Natural Killer Cells Can Remove the Aggregating Senescent Cells

May, 2021 - by CMI

 

The iNKT cells production decreases in different physiological conditions like Obesity, thus this activation mechanism of iNKT cells can confidently cure the aggregation of different senescent cells and the associated disorder with it.  

Cellular senescence is a key phenomenon in the body that occurs in human body because of the restriction or arrest in the progression cell cycle. The process continues throughout the lifetime for a particular individual posing immense pathological and physiological benefit for the body. The process helps in different physiological processes like, increasing host body immunity, tumor suppression and also take part in several would healing mechanism.

Although aggregation of this senescent can also cause severe drawbacks in the body. A large variety of age related diseases are linked with the cellular senescence. With age human body releases certain factors that causes a blockage in the senescence mechanism, causing the cells to get permanently withdrawn from cell-cycle thereby acquiring a particular secretome.

Recently in a discovery, researcher of university of California, San Francisco (UCSF), invited a new mechanism with which, the body can remove senescent cells (SNCs), therefore can be used to treat many Chronic diseases like osteoarthritis, diabetes and also in several type of cancers. The research was totally focused on the present of invariant Natural Killer T-cells (iNKT), an active part of the immune system of the human body that can sense damage in the DNA, via its signal transduction function. These iNKT are also responsible for the progression of senescent cells and their elimination too.

There are few advantages with iNKT cells, like all variants of iNKT cells have similar receptor on their membrane surface, which makes them a prime site for targeted drug therapy. Along with that iNKT follow a negative feedback loop mechanism.  The study was done by activating iNKT cells with lipid antigen, in an obesity induced mouse. Result were quite prominent with improved blood-glucose and also with a very few damaged cells. However, the problem with iNKT lies with the fact that like other cells they also experience a lesser growth with age.