About
Sentcell is an exclusive NCE (New Chemical Entity) company that develops first in class human rejuvenating therapies by rational design focused on a single pathway: the sMAC.
Rejuvenating drugs for renewed life
Our vision is to implement fundamental medicine by a dual based approach to reverse the ageing clock at later points in life (rejuvenating drugs) or delaying it acting at an earlier one (anti-ageing drugs). To do this, we have been focusing on T cells, which themselves employ a variety of strategies to exist and be functional for decades, protecting us from the challenges of life.
Given the novelty and inventiveness of the findings, we create watertight intellectual properties that offer boundless possibilities to respond to unanswered questions and unmet medical needs. As a model system, we use T cells because they exemplify anti-ageing solutions to deliver immune protection over a lifetime. For instance, our Founder was the first to 1) identify a molecular connection between ageing and metabolism in T cells (Lanna et al. Nature Immunology 2014), 2) discover a large previously unknown macromolecular complex of immune-inhibitory proteins, the sMAC, that accumulate in senescent T cells causing immune-dysfunction (Lanna et al. Nature Immunology 2017), and, 3) observe telomere transfer at the immune synapse that generates long-lived memory cells, bypassing the senescence state (Lanna et al. Nature Cell Biology, 2022 in press). We have therefore established a system where drugs can be designed to reverse or alter the ageing cellular fate. That can be extended well beyond immune regulation to respond to the challenges of life.
Our research is based not just on data
Unlike big data driven discoveries, we use a rationalistic, logic based biochemical approach to identify fundamental evolutionary conserved mechanisms and deliver safe and effective therapies. The evolutionary conserved nature of the processes allow generation of a robust workflow, with drug testing directly in primary human cells followed by in vivo preclinical validation and clinical trial exemplification. Our discoveries spun out of knowhow generated by the Founder over 15 years of resilient single-topic research investigating the biology of human ageing through modulation of the T cell.