Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) is estimated to affect up to 600 million people worldwide and by 2020 it will become the third most frequent cause of death. In Europe alone, COPD affects up to 10% of people (i.e. more people than breast cancer and diabetes) and it takes the life of around 300,000 Europeans each year. Current therapies are associated with a variety of side effects some of which can be acute and even life threatening. Moreover, none of the existing medications for COPD has been shown conclusively to modify the long-term decline in lung function thus, COPD remains a disease with a significant unmet medical need.
Our approach is focusing on the pharmacological elimination of senescent cells (i.e. cells that have stopped dividing, but do affect their microenvironment) which accumulate in tissues with age and contribute to multiple age-related diseases, including COPD. In particular, we discovered that a particular molecule leads to specific elimination of senescent cells from tissues. In this project, we evaluated the effect of the identified molecule on the disease development and progression using the COPD mouse model we developed. We showed that the treatment reduces both hallmarks of COPD – chronic lung inflammation and emphysema. Therefore, we established a feasibility of using a senolytic compound (a compound that selectively eliminates senescent cells) in treatment of COPD. We also evaluated the business feasibility of our approach and took the necessary steps towards its commercialization, by presenting this project at the entrepreneurship course. The project was also presented to a scientific advisory board of biotech incubator and received thorough evaluation. Altogether, we establish that senolytic treatment is effective in a preclinical model of COPD, and pursued the commercialization of our approach. We expect that eventually one of the senolytic treatments will provide the efficient and safe treatment modality for COPD.
