Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence

Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) is the term coined by British biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey for the diverse range of regenerative medical therapies, either planned or currently in development, for the periodical repair of all age-related damage to human tissue with the ultimate purpose of maintaining a state of negligible senescence in the patient, thereby postponing age-associated disease for as long as the therapies are reapplied.

The term "negligible senescence" was first used in the early 1990s by professor Caleb Finch to describe organisms such as lobsters and hydras, which do not show symptoms of aging. The term "engineered negligible senescence" first appeared in print in Aubrey de Grey's 1999 book The Mitochondrial Free Radical Theory of Aging, and was later prefaced with the term "strategies" in the article Time to Talk SENS: Critiquing the Immutability of Human Aging De Grey called SENS a "goal-directed rather than curiosity-driven" approach to the science of aging, and "an effort to expand regenerative medicine into the territory of aging". To this end, SENS identifies seven categories of aging "damage" and a specific regenerative medical proposal for treating each.

While many biogerontologists find it "worthy of discussion" and SENS conferences feature important research in the field, some contend that the ultimate goals of de Grey's programme are too speculative given the current state of technology, referring to it as "fantasy rather than science".

The ultimate objective of SENS is the eventual elimination of age-related diseases and infirmity by repeatedly reducing the state of senescence in the organism. The SENS project consists in implementing a series of periodic medical interventions designed to repair, prevent or render irrelevant all the types of molecular and cellular damage that cause age-related pathology and degeneration, in order to avoid debilitation and death from age-related causes.

De Grey defines aging as "the set of accumulated side effects from metabolism that eventually kills us", and, more specifically, as follows: "a collection of cumulative changes to the molecular and cellular structure of an adult organism, which result in essential metabolic processes, but which also, once they progress far enough, increasingly disrupt metabolism, resulting in pathology and death." He adds: "geriatrics is the attempt to stop damage from causing pathology; traditional gerontology is the attempt to stop metabolism from causing damage; and the SENS (engineering) approach is to eliminate the damage periodically, so keeping its abundance below the level that causes any pathology." The SENS approach to biomedical gerontology is thus distinctive because of its emphasis on tissue rejuvenation rather than attempting to slow the aging process.

...
Wikipedia