The SENS Approach: A Reimagined Research Strategy for Aging

Many things go wrong with aging bodies, but at the root of them all is the burden of decades of unrepaired damage to the cellular and molecular structures that make up the functional units of our tissues. As each essential microscopic structure fails, tissue function becomes progressively compromised – imperceptibly at first, but ending in the slide into the diseases and disabilities of aging.

SENS Research Foundation’s strategy to prevent and reverse age-related ill-health is to apply the principles of regenerative medicine to repair the damage of aging at the level where it occurs. We are developing a new kind of medicine: regenerative therapies that remove, repair, replace, or render harmless the cellular and molecular damage that has accumulated in our tissues with time. By reconstructing the structured order of the living machinery of our tissues, these rejuvenation biotechnologies will restore the normal functioning of the body’s cells and essential biomolecules, returning aging tissues to health and bringing back the body’s youthful vigor.

In its own way, each of these kinds of damage make our bodies frail, and contribute to the rising frailty and ill-health that appears in our sixth decade of life and accelerates thereafter.

The specific metabolic processes that are ultimately responsible for causing all of this damage are still only partially understood. For each major class of aging damage, a strategy for its removal or repair either already exists in prototype form, or is foreseeable from existing scientific developments: see the specific “Rejuvenation Biotechnology” listed for each kind of aging damage in the Table, and click the program name to learn more.

The entire SENS strategy – from the kinds of aging damage that occur, to their contribution to age-related frailty and illness, to the rejuvenation biotechnologies that can repair and replace the damaged functional units – are described in detail in Ending Aging, by SENS Research Foundation Co-founder Dr Aubrey de Grey and Science Writer Michael Rae.