Combining Senolytics and Cell Therapy for the Treatment of Parkinson’s Disease

There are more than 6 million people suffering from Parkinson’s disease worldwide. Current treatments can be ineffective and cause major side effects. Is there an alternative? Science says yes.

Introduction

Senescence and Senolytics

Figure 1. Cell viability of both wild-type and SATB1 KO cells after treatment with five compounds including DMSO (control), azithromycin (Azi), fisetin, dasatinib (D) plus quercetin (Q), and ABT-737 (another senolytic). Figure from [13].

Cell Therapies: MSK-DA01

Figure 2. Schematics of the nigrostriatal pathway, both normal and from a PD patient.
In
(a) a normal individual, DA neurons from the SNpc travel to the putamen and caudate nucleus (both parts of the striatum) where they synapse. However, in (b) a PD patient, the neurons projecting to the putamen are significantly reduced, as demonstrated by the dashed red line. As well, projections to the caudate see a loss, albeit a smaller one, as indicated by the thinner red line. Figure from [17].

Combining Two Approaches: Senolytics & Cell Therapies

Figure 3. Combining MSK-DA01 (putamen shown in dark green) and senolytics to eliminate senescent DA neurons in the SNpc (senescent neurons shown in blue) for a complete PD treatment. Created with BioRender.com

Conclusion

Acknowledgements

Reference List

--

--

Science communicator trying to learn something new everyday | Published in Start It Up, Predict & The Writing Cooperative

Get the Medium app

A button that says 'Download on the App Store', and if clicked it will lead you to the iOS App store
A button that says 'Get it on, Google Play', and if clicked it will lead you to the Google Play store
Parmin Sedigh

Science communicator trying to learn something new everyday | Published in Start It Up, Predict & The Writing Cooperative