News
Forever Healthy Fellowship was awarded to Dr. Tesfahun Admasu
- 06/23/2020
To inspire more young scientists to join the quest to get aging under full medical control, we have created the Forever Healthy Fellowship Program. The fellowship covers support for a three-year project, to be carried out at the SENS Research Center in Mountain View, California. It includes the salary for the fellow, benefits, supplies, and space in a fully equipped research lab.
We are happy to announce, that the Forever Healthy Fellowship was awarded to Dr. Tesfahun Admasu.
When cells age, they lose their proliferative capacity and stop dividing in a phenomenon called senescence. Cellular senescence decreases the regenerative capacity of cells and tissues and is thought to be driving age-associated pathologies. Throughout the aging process, senescent cells accumulate and secrete a characteristic set of proteins, called a senescence-associated secretory phenotype (SASP). Senescent cells can trigger healthy cells in their surrounding to become senescent, which further aggregate the effect. While primary senescent cells are fairly well characterized at this point, not much is known about secondary senescent cells and how they arise in vivo.
Project Goals
The project of Dr. Tesfahun Admasu seeks to confirm the hypothesis that secondary senescent cells are different from primary senescent cells, and would, therefore, need a different senolytic to eradicate them. In addition, the project will study how SASP components mediate the spread of senescence. This work could provide us with the basis for a new, therapeutically viable hypothesis for stopping the spread and to rejuvenate the affected tissue.