Regeneration Restored

As a person ages, their body gradually slows down – their walking, their reactions, even the regeneration of their cells. Inside the gut, it’s no different. The intestinal epithelium (the gut lining) of a young adult can entirely replace itself in less than a week. In elderly people however, many epithelial cells show signs of senescence – a dormant state in which the cells can no longer replicate to repair damage. This can lead to various gut complications. The image shows gut epithelium from an elderly person enriched with a senescence factor (a protein called uPAR; (cyan). Encouragingly, using an immunotherapy approach (called CAR-T) in which T cells were engineered to recognise and eliminate the gut cells that produce this senescence factor, scientists have been able to improve the ability of old mice to recover from gastrointestinal insults. Better still, just one round of the therapy provided long-term improvement to the animal’s gut health.

Written by Ruth Williams

Ruth Williams

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Ruth is a freelance science journalist based in the US. She's a regular correspondent for The Scientist, and her work has appeared in The Lancet, Nature, Scientific American Mind, BBC Focus and elsewhere. Twitter @rooph

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• Image from work by Onur Eskiocak, Joseph Gewolb, Vyom Shah, James A. Rouse, Saria Chowdhury et al. Amor Vegas & Beyaz labs at CSHL
• Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Cold Spring Harbor, NY, USA
• Image originally published as 'Attribution required' equating to a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Research published in Nature Aging, November 2025