Small Steps Towards Thymus Regeneration at the SENS Research Foundation

The immune system becomes unruly and ineffective in old age: on the one hand it generates ever greater levels of harmful chronic inflammation, while on the other it no longer has a sufficient population of effective cells able to tackle new threats, scan for cancerous cells, and eliminate senescent cells from the body. It becomes overactive and underachieving, and a sizable portion of the more obvious aspects of age-related frailty stem from the lack of a robust immune response. Why does this happen? No doubt the normal culprits leave their mark: the forms of accumulated cellular and molecular damage that degrade tissues and cell populations, including those involved in generating and maintaining immune cells. Beyond this, however, there are problems that inevitably arise due to the evolved structure of the immune system: it has what are in effect built-in limits. The first is a limit to the number of immune cells that can be supported at any one time, as the potential supply of new cells diminishes to a trickle quite early in adulthood, as an organ necessary for their creation - the thymus - atrophies. The second limit of interest stems from the fact that the adaptive immune system devotes cells to remembering threats, and thanks to persistent threats like herpesviruses, ever more of the available cell population is devoted to memory rather than action. So the end result is an evolved system that is front-loaded for early success, but which systematically falls apart much l...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Health Medicine and Bioethics Commentators Authors: Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs