Successfully Treating Fibrosis in Mice via the Senolytic Strategy of Bcl-2 Inhibition

It has to be said, today's research materials make for a fascinating read. A group of scientists, in 2021, a decade into the general acceptance of the importance of cellular senescence as a phenomenon, conducts a study of lung fibrosis in which they achieve a reversal of that fibrosis using a bcl-2 inhibitor, venetoclax, and then publish a paper that fails to mention cellular senescence even once. Fibrosis is a dysfunction of tissue maintenance, producing scar-like collagen deposits that disrupt tissue function. There is a weight of evidence for fibrosis as a phenomenon to be driven by the presence of senescent cells, including the use of various senolytic therapies in animal studies to reverse fibrosis. Initial human trials for one of those senolytic therapies are ongoing, and one of those trials was an attempt to treat lung fibrosis. Many of the senolytic therapies established in animal studies are bcl-2 inhibitors, such as navitoclax, a close relative of venetoclax. Inhibition of BCL2 family proteins has the effect of driving senescent cells into self-destruction, reducing their resistance of programmed cell death stimuli. This was the one of the first approaches to the selective destruction of senescent cells to be validated in the laboratory, and is widely studied and appreciated in the research community. So it is to my eyes a little odd for a research group to run a study using a senolytic drug, targeting a well-known apoptosis-related pathway, on ...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs