0:04
Finally, we'll just
talk a little bit about
the third bit of
the puzzle here.
This is that low-grade
chronic systemic inflammation
- inflammageing -
that we talk about.
0:16
Again, to the context
of the hallmarks,
three of the key ones
I think are involved
are altered intracellular
communication,
cellular senescence and
loss of proteostasis.
0:27
One of the original findings
that we had in the lab a
number of years ago now
is, again, using the
VZV challenge model.
I appreciate this graph
looks horribly complicated,
but it's actually really simple.
There are only certain
things we need to look at.
On the very left-hand side,
you will find young
donors which have VZV,
and on the right, you see
older donor VZV challenge.
If you just look at the
normal and the VZV columns,
you see, more or less,
between old and young
that they kinda look the same.
The responses are more or
less the same in both.
It was interesting because we're
very good scientists,
we are very diligent,
we decided to have a control
for injecting
something into the arm
and, of course, we used saline
because that's what
the VZV antigen is in.
When we did this in young people
we see there's no response.
Saline, the body isn't
supposed to respond to this.
But when we looked
in older people,
we started seeing,
you can see it here,
the red rectangles
in this graph.
The immune system was responding
to a saline challenge
in older people.
This indicates that perhaps
the immune system is
just more aggravated in
older people's tissues.
On the right-hand side,
I'm showing you this
horribly detailed
complicated table,
it's just a long list of
different genes that we
saw being activated in
response to saline.
But a key bit to note here is
all the asterisks on this graph.
They all denote genes
that are in part
at least regulated by
this molecule p38.
p38 is a very ubiquitous
driver of many processes,
one of which is inflammation.
We thought this was really
interesting that in
all the tissues when you
just give them saline,
we all of a sudden
start seeing evidence
that p38 is doing quite a lot.
