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Priority Research Paper|Volume 13, Issue 15|pp 19088—19107

Senescence-associated hyper-activation to inflammatory stimuli in vitro

Vivekananda Budamagunta1,2,3, Sahana Manohar-Sindhu1,5, Yang Yang2,4, Yonghan He2, Dmitry O. Traktuev1,5, Thomas C. Foster1,3, Daohong Zhou1,2
  • 1Genetics and Genomics Graduate Program, Genetics Institute, College of Medicine, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32610, USA
  • 2Department of Pharmacodynamics, College of Pharmacy, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32610, USA
  • 3Department of Neuroscience, McKnight Brain Institute, College of Medicine, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32610, USA
  • 4Pharmacology and Therapeutics Graduate Program, Department of Pharmacology and Therapeutics, College of Medicine, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32610, USA
  • 5Department of Medicine, College of Medicine, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32610, USA
Received: May 15, 2021Accepted: July 27, 2021Published: August 10, 2021
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.203396

Copyright: © 2021 Budamagunta et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

Aging is associated with an increased susceptibility to adverse inflammatory conditions such as sepsis and cytokine storm. We hypothesized that senescent cells (SnCs) play a central role in this age-associated pathology in part due to their expression of the senescence-associated secretory phenotype (SASP), which may prime SnCs to inflammatory stimulation. To test this hypothesis, we examined the expression of various inflammatory cytokines and chemokines at the levels of gene transcription and protein production in various SnCs in vitro in response to lipopolysaccharide (LPS), interleukin-1β (IL1β), and tumor necrosis factor α (TNFα) stimulation. We found that SnCs not only expressed higher basal levels of various inflammatory cytokines and chemokines as a manifestation of the SASP, but more importantly exhibited hyper-activation of the induction of a variety of inflammatory mediators in response to LPS, IL1β and TNFα stimulation as compared with non-SnCs. This senescence-associated hyper-activation is likely mediated in part via the p38MAPK (p38) and NFκB pathways because LPS stimulation elicited significantly higher levels of p38 phosphorylation and NFκB p65 nuclear translation in SnCs when compared to their non-senescent counterparts and inhibition of these pathways with losmapimod (a p38 specific inhibitor) and BMS-345541 (a selective NFκB inhibitor) attenuated LPS-induced expression of IL6, TNFα, CCL5, and IL1β mRNA in SnCs. These findings suggest that SnCs may play an important role in the age-related increases in the susceptibility to developing an exacerbated inflammatory response and highlight the potential to use senotherapeutics to ameliorate the severity of various devastating inflammatory conditions in the elderly.