The newest SENS research - OncoSENS - is beginning
Mathias Bollmann
University of Hamburg & Methuselah Foundation
Since I first became involved with the research initiated by the Methuselah Foundation in late 2006, I have been fascinated by aging and by SENS - the plan to cure its main manifestations - in particular. After some initial work in other areas I focused my interest on telomere biology in 2007. I am a medical student at the University of Hamburg, Germany, with a deep interest in basic research and hope to contribute to SENS research theoretically and experimentally as well as, in later stages, clinically.
Cancer is one of the leading causes of death and thus one of the key targets of SENS. Our approach aims to tackle cancer by making it impossible for tumor cells to become immortal, rendering them harmless. Telomeres, the ends of chromosomes, play a key role in this process; specifically, we want to prevent them from being lengthened - a precondition of cellular immortality. In humans two mechanisms of telomere lengthening exist, of which the telomerase enzyme is the most well known; in my work, I focus on the less understood form called “alternative lengthening of telomeres” (ALT).
In contrast to telomerase, the molecular basis of ALT still remains to be elucidated. We have a rough understanding of its function, and a partial list of the genes involved, but have unfortunately so far failed to identify a master gene which - we argue - must exist to allow for efficient targeting of the mechanism1. Moreover, ALT-specific research seems to have slowed down in recent years, and most of the newest data we have on ALT comes from research that has other main topics. The goal of my current work is to understand the genetic basis of ALT, and how it relates to the telomere biology of different stem cell types.
