Research Paper Volume 14, Issue 5 pp 2131—2147
Enhanced co-culture and enrichment of human natural killer cells for the selective clearance of senescent cells
- 1 SENS Research Foundation, Mountain View, CA 94041, USA
- 2 Loughborough University, Centre for Biological Engineering, Wolfson School of Electrical, Material and Manufacturing Engineering, Loughborough, UK
Received: September 24, 2021 Accepted: February 22, 2022 Published: March 4, 2022
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.203931How to Cite
Copyright: © 2022 Kim 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
In the context of aging and age-associated diseases, Natural Killer (NK) cells have been revealed as a key cell type responsible for the immune clearance of senescent cells. Subsequently, NK cell-based therapies have emerged as promising alternatives to drug-based therapeutic interventions for the prevention and treatment of age-related disease and debility. Given the promise of NK cell-mediated immunotherapies as a safe and effective treatment strategy, we outline an improved method by which primary NK cells can be efficiently enriched from human peripheral blood across multiple donors (ages 20-42 years old), with a practical protocol that reliably enhances both CD56dim and CD56bright NK cells by 15-fold and 3-fold, respectively. Importantly, we show that our co-culture protocol can be used as an easily adaptable tool to assess highly efficient and selective killing of senescent cells by primary NK cells enriched via our method using longer co-culture durations and a low target to effector ratio, which may be more physiological than has been achieved in previous literature.