Removing worn-out cells from the body could help one prevent age-related diseases, a new study has suggested.
In experiments on mice, a team at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine in the US found that by removing the worn-out and old cells, called senescent cells, several times during the lifetime of ageing-accelerated mice, spared them of cataracts, ageing skin and muscle loss.
“We started treating animals when they were really young, before they started to establish these senescent cells,” study researcher Darren Baker was quoted as saying by LiveScience. “As a cell became senescent we would remove it; we saw a really profound effect.”
The researchers said their findings showed that gene therapies can be used to target senescent cells in humans to attack these cells. But such therapies are far in the future, and still require lots of basic science to back them up.
According to the scientists, though cells were important contributors to their cellular community, they eventually get old and start showing signs of wear and tear that could lead to cancer, so the body essentially “turns them off”.
When cells get turned off in mammals (including humans and mice), they can take one of two paths, either dying off or sticking around in a senescent state.
For some reason, the ones that stick around start pumping out odd proteins. These chemical signals have a strange impact on the cells around them, and researchers have speculated that these chemicals can lead to age-related diseases.
The number of senescent cells increases as tissues age; at most they will make up 15 per cent of cells in mammalian tissues, the researchers said.
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Heart cells grown in lab
Sydney: Scientists have hit upon a new and reliable way of producing heart cells in a lab, which would help in the battle against heart diseases. The Monash University-led research shows how human heart cells can be consistently produced from embryonic stem cells, creating a potentially inexhaustible source for research and drug discovery.
Researcher David Elliott, along with Andrew Elefanty and Ed Stanley, both professors at Monash Immunology and Stem Cell Lab, led the group which worked with a number of institutions in Australia and overseas to develop the method, reports the journal Nature Methods.
— IANS