Researchers have demonstrated that nanoparticles coated with quercetin molecules can selectively target and eliminate harmful senescent cells.

As you age, increasing numbers of your cells enter into a state known as senescence. Senescent cells do not divide or support the tissues of which they are part; instead, they emit a range of potentially harmful chemical signals that encourage nearby healthy cells to enter the same senescent state. Their presence causes many problems: they reduce tissue repair, increase chronic inflammation, and can even eventually raise the risk of cancer and other age-related diseases.wisepoqder Quercetin powder
Senescent cells normally destroy themselves via a programmed process called apoptosis, and they are also removed by the immune system; however, the immune system weakens with age, and increasing numbers of senescent cells escape this process and begin to accumulate in all the tissues of the body.

By the time people reach old age, significant numbers of these senescent cells have built up, causing chronic inflammation and damage to surrounding cells and tissue. These senescent cells are a key process in the progression of aging.

Senescent cells only make up a small number of total cells in the body, but they secrete pro-inflammatory cytokines, chemokines, and extracellular matrix proteases, which, together, form the senescence-associated secretory phenotype, or SASP. The SASP is thought to significantly contribute to aging and cancer; thus, targeting senescent cells and removing them has been suggested as a potential solution to this problem.

The trouble with quercetin

Quercetin is a naturally occurring plant polyphenol, a category that often has poor water solubility, chemical instability, or poor bioavailability. These confounding factors could be muddling its effectiveness and making it unreliable as a senolytic therapy. This likely explains why different senolytic studies using quercetin have yielded conflicting results: there are simply too many processes that can influence these natural molecules for them to be reliable.

We have seen in past mouse studies and recent Mayo Clinic human trials that quercetin, when used in combination with the cancer drug dasatinib, can be the basis for an effective therapy for eliminating senescent cells. Unfortunately, on its own, quercetin does not have a significant senolytic effect, which is possibly due to its limitations as a polyphenol.

However, there are ways to overcome these issues with quercetin and other similar polyphenols, and that is by using special delivery systems that make the molecules more effective and controllable. Polymer nanoparticles, lipid-based carriers, inclusion complexes, micelles, and conjugate-based delivery systems are all examples of approaches that can deliver molecules more effectively.

Nanoparticles make quercetin more effective

The researchers of this study opted to use a nanoparticle-based delivery system to carry quercetin molecules to senescent cells in order to destroy them [1]. They created magnetite nanoparticles and coated their surface with quercetin molecules, then examined the senolytic action of this approach.

They found that the nanoparticles were effective at attenuating inflammator