Delaying replicative senescence in primary cells
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Exploring replicative senescence in primary human cells, and its modulations by small molecules
IRAS ID
245053
Contact name
Peter Tyrer
Contact email
Duration of Study in the UK
2 years, 7 months, 1 days
Research summary
As we age, our cells lose the capacity to divide, leading to loss of tissue’s ability to heal and repair; they become ‘senescent’. Senescent cells are not just 'old' - they actively damage the cells around them. We have found that a type of chemical can help mouse cells defer the day when they enter this state. We want to extend this result from mouse to human cells, as a step on the way to developing treatments for such disabilities of aging as muscle loss, skin thinning, possibly even neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's.
The research will take human cells, isolated from anonymous tissue collected by another company, and grow them in the lab under a range of conditions that mimic healthy aging and aging in diabetics. We will be looking at skin cells to see if we can prevent the loss of cells that makes the skin of the elderly thin and fragile, and ulcers in diabetics fail to heal. We will also be looking at muscle cells, to see if we can prevent the loss of cells that is the cause of disability in Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy, and may be one of the causes of weakening and shrinking muscles in the elderly. We will be testing different surfaces, different solutions to grow them in, and different chemicals to see how closely our results might model what happens in humans.
None of the cells will be traceable back to a human, and none of the chemicals or other procedures will be tested on any humans, only on cells. We plan this series of experiments to last 9 to 12 months, depending on how long the cells live. The work will be carried out in research labs at the Babraham Biomedical Campus.
REC name
East Midlands - Derby Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
18/EM/0103
Date of REC Opinion
4 Apr 2018
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion