A Conservative View of the Present State of Senolytic Development for Rejuvenation

Here, one of the leading researchers working on the biochemistry of senescent cells - and their relevance to aging - considers the state of development of senolytic therapies. These are treatments, largely small molecule drugs at this stage, but also including suicide gene therapies, immunotherapies, and more, that are capable of selectively destroying some fraction of the senescent cells present in old tissues. There is tremendous enthusiasm in the scientific and development communities for the potential to create significant degrees of rejuvenation via this approach. The results in mice are far and away more impressive and reliable than anything else that has yet been tried in the matter of aging and age-related disease. Simple one time treatments with senolytics lead to significant extension of life span and reversal of aspects of age-related disease. Leading researchers, of course, have to be far more muted when writing for scientific journals, so the tone here is more cautious than enthused. Healthy aging is limited by a lack of natural selection, which favors genetic programs that confer fitness early in life to maximize reproductive output. There is no selection for whether these alterations have detrimental effects later in life. One such program is cellular senescence, whereby cells become unable to divide. Cellular senescence enhances reproductive success by blocking cancer cell proliferation, but it decreases the health of the old by littering tissues with...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs