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osteoarthritis
Unity (biotech company)
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Want to live for ever? Flush out your zombie cells
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2011 Jan van Deursen and colleagues at the nonprofit medical organisation the Mayo Clinic showed that eliminating senescent cells in mice via a genetic trick delayed some of the ravages of age in prematurely aged mice.
Biotech
Jan van Deursen
Jeff Bezos AKA Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen
Keith Leonard
Nathaniel David
osteoarthritis
Peter Thiel
senescent cells
Children
"A pill or an injection that would clean out senescent cells throughout your entire body would be a brilliant future but we have to be very careful."
"And chapter one concludes with the successful demonstration in human beings that the elimination of senescent cells takes a feature of ageing that was untreatable and uncurable, and makes it a treatable medical condition."
(One complication with senescent cells is that because they all spring from different normal cell types they retain their own individuality, a drug might kill senescent skin cells, fat cells or blood vessel cells but is unlikely to kill all three.)
2018 Want to live for ever? Flush out your zombie cells
Beyond that, it has another drug in the pipeline with which it hopes to target eye disease and beyond that, more drugs in a competitive bake-off for lung disease.
Other approaches from Senolytic Therapeutics and CellAge could respectively make Unity and Oisin's methods more precise.
Roelof Botha (III, Sequoia Capital)
The company's way round the problem is to start with localised treatment, which is possible in a few organs such as the knee, eye and lung that essentially "trap" the drugs so they can’t leak elsewhere in the body where they can cause toxicity to other c
The company's(Unity) approach is to find small molecules (so called "senolytics") that can do this. But because small molecules, by their nature, can get everywhere in the body, the approach is prone to unwanted side-effects.
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.
Unity's method is based on targeting the biological pathways senescent cells use to resist the normal death of ageing cells. Inhibit the right pathway and death can be "nudged" to occur.