SENS and
Nanotechnology/Nanomedicine

A cornerstone of SENS's achieving its goal of short-circuiting much or all of aging's influence on disease and corporeal degradation is to repair cumulative age-related damage. Therefore, it might seem reasonable to develop nanotechnology to facilitate such repair.

This may become more a possibility in the future, but for now, SENS researchers are pursuing what they believe to be a faster track to their goals. The complex and futuristic manufacture of nanobots or artificial blood cells can be contrasted with LysoSENS's borrowing of ideas already used for heritablelysosomal storage diseases, and MitoSENS's expanding on others' successfully expression mitochondrial genes from the nucleus in vitro.

Although nanoparticles are already being developed to increase drug delivery specificity, more traditional methods are planned for delivery of lysosome-enhancing enzymes and mitochondrial genes.

Nevertheless, nanoparticle drug delivery may prove relevant to SENS therapies. By encasing drugs for release in very specific locations, nanoparticles reduce side effects (by eliminating delivery to tissues where the drug is toxic) and dosage requirements. This is significant considering that evolution may have avoided giving us damage-repairing mechanisms that work through later life because of early-life side effects.

Nanoparticles' ability to cross the blood-brain barrier may open the option to deliver lysosome-enhancing enzymes to the brain to obviate neurodegenerative diseases, instead of having to resort to delivering new genes to the nucleus to express such enzymes. Developing restorative therapy for arterial lysosomes may then be most of the battle to developing lysosomal therapies for such diseases as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases.