Although ‘zombie’ skin cells sounds ominous, it turns out they’re not all bad all the time, as senescent skin cells, which outlive their usefulness without ever quite dying, cause inflammation and promote diseases but also help the immune system heal wounds.
Specifically, researchers from Johns Hopkins University have distinguished three subtypes of senescent skin cells featuring different shapes, biomarkers, and functions, to provide a possible explanation of the paradoxical behavior of these ‘zombie’ skin cells, per a study published in Science Advances on April 25.
‘Zombie’ skin cells subtypes
As June Philip, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins University, explained:
“We’ve known that senescent skin cells are different from senescent immune cells or senescent muscle cells. But within a cell type, senescent cells are often considered the same – in essence, skin cells are either senescent or not, for example. (…) But we’re finding that when a skin cell goes into senescence, or a zombie-like state, the cell could go down one of three different paths, each leading to a slightly different subtype”
Indeed, the scientists deployed the newest machine learning and imaging technology to compare skin cell samples from 50 healthy donors aged 20-90, having extracted dermal fibroblasts (cells that produce the scaffolding to give tissues their structure) and pushed them toward senescence by damaging their DNA, something that naturally occurs with aging.
Furthermore, they used specialized dyes to capture images of the cells’ shapes and stained elements to indicate senescent cells, used customized algorithms to analyze the images, measured 87 distinct physical characteristics, and categorized the fibroblasts into groups, discovering 11 different shapes and sizes, three of which are specific to senescent skin cells.
Thanks to the results of this research, medical and pharmacology scientists can develop drugs and therapies to target one fibroblast subtype in inflammation and disease and not the others as soon as they identify the senescence subtype. On top of that, more precise senescence targeting could pave the way for more efficient cancer treatments.
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