Removing Senescent Cells
Dealing with the accumulation of senescent cells is one of the seven Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senesence (SENS). This profile of researcher Judy Campisi at The Scientist gives some insight into where the mainstream of aging research is on this topic: "senescent cells not only exist in vivo but also accumulate in aging tissue. ... in culture, these nonreplicating cells are far from inert. They produce a plethora of unpleasant proteins that can, among other things, destroy the structural integrity of the tissue that surrounds them. ... The critical test would be to create an organism in which you prevent senescent cells from accumulating ... She and her colleagues are working on devising a system to do that test. They are developing a mouse in which an inducible promoter allows them to activate a gene that will selectively eliminate senescent cells."