What might reprogramming cells have to do with understanding Alzheimer’s? Elizabeth Tracey reports

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A simple blood test may soon help precisely identify your risk for Alzheimer’s disease by inducing some of your cells to go back in time, looking like they did when you were an embryo. Johns Hopkins cell engineering expert Vasiliki Machairaki explains.

Machairaki : We take blood from patients with Alzheimer's disease and from cognitive healthy individuals and we can make give this amazing technology which is called the reprogramming.   :13

The cells are reprogrammed in the lab.

Machairaki : We actually erase the identity of that blood cell and we make the cells to be reprogrammed, going back in time and make the stem cell like when the human individual was an embryo. These are the first cells that they can give rise to all the different type of cells that the human body has.              :23

Machairaki explains the cells can then we coaxed into becoming neurons and studied further for Alzheimer’s risk. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.