For years, sci­en­tists have looked to curb ag­ing and chron­ic dis­eases by clear­ing de­funct cells with ir­repara­ble dam­age, al­so known as senes­cent cells. Drug­mak­ers like Bris­tol My­ers Squibb and Uni­ty Biotech­nol­o­gy have toiled over senolyt­ics to kill the stub­born cells. So when Robin Man­sukhani was told it could be done us­ing reawak­ened im­mune cells, he was in­trigued.

Senes­cence serves a pro­tec­tive func­tion. It oc­curs when cells are too dam­aged to keep di­vid­ing — for ex­am­ple, if they de­vel­op a can­cer­ous mu­ta­tion. But senes­cent cells al­so con­tribute to ag­ing and oth­er dis­eases, emit­ting tox­ic mol­e­cules that cause in­flam­ma­tion and tis­sue dam­age.

Anil Bhushan

Back in 2018, Man­sukhani was in­tro­duced to Anil Bhushan, a pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, San Fran­cis­co, who was work­ing on a way to weaponize in­vari­ant Nat­ur­al Killer T (iNKT) cells against senes­cent cells to treat type 1 di­a­betes. iNKT cells act as a sort of sur­veil­lance sys­tem, elim­i­nat­ing for­eign cells, but be­come less ac­tive with age and oth­er fac­tors.

“I fol­lowed senes­cence for a long time, but I nev­er ever thought about it in the con­text of type 1 di­a­betes. So that da­ta just kind of knocked me aside,” Man­sukhani said.

He did his own re­search, then about six weeks lat­er teamed up with Bhushan to launch De­cid­u­ous Ther­a­peu­tics. While the team is no longer go­ing af­ter di­a­betes, they pub­lished a pa­per on Mon­day in Med link­ing in vi­vo iNKT cells with clear­ing senes­cent cells.

“These cells have long been of in­ter­est to peo­ple — they just, you know, haven’t re­al­ly fig­ured out what to do with them or what they re­al­ly do,” Man­sukhani, now CEO, said. “There was some­thing in the senes­cent cell that said, OK, there’s a foot­print here to an im­mune cell that’s go­ing to talk to this senes­cent cell and clear it out. And that’s where things get ex­cit­ing.”

iNK­Ts have two main at­trib­ut­es that make them an ap­peal­ing tar­get, Man­sukhani ex­plained. First, they have the same re­cep­tor, which doesn’t ap­pear on any oth­er cell in the body, al­low­ing a high lev­el of speci­fici­ty. And they al­so op­er­ate in a nat­ur­al neg­a­tive feed­back loop, that re­turns them to dor­man­cy af­ter a pe­ri­od of ac­tiv­i­ty.

“Us­ing iNKT-tar­get­ed ther­a­py can pig­gy­back on their ex­quis­ite, built-in speci­fici­ty,” Bhushan said in a state­ment.

Us­ing the ap­proach, the sci­en­tists were able to im­prove blood glu­cose lev­els in mice with di­et-in­duced obe­si­ty, and ex­tend the lives of mice with lung fi­bro­sis. Go­ing forth, Man­sukhani said the team is go­ing to look at things like chron­ic kid­ney dis­ease and car­diac fi­bro­sis. He ex­pects to hit the clin­ic in mid-to-late 2023.

“The ra­tio­nale here was that, if this hap­pens nat­u­ral­ly in the body by the im­mune sys­tem, let’s just go back and un­der­stand that first, and then we can fig­ure out what to do with that in­for­ma­tion once we ac­tu­al­ly un­der­stand that un­der­ly­ing first prin­ci­ple,” he said.

Neurologist and King’s College London professor Christopher Shaw has been researching neurodegenerative diseases like ALS and collaborating with drugmakers for the last 25 years in the hopes of pushing new therapies forward. But unfortunately, none of those efforts have come anywhere close to fruition.

“So, you know, after 20 years in the game, I said, ‘Let’s try and do it ourselves,’” he told Endpoints News. 

Discovery Life Sciences has acquired what claims to be the Maryland-based host of the world’s largest hepatocyte inventory, known as IVAL, to help researchers select more effective and safer drug candidates in the future.

The combined companies will now serve a wider range of drug research and development scientists, according to Albert Li, who founded IVAL in 2004 and is set to join the Discovery leadership team as the CSO of pharmacology and toxicology.

Researchers may be nearing an answer for the mysterious and life-threatening blood clots that appeared on very rare occasions in people who received the J&J or AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine.

The new work builds on an early hypothesis researchers in Norway put forward last spring, when the cases first cropped up. They proposed the events were similar to blood clots that can occur in a small subset of patients who receive heparin, one of the most commonly used blood thinners.