To stay young, kill zombie cells

Megan Scudellari in Nature:

Jan van Deursen was baffled by the decrepit-looking transgenic mice he created in 2000. Instead of developing tumours as expected, the mice experienced a stranger malady. By the time they were three months old, their fur had grown thin and their eyes were glazed with cataracts. It took him years to work out why: the mice were ageing rapidly, their bodies clogged with a strange type of cell that did not divide, but that wouldn't die¹.

That gave van Deursen and his colleagues at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, an idea: could killing off these 'zombie' cells in the mice delay their premature descent into old age? The answer was yes. In a 2011 study², the team found that eliminating these 'senescent' cells forestalled many of the ravages of age. The discovery set off a spate of similar findings. In the seven years since, dozens of experiments have confirmed that senescent cells accumulate in ageing organs, and that eliminating them can alleviate, or even prevent, certain illnesses (see 'Becoming undead'). This year alone, clearing the cells in mice has been shown to restore fitness, fur density and kidney function³. It has also improved lung disease⁴ and even mended damaged cartilage⁵. And in a 2016 study, it seemed to extend the lifespan of normally ageing mice⁶. “Just by removing senescent cells, you could stimulate new tissue production,” says Jennifer Elisseeff, senior author of the cartilage paper and a biomedical engineer at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. It jump-starts some of the tissue's natural repair mechanisms, she says.

More here.