C. Elegans as a Model of Cell Senescence and Alzheimer's Disease

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PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT Significance: Cell senescence is implicated in many age-related diseases. Drugs which postpone or reverse cellular senescence (SENO drugs) have been developed and three of these drugs are in human clinical trials. The availability of an inexpensive, whole-animal model of SENO drug action will accelerate development of new treatments of Alzheimer’s Disease. Background: SENO drugs ameliorate numerous age-related pathologies through a common pharmacological action: the selective killing or alteration of senescent cells. SENO drugs are expected to postpone diverse causes of human mortality including Parkinson’s Disease, Alzheimer’s Disease, and atherosclerosis, as well as cancer metastasis and recurrence. We propose to study SENO drugs, targeting three distinct pathways. These pathways lead to alternative responses characterized by distinct levels of AMP Kinase and P53. C. elegans transgenic strains have been engineered to express the amyloidogenic human proteins amyloid-beta (Aβ) and tau. We found that treatment with a SENO drug (piperlongumine) resulted in longer life in the wild-type and postponed paralysis in Aβ-expressing transgenic worm strains, and have since found a similar effect with a second SENO drug (KU60019). We propose to extend these studies by applying a representative set of five SENO drugs to wild-type nematodes and then apply single-cell RNA-Seq, to search for common seno-drug-driven transcriptional changes within and between specific cell types. 6