Senescent cells play an essential role in wound healing
“What is most exciting is that we are now able to identify what senescent cells express that makes them beneficial,” said Campisi, senior scientist on the study. “This means we will be able to simply provide that factor while we eliminate senescent cells to prevent a deleterious side effect before it even occurs.” Postdoctoral fellow, Marco Demaria, PhD, lead author of the study, used two different mouse models: in the first, which was developed in collaboration with colleagues at the Erasmus, Harvard and Einstein Medical Schools, senescent cells can be visualized and eliminated in living animals; in the second, which was developed by Eiji Hara, Naoko Ohtani and colleagues at the Japanese Foundation for Cancer Research, mutations in two key genes block the senescence program…