The Splice of Life – Reprogramming Ageing to Treat Chronic Disease
Talk by Lorna Harries – Exeter Medical School and SENISCA.
The accumulation of old and dysfunctional cells is a major cause of why we become more susceptible to diseases such as cardiovascular disease and dementia as we get older. These old and dysfunctional cells are termed ‘senescent’ and are often referred to as ‘zombie’ cells because they are able to communicate with the healthy cells around them and persuade them also to demonstrate features of ageing. The presence of senescent cells has been demonstrated to contribute not just to the common, chronic diseases of ageing, but with the ageing process itself.
In this talk, Lorna Harries will describe our discovery of a new cause of senescence and demonstrate by targeting this process. It is possible to ‘reprogram’ old cells back to a younger, and more functional state.
She will describe how we are harnessing this new knowledge to develop a new generation of medicines that are capable of targeting age-related diseases at their cause, not just their symptoms. In the first instance, we are trying to tackle a fibrotic disease of the lung called idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) which is currently incurable. By targeting the roots of ageing itself, we have been able to reprogram cells and tissues from IPF patients to slow fibrosis and hopefully provide a new solution for these patients beyond the merely palliative.
Many of the most common diseases that we are subject to as we age are driven by the accumulation of old cells. Should we be successful, the approaches Lorna will describe have implications not just for IPF, but for many diseases of ageing, and may represent a completely new paradigm in how we treat age-associated disease.
Professor Lorna Harries gained her PhD from University College London in 1994. She established the RNA-mediated disease mechanisms group at Exeter in 2006 and holds a personal chair in Molecular Genetics at the University of Exeter Medical School and a position as co-founder, co-director and Chief Scientific Officer at SENISCA Ltd, a spin out company founded on the Harries lab’s research. Lorna also heads the Exeter Animal Free Research Centre of Excellence (ARC 2.0) funded by Animal Free Research UK. The Harries lab have interests in -omics approaches to the study of ageing and age-related disease processes in humans, and her work takes a genes-to-systems approach, ranging from ‘big data’ analyses to detailed individual molecular analysis of particular genes. Her team were the first to report dysregulation of alternative splicing as a new, and druggable, hallmark of ageing.