Senescent Cells Hinder Fracture Repair, Rather than Helping as Might Be Expected

Regeneration might be thought of as a complex and highly coordinated interaction between stem cells, somatic cells, and senescent cells. Some small fraction of cells in the injured tissue become senescent, cease replication, and secrete pro-growth, pro-inflammatory factors. They are then removed by the immune system once their task is done, to prevent long-term disruption of tissue function by those same secretions. The problem of senescent cells in aging is entirely that this signaling for growth and inflammation, beneficial in the short term, becomes very harmful and disruptive to normal tissue function when present for the long term. It was thought that senescent cells assist in wound healing throughout the body, based on evidence gathered largely from skin injuries. Here, however, researchers present evidence to show that senescent cells actually hinder fracture healing, and thus senolytic therapies to selectively destroy senescent cells may be beneficially applied to this sort of injury. This suggests that senescent cells may actively impede regeneration in other tissues as well. Senescent cells have detrimental effects across tissues with aging but may have beneficial effects on tissue repair, specifically on skin wound healing. However, the potential role of senescent cells in fracture healing has not been defined. Here, we performed an in silico analysis of public mRNAseq data and found that senescence and senescence-associated secretory phenotype (SAS...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs