Targeting Pro-Inflammatory Cytokine IL-17 to Slow Skin Aging

Researchers here report that a few cell types in aged skin begin to generate large amounts of IL-17, an inflammatory signal molecule. While the obvious suspect here is cellular senescence, as we know that senescent cells accumulate with age and energetically secrete pro-inflammatory signal molecules, this data suggests that this may not be the case, at least for this particular signal molecule in this particular tissue. The researchers show that blocking IL-17 slows the manifestations of skin aging. The challenge in this sort of approach is that inflammatory signal molecules are needed for the normal immune response to function correctly. The treatment of autoimmune conditions via blockade of various inflammatory signals has meaningful side-effects that include suppression of necessary immune responses. This is less of a concern if treatments target only the skin, but we should hope that researchers can identify more targeted, subtle ways to eliminate only excess inflammatory signaling in the rest of the aging body. During aging, tissue-specific alterations in the stem cell niche synergize with stem cell-intrinsic changes to contribute to the development of age-associated traits. Aging has been proposed to drive a tissue-dependent proinflammatory microenvironment that perturbs adult stem cell behavior. Infiltration of immune cells into the stem cell niche, or a transcriptional switch of stem cells, contributes to this proinflammatory environment that negatively feeds...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs