A Sample of Recent Work on New Means of Detecting and Targeting Senescent Cells

Senescent cells are receiving a great deal more attention from the research community these days, as illustrated by the two papers on methods of senescent cell identification I'll point out today. How things have changed; it wasn't only a few short years ago that scientists struggled to raising funding for animal studies of senescent cell removal, in an environment of little interest in this aspect of cellular biology. That was the state of the field despite the weight of evidence, gathered over decades, for increased cellular senescence in old tissues to be a root cause of aging and age-related disease. Now that studies have demonstrated that targeted clearance of senescent cells improves health and extends healthy life span in mice, and now that the methods of clearance are being used to produce stronger direct evidence for specific age-related disease and loss of function to involve senescent cells, it seems that every other gerontologist is either revising existing views of aging to incorporate cellular senescence or adding studies of cellular senescence to their portfolio. Most cells fall into a senescent state when they reach the end of their replicative life span, at which point they either self-destruct or are removed by the immune system. Damage from random mutation or a toxic tissue environment can also result in senescence, and should in theory lead to cell death in the same way as for replicative senescence. Complicating the picture somewhat, short-term lo...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs