Victor Lau
vzplau.bsky.social
Victor Lau
@vzplau.bsky.social
Praxis of Complex Systems; Aiming towards sustainability.

Repurposing Senescence to Elucidate the Brain. Views my own, he/him.

(Incoming PhD student at Western University!)
I look forward to seeing more on senescence + diseases, hopefully from both others & myself as well.

Sincerely, thanks so much for reading to here.

The detailed thoughts I'll save for within the News & Views (rdcu.be/d5qR5), but please, do feel free to message too.
January 6, 2025 at 5:20 PM
I believe there are a lot of future follow-up studies & hypotheses to follow up on; i.e., I think this also counts as richer value by scientific questioning design. Another example(can squeeze it in here, not yet posted here!) includes my first 1st author rev:

www.nature.com/articles/s41...
An aging, pathology burden, and glial senescence build-up hypothesis for late onset Alzheimer’s disease - Nature Communications
In this perspective, the authors hypothesise that glial senescence, requiring senescent microglia burden, perpetuates further aging, Alzheimer’s pathologies, and senescence. Increasing glial senescenc...
www.nature.com
January 6, 2025 at 5:20 PM
While Lyons et al. explore more tissue systems, I'm glad it's catching more awareness via being published in Nature Aging too. A primary benefit of it being published in Nat Aging = creates greater awareness + visibility; for influencing the field more.

I fully support this.
January 6, 2025 at 5:20 PM
I also missed this before, but also should def. acknowledge: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

I think these studies = ↑ chances to find ↑ precise mechanisms + parsimonious, higher potential targets to focus the field + help society on; +, kudos to the group efforts behind the scenes.
January 6, 2025 at 5:20 PM
I think personally, I love the process seen in the paper for having big-pic focuses (chronic stress, aging <-> senescence?) that the team chose, and how they tried to iterate from there to be at the forefront of this work.

Reminds me a bit of this paper (among many):
www.cell.com/cell/abstrac...
Problem choice and decision trees in science and engineering
Scientists and engineers often spend days choosing a problem and years solving it. This imbalance limits impact. Here, we offer a framework for problem choice: prompts for ideation, guidelines for evaluating impact and likelihood of success, the importance of fixing one parameter at a time, and opportunities afforded by failure.
www.cell.com
January 6, 2025 at 5:20 PM