Scientists Are Working To Eliminate Senescent Cells (theguardian.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: In a lab just south of San Francisco I am looking at two blown-up images of microscope slides on a computer screen, side by side. The slides are the same cross-sections of mouse knees from a six-month-old and an 18-month-old animal. The older mouse's image has a splattering of little yellow dots, the younger barely any. That staining indicates the presence of so-called senescent cells -- "zombie cells" that are damaged and that, as a defense against cancer, have ceased to divide but are also resistant to dying. They are known to accumulate with age, as the immune system can no longer clear them, and as a result of exposure to cell-damaging agents such as radiation and chemotherapy. And they have been identified as a cause of aging in mice, at least partially responsible for most age-related diseases. Seeing the slides, it makes me worried about my own knees. "Tell us about it," says Pedro Beltran who heads the biology department at Unity Biotechnology, a 90 person-strong company trying to halt, slow or reverse age-associated diseases in humans by killing senescent cells.

Developing therapies to kill senescent cells is a burgeoning part of the wider quest to defeat aging and keep people healthier longer. Unity, which was founded in 2011, has received more than $385m in funding to date including investment from big tech names such as Amazon's Jeff Bezos and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. It went public this May and is valued at more than $700m. Its first drug entered early clinical trials in June, aimed at treating osteoarthritis. Other startups with zombie cells in their sights include Seattle-based Oisin Biotechnologies which was founded in 2016 and has raised around $4m; Senolytic Therapeutics whose scientific development is based in Spain and which was established last September (it won't disclose its financing other than to say it has a first round, which will allow it to reach clinical trials); and Cleara Biotech, formed this June backed by $3m in funding and based in the Netherlands. In addition, Scottish company CellAge, also founded in 2016, has raised about $100,000 to date, partly through a crowdfunding campaign. The report goes on to detail Unity's plan to kill senescent cells. Their method is to target the biological pathways senescent cells use to resist the normal death of aging cells. "The company's approach is to find small molecules (so called 'senolytics') that can do this," reports The Guardian. "But because small molecules, by their nature, can get everywhere in the body, the approach is prone to unwanted side-effects." As a result, the company has turned to localized treatment.

Meanwhile, Oisin is trying to kill all a person's zombie cells in one go. "The idea is to load the body with nanoparticles that insert a 'suicide gene' into every cell," reports The Guardian. "It only triggers if a cell has a lot of particular protein (p16) that acts as a marker of zombie cells, albeit imperfectly." It plans to test this method on late-stage cancer patients next year.

Comments

People need to die

[MikeDataLink]

It's the only way for change to happen. Imagine in people from 200 years ago were still alive and voting. We'd never progress as a society.

"And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new."

Re:People need to die

[Wycliffe]

It's the only way for change to happen. Imagine in people from 200 years ago were still alive and voting. We'd never progress as a society.

"And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new."

If we could completely stop aging, the average life expectance would only jump to about 300. You can calculate this by extrapolating out the death rate of a 25 year old. People would eventually die from other things besides old age. This would likely be a net benefit to society. We would greatly reduce our heathcare costs and people wouldn't have to retire because they are no longer capable of working. It would likely have other effects too. People might decide to be more careful with their driving and eating habits if they knew that it was up to them how long they could live.

Re:People need to die

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the only way for change to happen. Imagine in people from 200 years ago were still alive and voting. We'd never progress as a society.

"And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new."

This is cute non-sense that you feel is funny to engage in because you don't think extending life is actually a possibility that relates to your life. Once you have cancer or Alzheimers or even just your brain, muscles and bones atrophy with age, and there is a fix available, you will not reject it on the basis that your old-fashioned thinking should not be around any more. In no other context would you be anything but horrified at a suggestion to kill off large population groups because their thinking is not as you would like. People do change their minds and the longer-term perspective and accumulated competence of people living for, say, 200 years will do a lot of good. If that slows down progress and makes us all more responsible, then so be it, we would then all have time to wait that out, though I'm fairly sure it will make for faster progress.

Re:People need to die

[Courageous]

Accidental death, suicide, and homicide kill 36,726 annually. In that age group, roughly 43M are alive. That 1:1171 or so chance of dying from those causes by my calculation.

Re:People need to die

[ChrisMaple]

People need to die. It's the only way for change to happen. Imagine in people from 200 years ago were still alive and voting. We'd never progress as a society.

What a vile and disgusting statement, false in every regard. What makes you think that people don't get wiser as they get older? What makes you think change in society, which you call progress, will be an improvement? Judging from the proclamations of those young people making the most noise in politics today, progress is torturing all males to death and giving 3-year-olds the vote. There's no limit to human stupidity, and most of it comes from the immature.

Re:People need to die

[Tapewolf]

It's the only way for change to happen. Imagine in people from 200 years ago were still alive and voting. We'd never progress as a society.

"And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new."

It also causes valuable lessons to be lost.The people who experienced Hiroshima and it's after-effects are better placed to fight against it happening again than people who just read about it as bored schoolchildren. It becomes easier to deny the holocaust when the survivors are dead of old age. And regulations put in place after the Great Depression were swept away by later generations who considered them obsolete relics, until the consequences became apparent in 2008.

Re:People need to die

[roman_mir]

It is always safe to assume that socialists, communists, fascists and other types of collectivists hate individuals as they espouse their love to humanity as a whole.

AFAIC individuals matter while the collective does not. I am all for infinite life and completely against aging and dying from so called 'natural causes'. However anybody is and should be free to terminate their own existence if they so choose. It would be interesting to see how many collectivists would off themselves for the sake of their vision of 'progress'.

Re: People need to die

[c6gunner]

Who know what the side effects of eliminating these cells are going to be.

Long life.

They may not appear for generations. We thought that aggressive use of antibiotics and routine use of antibacterials would be a good idea

They are. We live longer, healthier lives than ever in human history. All thanks to those good ideas.

until we bred the superbugs that one day could eliminate us.

We didn't breed "superbugs". Life evolved, as it always does. The phrase "superbug" is fearmongering nonsense meant to attract attiontion. Every disease which we couldn't fight in the past was a "superbug". Measles. Polio. Smallpox. The plague. They killed and maimed incredible numbers of people and we had no defense against them. Today Ebola is one of the most potentially harmful diseases on the planet, and it has absolutely nothing to do with antibiotics or antibacterials.

  I've never understood the mindset of the horribly confused people who seem to believe that we shouldn't bother fighting diseases or pests because new ones will evolve. That's like suggesting that we shouldn't eat today because we'll just be hungry again tomorrow.

Re: People need to die

[commodore64_love]

> Abolitionists existed in 1700, and women were not entirely without rights

Your date is a bit off. The first attempts to end slavery in the British-american colonies came from Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and some of their contemporaries. So basically 1770s.

- Many U.S. States when they declared independence in 1776, also allowed women to vote, same as men did. Sadly that equal suffrage was later repealed in the 1810s and 1820s. Every time there's a revolution, there's also a backlash a few years later to "undo" what the revolutionaries accomplished :-(

- Blacks in the North continued to have the right to vote, and be treated as equals under the law.

Re:Human "foresight"

[SuricouRaven]

Medicine is a history of doctors and scientists facing up to Death, raising their middle finger towards the reaper and declaring, "Not today!"

Re:Human "foresight"

[ChrisMaple]

The difficult problems we solve first. The impossible takes a little longer.