A Tissue Engineered Model of Aging: Interdependence and Cooperative Effects in Failing Tissues

TL;DR

This paper presents a tissue-engineered model to study how microscopic cellular failures and interdependence contribute to macroscopic tissue aging, revealing the critical role of cell interactions in tissue death.

Contribution

It introduces a controlled tissue model to link cellular damage and interdependence with tissue aging, bridging microscopic failures to systemic aging effects.

Findings

Cellular interdependence accelerates tissue failure.

Microscopic damage impacts macroscopic tissue aging.

Cell-cell interactions are crucial in aging processes.

Abstract

Aging remains a fundamental open problem in modern biology. Although there exist a number of theories on aging on the cellular scale, nearly nothing is known about how microscopic failures cascade to macroscopic failures of tissues, organs and ultimately the organism. The goal of this work is to bridge microscopic cell failure to macroscopic manifestations of aging. We use tissue engineered constructs to control the cellular-level damage and cell-cell distance in individual tissues to establish the role of complex interdependence and interactions between cells in aging tissues. We found that while microscopic mechanisms drive aging, the interdependency between cells plays a major role in tissue death, providing evidence on how cellular aging is connected to its higher systemic consequences.