could be mediating aging at this systemic level what connects everything in our body together and the answer was blood. Now in order to actually determine whether changes in blood could mediate the aging process we made use of a really old experimental model first used in the 1800s known as parabiosis in which a young and an old animal are physically connected such that two hearts are pumping one bloodstream. What we discovered was that young mice exposed to old blood showed premature signs of aging while in old animals exposed to young blood signs of aging were actually reversed. Now these studies indicate two potential ways of rejuvenating the aging brain by targeting pro-aging factors in old blood or introducing pro-youthful factors from young blood. Well in a study from my lab at UCSF published last month we identified a molecule involved in the immune system as a pro-aging factor in old blood and interestingly when we targeted this factor in old blood we could actually prevent age-related cognitive decline with these old mice missing the factor finding that hidden platform much faster than normally aging mice. Well this suggests that targeting individual pro-aging factors in old blood may provide a therapeutic approach to at least prevent cognitive decline but what about the opposite is it possible that beneficial factors flowing through our young blood are lost as we get older and that reintroducing them can enhance cognition in the elderly. Well in a study published last year with my previous graduate advisor and I we actually discovered that injecting a small volume of young blood to an old animal was enough to reverse age-related cognitive impairments already existing in the old brain with these old mice finding that hidden platform almost as easily as young mice. What's super exciting is that research over the last decade from around the world have demonstrated that these pro-youthful factors don't just rejuvenate the brain but organs throughout the body like muscle and bone. While the search for individual pro-youthful factors is still going the potential to reverse the signs of aging through such factors now actually exists. Now I hope that I've been able to convey this idea to you that aging it's actually not final but through biomedical research we hope that we may be able to combat its devastating effects. I presented to you today this systemic approach to rejuvenate the aging brain by targeting pro-aging and pro-youthful factors in blood to maintain the same cognitive integrity we have today well into our golden years.