The development of a drug discovery program based on senolytics required four years of research to answer fundamental biological questions.

“if you think about it the chapter one of this entire effort really was demonstrating a human being that eliminating senescence cells could take a feature of Aging that otherwise was untreatable and sent it backwards our phase one study certainly if the Phase two replicates that was the end of chapter one and we're sort of living in this chapter two moment where we're seeing how broad can we make this work”

“so we had four questions we were trying to ask and answer and the first question and none of this stuff got answered in the first 2011 paper was do senescent cells contribute to natural aging as opposed to some genetically contrived Mouse second question could we find a disease any human disease that we could model in an animal where we could eliminate senescence cells and take that disease and either stop it or even better send it backwards third question could we find a molecule that could trigger the elimination of senescence cells from a living creature safely and last question which is what's getting rid of these cells safe”

“it was a long way between that paper and when you could never credibly claim there could be a drug discovery program based on it and we spent the next four years in stealth mode asking for biological questions”

“So the good news is I think the strategy of tuning down the bad effects of senescence is on the way. That's on the horizon for sure. ... So what that means is you don't have to take a drug that kills senescent cells every day. You may have in mice you can apply them every few months and in people, maybe every few years. So this could be interesting strategy to improve health by incrementally knocking down senescent cells every so often.”