She was co-editor in chief of the Aging Journal, together with Mikhail Blagosklonny and David Sinclair, and founder of the pharmaceutical company Unity Biotechnology.
in chemistry in 1974 and Ph.D. in biochemistry in 1979 (under mentor Carl Scandella) from the State University of New York at Stony Brook and completed her postdoctoral training at the Harvard Medical School in 1982.
[4] She initially joined the Boston University Medical School, and moved onto the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory as a Senior Scientist in 1991.
Cellular senescence was first formally observed in 1965 by Leonard Hayflick, who demonstrated that certain cells have limited ability to proliferate in-vitro.
Dysfunctional telomeres trigger a classical DNA Damage Response, and are a major contributing factor to why many cells cannot replicate indefinitely without the presence of telomerase.
DNA-damage-initiated senescence is caused by major DNA damage (usually double-stranded breaks) that trigger pathways that keep the cell from dividing.
Specifically, the cells exhibit up-regulation of genes that encode for extracellular-matrix degrading proteins (such as metalloproteases), inflammatory cytokines, and growth factors.
[11] The damage that these factors do to the extracellular matrix is a possible mechanism for how the accumulation of senescent cells in tissues results in aging in mammals.
While the senescence response can be effective at protecting organisms from cancer at young ages, it can also cause the age-related decline in tissue function typical of many degenerative diseases in mammals.