Adoptive cell therapies involve introducing immune cells to attack a specific issue in the body, most often cancer. The earliest forms of adoptive cell therapy used immune cells from another individual, but more modern approaches use a patient's own cells, expanded in culture and potentially engineered in various ways. Think of chimeric antigen receptor T cell (CAR-T) therapies, for example. Both T cells and natural killer (NK) cells have been employed as a basis for adoptive cell therapies targeted at cancer. In today's open access paper, researchers consider another potential use for adoptiv ..read more

The practice of calorie restriction, reducing calorie intake by up to 40% while still obtaining a sufficient level of micronutrients necessary to good health, is well demonstrated to slow aging. It slows near all aspects of aging and progression of near all age-related conditions, and so the literature is packed with papers that investigate just one of those line items. Here, the focus is on loss of bone mineral density with age, a phenomenon that leads to osteoporosis and eventual fracture and incapacity. This is one of the few age-related conditions for which there is some debate over whethe ..read more

The measurement of life span is self-evident and obvious, but is little consensus on how to measure healthspan, the length of life spent in good health. Good health is like art, we know it when we see it, but that isn't helpful when trying to compare the effects of interventions where the studies were conducted by different researchers with different ideas as what constitutes good health in an older individual. This issue exists for both human and animal studies, and the lack of consistency makes it hard to make comparisons based on the existing literature on the topic. Researchers are startin ..read more

What are the biological mechanisms by which centenarians manage to reach 100 years of age or more, significantly outliving near all of their birth cohort peers? This is a question that receives a great deal of interest in the research community and among the public at large. The answer that aging is a stochastic process of damage accumulation that produces a distribution of outcomes, and that some people are lucky, is not very satisfying. So a sizable amount of funding is directed towards analysis of factors that might robustly contribution to the longevity of centenarians: cultural transmissi ..read more

Researchers here describe an injected immunomodulatory peptide that reduces migration of adaptive immune cells in response to inflammatory signaling. They mount the argument that excessive immune cell migration is a sizable part of the problem in the chronic inflammation of aging, and arises due to age-related changes in immune cell behavior. Delivering the peptide is intended to restore a more youthful regulation of this immune cell behavior. Growing evidence suggests that the ageing process significantly impacts leukocyte trafficking dynamics during inflammation, thereby compromising protec ..read more

The aging brain malfunctions in complex ways, giving rise to a range of poorly categorized end states beyond the most prevalent, well known neurodegenerative conditions. As an example of research in this part of the field, scientists here discuss a form of age-related memory loss that they call limbic-predominant amnestic neurodegenerative syndrome. Interestingly, this condition appears to be associated with TDP-43 pathology, a comparatively recently discovered form of harmful protein aggregation in the aging brain that is now known to contribute to some forms of neurodegeneration. Researcher ..read more

Senescent cells accumulate with age throughout the body. Cellular senescence occurs most often at the end of a cell's replicative life span, but can also be provoked by damage, a toxic environment, or the signaling of other nearby senescent cells. Senescent cells are metabolically active and secrete a potent mix of pro-inflammatory, pro-growth signals. This state has a number of useful functions, such as coordination of wound healing and elimination of potentially cancerous cells. In youth senescent cells are promptly destroyed by the immune system or programmed cell death processes, but with ..read more

Mitochondria are the power plants of the cell, their production of the chemical energy store molecule adenosine triphosphate (ATP) essential to cell function. With advancing age mitochondria become dysfunctional for reasons that in part involve damage to mitochondrial DNA and in part involve changes in gene expression that harm mitochondrial structure and the quality control processes of mitophagy. Mitochondrial dysfunction places stress on cells in a number of ways, from loss of ATP production to increased generation of oxidative molecules. What might be fixed if mitochondria could be restore ..read more

Here find a SENS Research Foundation article covering some of the specifics of progress towards messenger RNA (mRNA) therapies capable of breaking down harmful age-related intracellular protein aggregates, with a focus on those involved in neurodegenerative conditions. Delivery of synthetic mRNA into cells by lipid nanoparticle is an active area of gene therapy development. Once inside cells, mRNA molecules are processed by ribosomes to produce proteins for a short period of time. A range of biochemical problems in the cells of aged tissues can only be solved by expressing suitable proteins in ..read more

Atherosclerosis is the development of fatty plaques in blood vessel walls. It is a universal condition of aging, present to some degree in every older individual. Atherosclerosis contributes to many age-related diseases via narrowing of vessels and reduced blood flow on the one hand, and on the other causing more than a quarter of all human mortality via the stroke and heart attack that can follow rupture of an unstable plaque. We might think of atherosclerosis as a condition of macrophage dysfunction. Macrophages are innate immune cells responsible for clearing excess cholesterol from blood v ..read more