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

Re: People need to die

[AsmCoder8088]

I was going to bring this up as well. Also, imagine the usefulness of a healthy 300 year old. They would have not only a unique perspective and wisdom about things but also the energy to put it to good use.

Re:People need to die

[strikethree]

What a vile and disgusting statement, false in every regard.

Well, that is one way to look at it.

What makes you think change in society, which you call progress, will be an improvement?

There is no way to tell ahead of time whether or not there will be an "improvement"; however, like Evolution itself, over enough time, things seem to "advance".

As a person who is subject to dying and not terribly far away from it, I support the idea of natural death. It causes change. There are some Golden Ages which ended because of death and that seems to be a shame; however, the majority of time, it has been self serving kings and emperors who have made everyone's lives miserable and it is good that things changed.

I think there is a quote by Max Planck (not going to verify because it really doesn't matter WHO said it) that goes something like this: The progress of Science advances one death at a time. Once a scientist has found a "truth", they tend to enforce that truth far beyond the applicability of that truth. Could you imagine still "believing" in the Niels Bohr model of the atom?

And yet another strangely prophetic captcha: stings