What inspired you to pursue aging research?
I have always had a deep interest in understanding what drives health and disease among different individuals. Was it mainly encoded in their genes or maybe their environment? With these questions in mind, I pursued degrees in engineering to someday develop new technologies that clinicians can use to impact and improve the health of individuals. During the early stages of my PhD, I worked on developing single-cell profiling technologies to determine the metastatic potential of cancer cells based on their morphologies. However, during that time my great-grandmother who lived back in Grenada and was 93-year-old, suddenly started to lose her health. I remember feeling very puzzled as to how suddenly one can lose their health, even when there were no major underlying health conditions. Interestingly, around that same time, I met Dr. Jeremy Walston who opened my eyes to new perspectives on aging, and I immediately saw ways that I could use engineering to address unanswered questions in the field. Today, I have a passion for aging and bioengineering, and I think that we have a unique opportunity to develop solutions that can directly impact people, not only in the science that we do but in the people that we can reach and inspire. With my non-traditional background in aging research, I believe that by working together we can make the advances needed to boost health and drive longevity.
In your view, what does AFAR mean to the field, and what does it mean, for you, to receive an AFAR grant now?
AFAR is essential to the aging field and aging community. It provides funding opportunities, exposure, and a platform for aging researchers at all levels to impact aging, and in the long-term human health. I am incredibly excited and grateful for this award. As a bioengineer interested in addressing some of the key challenges of aging, this award will support our research and provide opportunities to interface deeper with the aging community. I believe that in the future I will look back and see that this award was pivotal to my growing success as a leader in the field of aging research.
What is exciting about your research’s potential impact?
One of the things that really excites me about this research project is that we are coming at the question from a different perspective. Currently, senescence is typically thought of as an end “state”, meaning that a cell can either be senescent or not. However, the literature is mixed with results showing that the benefit, or lack thereof, is context-dependent. We think that this context-dependence has to do with the notion that all senescent cells are not equal, but that there are functional subtypes. I think that if we can show this to be true, it could help explain a variety of findings to enhance our understanding, and potentially provide new ways to target deleterious senescence subtypes.
How would you describe your research to a non-scientist?
As we grow older, some of our cells become senescent and these senescent cells linger within our bodies. While it is a natural process, where after senescent cells arise, they are typically cleared from our bodies. However, during aging this process becomes less efficient. Also, it is unclear whether age-related accumulation of senescent cells is primarily due to a lack of clearance, or that cells from older individuals are also more prone to becoming senescent. Senescence is interesting because it is a cell-based phenotype whose presence and abundance are shown to have direct effects on the physiology and health of organisms. For instance, studies have shown that if you deplete certain types of senescent cells, you can mitigate various aging-related changes in mice. These are also being tested in humans. However, one of the major challenges is that we do not have great ways to identify senescent cells, and even with the biomarkers that we do have, we are unable to fully capture the extent of senescent cells across populations. Our research seeks to address this by developing a single-cell platform to use multiple characteristics of senescent cells that are different from non-senescent cells to identify and classify them. For instance, using multiple protein-based biomarkers and measuring cells and nuclear morphologies. With single biomarkers we do a decent job of identifying senescent cells, however, with our approach we believe that we will not only identify all or most of the senescent cells within populations, but we will also identify subtypes that may differ in abundance and function during aging.
