The Suicide Gene Therapy Kills Cancer Cells
It makes sense, then, that drugs that kill senescent and cancer cells could be the same. Researchers in the new study wanted to test this hypothesis.
However, in this experiment, the researchers discovered that the chosen senolytic drugs were not effective at destroying cancer cells with senescence-associated gene expression. Cancer cells and senescent a cells share many similarities, but they differ on an epigenetic basis.
The researchers did, however, demonstrate that a so-called \”suicide gene therapy\” that causes both senescent cells and cancer cells to kill themselves worked by targeting senescence-associated p16Ink4a. This approach is similar with that of Oisin Biotechnologies a spin-off from SENS, which uses a suicide gene to eliminate senescent cell.
Source:
https://www.leafscience.org/suicide-gene-therapy/
