Saranya Wyles, M.D., Ph.D.

We actually want senescence.

because it's our cancer evading mechanism.

So even in skin, being predisposed to skin cancers, melanoma, et cetera, when a cell gets these DNA damage from UV light, from other exposures, there's a DNA damage that occurs and this cell is mutated.

Now, a cell becomes senescent because it kind of undergoes a growth arrest.

So it says, I see that the cell has a mutation.

It's going to take a lot of energy for me to put this cell under apoptosis.

So I don't have that energy to spare right now.

So instead, I'm going to put it under this cell cycle arrest or house arrest, if you will.

And that's how these senescent cells accumulate.

So it's a good thing.

Most cells that become senescent are bad players or bad apples.

But the immune system...

comes and clears out these senescent cells.

So it kind of gets arrested and then your active immune system comes and says, these are bad apples, we're going to clear them out.

What happens with age is your immune clearance slows down and you start accumulating senescent cells haphazardly or senescent programs turn on even without a DNA damage mutation.

And that's where chaos and havoc happens.

create trouble because basically these cells start accumulating and you don't have an efficient way of clearing them and they start to release factors.

They're called senescence-associated secretory phenotype that kind of affect their neighborhoods.

Yeah, so we've thought a lot about skin health and skin longevity, and we've created five pillars of skin span, which is this idea that we have our health span, lifespan, and your skin span is how well our skin is functioning over time.

And these five pillars, we kind of think about them as fundamentals.