A Japanese research team said it developed a vaccine to remove so-called zombie cells that accumulate with age and damage nearby cells, causing aging-related diseases including arterial stiffening.
“We can expect that (the vaccine) will be applied to the treatment of arterial stiffening, diabetes and other aging-related diseases,” Minamino said.
When the team administered the vaccine to mice with arterial stiffening, many accumulated senescent cells were removed and areas affected by the disease shrank. When administered to aged mice, their frailty progression was slower than that of unvaccinated mice, according to the team.
I’m really curious to know if clearing senescent cells could help to reverse calcified arterial plaque over time, or at least if it could safely reverse non-calcified/soft plaque without causing it to rupture. This would be revolutionary in the prevention of heart attack/stroke in vulnerable populations.
I think this is the same vaccine. It looks like it was tested to see if it could mitigate alzheimers with mice. The thing I am surprised about is that I can find no evidence of a human trial and wonder how long it will be until someone gets around to that.
More broadly, we might call anyone with higher blood sugar levels as progeriod. I’ve heard many longevity researchers talk about how diabetes is really accelerated aging.
Multiple studies support the concept of accelerated aging in diabetes: increased telomere shortening and mitochondrial DNA depletion in patients with T2D [30] and accelerated aging of human collagen in juvenile diabetes mellitus as determined experimentally by enzymatic digestion [31]
This is really interesting. But as someone with an autoimmune disease I would cautious and ensure that the research team were doubly (tripley etc.) certain that the randomised controlled trials were large enough (and that they follow participants long enough) to ensure no autoimmune diseases resulted from the immune system giving non-zombie cells ‘the chop’.