Senolytics

Abstract

Cell aging is the major cause of age-related chronic diseases and most of morbidity, mortality, and health care expenses. Specific features of senescent cells, such as loss of proliferative capacity, increased secretion of proinflammatory cytokines, chemokines, proteolytic factors, and extracellular matrix proteases, together create the senescence-associated secretory phenotype (SASP). Content of such cells increases with age to break the physiological regeneration of tissues, which turns into the pandemics of modern humanity, including atherosclerosis, other cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, cancer, inflammatory lung diseases, cognitive disorders, sarcopenia, osteoporosis, etc. Aging cells, like cancerous cells, are relatively resistant to apoptosis. A recent prospect in medicine, the therapy with senolytic drugs that promote apoptosis, is based on overcoming this feature. By present, already numerous experimental studies have shown that senolytics can improve almost all indexes of health and increase duration of both chronological and physically active life of mice. Clinical studies in this field as yet are scarce and modest in terms of the number and significance of studied parameters. However, some of the studies have reported favorable results of using the senolytics.