The SENS Research Foundation on the Ongoing Development of Senolytic Therapies to Treat Neurodegenerative Conditions

Senescent cells are a significant cause of age-related disease. Now that the research community is earnestly developing ways to remove senescent cells, and trying them out in animal studies, every few months there is a new announcement of one or another definitive connection between the accumulation of senescent cells and a specific medical condition. The SENS vision for the development of rejuvenation therapies assembled the existing evidence and strongly advocated for senescent cell clearance around the turn of the century, ten long years prior to the point at which the rest of the research community finally got on board. In a better world, most of the impressive progress today towards the effective treatment of many age-related diseases by clearance of senescent cells would have happened certainly ten and perhaps twenty years ago. There is no compelling technical reason for it to have waited until now; the delay is near all cultural, a consequence of the attitudes of the research community during the decades in which its members actively discouraged work on slowing or reversing the aging process. It was a bit of a mystery to the scientists investigating the phenomenon: a brain disease driven by the death of specialized neurons was strongly linked to exposure to a particular pesticide. Why, then, didn't exposing those same neurons directly to that same pesticide seem to affect them? Parkinson's disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative disease of aging, whose most obviou...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs