A Tyrosine Kinase Inhibitor Produces Improvement in Early Stage Alzheimer ' s Patients

Senolytic drugs are those that selectively force senescent cells into programmed cell death. Senescent cells accumulate with age throughout the body, and their pro-inflammatory signaling is disruptive to tissue structure and function when maintained over the long term. Clearance of senescent cells has produced sizable, rapid reversal of age-related disease and improvement in health in mice. There are numerous classes of senolytic small molecule drugs, each class attacking the biochemistry of senescent cells from a different direction in order to force programmed cell death. The well-studied senolytic drug dasatinib is a tyrosine kinase inhibitor, and there is evidence for another tyrosine kinase inhibitor, nintedanib, to also be senolytic. Today's open access paper concerns ongoing clinical trials of masinitib, another tyrosine kinase inhibitor, as a treatment for Alzheimer's disease. Cellular senescence in brain cells, particularly the supporting cells of the brain such as astrocytes and microglia, is implicated in the progression of Alzheimer's disease. The use of tyrosine kinase inhibitors in this context predates a growing understanding of their relevance to cellular senescence in aging, and so the paper here focuses reducing inflammatory activation of brain cells rather than putting this in terms of cellular senescence. It is unclear as to whether masinitib is in fact senolytic, but it would not be that surprising to find that it is. It is also worth noting that t...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs