Senescent cells are damaging to tissue function and health when they linger and grow in number, as becomes the case with age. They contribute to the chronic inflammation of aging via their signaling, the senescence-associated secretory phenotype.
In skin, senescent cells are most likely responsible for a sizable fraction of the more problematic later life skin aging, in the 50s and on. It is less clear and less likely that they have much do to with the changes seen from the late 20s into the 40s.
Image credit: Pixabay (Free Pixabay license)
The primary advantage inherent in targeting the mechanisms of aging specifically in skin is that the regulatory path to market for cosmetic treatments is much, much shorter than the alternative Investigational New Drug option. Thus OneSkin is making available a topical senolytic treatment that selectively destroys senescent cells in skin, and is doing so years in advance of FDA approval of any of the programs aiming to destroy senescent cells throughout the body. (That said, the senolytic treatment of dasatinib and quercetin, shown to destroy senescent cells in humans in a clinical trial, and capable of producing significant reversal of aging and age-related disease in mice, is very much available to any sufficiently motivated individual).
It would be interesting to see concrete data on the size of the effect produced by the OneSkin treatment, but that data isn't available yet. Is this approach definitively better than the suppression of skin senescence achieved via long term topical use of rapamycin, for example? One would hope so, but we'll have to wait and see. This lack of published, detailed data on effects in humans at the time of product launch is fairly characteristic of the supplement and cosmetics industries, and it makes it hard for the public at large to tell the difference between groups that are earnest and addressing a useful mechanism versus those that are not.
OneSkin launches topical senetherapeutic skin treatment
“Our goal was to develop a product that extends skinspan, the period of time your skin is healthy and youthful. Our roots are in longevity science and we saw a need to shift the current paradigm. Instead of short-term fixes that focus purely on aesthetics, we're targeting the root cause of aging and optimizing skin health on a molecular level. We believe what we put on our skin should be safe, effective, and help to maximize our human potential.”
Source: Fight Aging!