When we hear the word senile we might think stereotypically of an older person who has cognitive impairment, but some argue that senility can apply to cells too as they age and that such cells can be targeted by drugs called senolytics.
Unfortunately, the supplements industry has picked up on this idea to sell iffy pills. A Google search for “senolytics” found a whole bunch for sale at the top of the search results. A quick YouTube search found one of the top-ranking senolytics videos features Steve Horvath who is now a leader at the new institute Altos Labs. See the screenshot below.
I noted several recent research articles. It remains a somewhat controversial area.
Senolytics research
- Restoration of hippocampal neural precursor function by ablation of senescent cells in the aging stem cell niche, Stem Cell Reports. This work builds on previous studies arguing that removing senescence cells can have potential health benefits or fight aging. The hope is that so-called senolytics drugs can target senescent cells to have benefits. Here’s a recent review on senolytics that is appropriately cautious in nature.
- Senescence-induced changes in CD4 T cell differentiation can be alleviated by treatment with senolytics, Aging Cell.
- Deletion of SA beta-Gal+ cells using senolytics improves muscle regeneration in old mice, Aging Cell.
More recommended reads
- An in vivo Cell-Based Delivery Platform for Zinc Finger Artificial Transcription Factors in Pre-clinical Animal Models, Frontiers in Molecular Neuroscience. Excellent work from my colleagues here at UC Davis with some big translational potential.
- Early human embryonic development: Blastocyst formation to gastrulation, Developmental Cell.
- California’s Stem Cell Agency Collects First Major Royalties: $15.6 Million from Stanford, Cal Stem Cell Report. This is great news for CIRM and California.
- The Cyclin-Like Protein SPY1 Overrides Reprogramming Induced Senescence Through EZH2 Mediated H3K27ME3, Stem Cells.
- This Stem Cell Manufacturing Startup Just Raised An $80 Million War Chest To Revolutionize Medicine, Forbes. This article is about Cellino, which has some interesting tech. Recently, I covered a talk by their leader on use of lasers to “edit” cell cultures in the sense of removing less desirable stem cell colonies.
- Induced pluripotent bovine stem cells overcome decades-long challenges for cultivated meat, Phys.org. It’s been a challenge to make bovine iPS cells. Pablo Ross’ group formerly of UC Davis had derived bovine ES cells, but that was a big challenge. In the new work, the team had to use 6 reprogramming factors: Oct4, Sox2, Klf4, c-Myc, Lin28, and NANOG plus KDM4A it seems. Here’s the research article on cow iPS cells.
- Single-cell ATAC-seq of fetal human retina and stem-cell-derived retinal organoids shows changing chromatin landscapes during cell fate acquisition, Cell Reports. This nice study comes from the Tom Reh lab.
- Cholinergic signals preserve haematopoietic stem cell quiescence during regenerative haematopoiesis, Nat Comm.
- Brahma safeguards canalization of cardiac mesoderm differentiation, Nature. This work comes from a team led by Benoit Bruneau.
- Reprocessing seafood waste: challenge to develop aquatic clean meat from fish cells, npj Science of Food.
Very exciting work on dasatinib and quercetin as senolytics to prevent T cell senescence/Treg generation..
Thank you so much for sharing ! There are some very big implications here. One obvioulsy is in the field of chronic myeloid leukemia, which my mother died from. T cells have been shown to play a role in suppressing this disease…the first demonstration of immunotherapy efficacy was in CML in th eform of donor lymphocyte transfusions.
Dasatinib is a drug already used in CML. I am sure that someone will do a trial on quercetin and dasatinib for CML to prevent the T cell exhaustion.
It is too bad my mother didnt live to see these advancements but there are many mothers like my mother out there that will benefit from the acceleration of scientific progress that we are seeing today.
Thomas Ichim