«Cellular senescence is a biological mechanism that functions as an ‘emergency brake’ used by damaged cells to stop dividing," says Jan van Deursen, Ph. D., Chair of Biochemistry and Molecular biology at Mayo Clinic, and senior author of the paper. «While halting cell division of these cells is important for cancer prevention, it has been theorized that once the ‘emergency brake’ has been pulled, these cells are no longer necessary.»
The immune system sweeps out the senescent cells on a regular basis, but over time becomes less effective. Senescent cells produce factors that damage adjacent cells and cause chronic inflammation, which is closely associated with frailty and
Mayo Clinic researchers used a transgene that allowed for the
«Senescent cells that accumulate with aging are largely bad, do bad things to your organs and tissues, and therefore shorten your life but also the healthy phase of your life," says Dr. van Deursen. «And since you can eliminate the cells without negative side effects, it seems like therapies that will mimic our findings — or our genetic model that we used to eliminate the cells — that drugs or other compounds that can eliminate senescent cells would be useful for therapies against
«The advantage of targeting senescent cells is that clearance of just 60 to 70 percent can have significant therapeutic effects," says Dr. Baker. «If translatable, because senescent cells do not proliferate rapidly, a drug could efficiently and quickly eliminate enough of them to have profound impacts on healthspan and lifespan.»
The research was supported by the National Institutes of Health, the Paul F. Glenn Foundation, the Ellison Medical Foundation, the Noaber Foundation and the Mayo Clinic Robert and Arlene Kogod Center on Aging.
Others on the research team include: Bennett Childs; Matej Durik, Ph. D.; Melinde Wijers, Jian Zhong, Ph. D., Rachel Saltness, Grace Verzosa, M.D., Abdulmohammad Pezeshki, Ph. D., Khashayarsha Khazaie, Ph. D., Jordan D. Miller, Ph. D.; all of Mayo Clinic.
Dr. van Deursen is a
