GeroScience - Editor's pick: Matthew J. Yousefzadeh

Matthew J. Yousefzadeh
Columbia University Irving Medical Center, USA

Areas of expertise:
Genomic instability and Cellular senescence

Matt Yousefzadeh is a faculty member in the Columbia Center for Health Longevity and the Columbia Center for Translational Immunology at Columbia University Medical Center where his lab focuses on exploring the role of senescent cells in aging and immunity.

Editor's Pick: Free to read

Cherry, C., Andorko, J.I., Krishnan, K. et al. Transfer learning in a biomaterial fibrosis model identifies in vivo senescence heterogeneity and contributions to vascularization and matrix production across species and diverse pathologies. GeroScience 45, 2559–2587 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11357-023-00785-7 (this opens in a new tab)  (FREE access until April 20th, 2024)

His synopsis of the article:
"Cherry et al. demonstrate the utility of using transfer learning methods to better identify rare cell populations, in this case senescent cells, in different tissues and species. This was done by creating new senescence reporter models using an inducible cre driven from the native p16 promoter that would activate a tdTomato reporter, thus allowing for senescent cell identification or enrichment. Senescence and the resulting fibrosis were induced using a foreign body response paradigm to identify senescent cell types by virtue of a signature (SenSig). The combination of this model and transfer learning was able to identify pericytes and a population of fibroblasts that were cartilage-like, each with distinctive SASP signatures. The authors showed that SenSig was able to identify senescent cells in other tissue microenvironments, including those from human samples. This work is incredibly important to the field as senescence mapping networks sponsored by the NIH are currently getting off the ground. The field has long grappled with the issue of identifying senescent cells and the need for "Forging a signature of in vivo senescence."¹ 
The work presented here is a novel system to better identify these cells to better characterize their heterogeneity and start to better understand the difference between the less deleterious forms of senescent cells and their more pathogenic counterparts."
                                                                                                                                      Matthew J. Yousefzadeh

1. Sharpless, N., Sherr, C. Forging a signature of in vivo senescence. Nat Rev Cancer 15, 397–408 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrc3960 (this opens in a new tab)