Lecture, Research

Dean’s Seminar Series featuring Judith Campisi, PhD – “Cellular senescence: Quo vadis?”

Name: Dean’s Seminar Series featuring Judith Campisi, PhD – “Cellular senescence: Quo vadis?”
Start: 2022-01-27T16:00:00-05:00
End: 2022-01-27T17:00:00-05:00
Location: Virtual

Dean’s Seminar Series

Co-sponsored by the Center for Healthy Aging and the Center for Fibrosis Research and Treatment

Judith Campisi, PhD
Professor, Buck Institute for Research on Aging

Title & Abstract:

“Cellular senescence: Quo vadis?”

Cellular senescence is state with both beneficial and deleterious consequences for complex organisms. Senescent cells arrest growth, essentially irreversibly, resist cell death and develop a complex senescence-associated secretory phenotype (SASP). The SASP includes inflammatory molecules chemokines, cytokines and DAMPS, proteases and bioactive lipids. Mouse models show that senescent cells are prime drivers of many diverse age-related pathologies, including median (but not maximum) life span. I will discuss the challenges of dissecting the beneficial from the deleterious effects of senescence, the development of drugs that can selectively kill senescent cells or suppress modules of the SASP, some large outstanding questions in the field of aging biology and the promise of living substantially healthier, if not longer, lives.