TL;DR
As bodies age, they pile up worn-out "zombie" cells that stop dividing but refuse to die, leaking inflammatory signals that wear down the tissue around them. Most efforts to clear them rely on pills taken again and again. A Chinese research group is testing a different idea: a vaccine that teaches the immune system to hunt those cells down on its own. In mice, it worked well enough to notice. Old mice given the shot lived 12% longer at the median than untreated mice, and they handled blood sugar better and carried less liver fat. This is a mouse study with about 10 animals per group, from a paper that could not be opened to check, and no human trial is named yet. It keeps alive a tantalizing possibility for people: that the body's own defenses could someday be enlisted to keep tissues younger, instead of a lifetime of pills. For the odds on a vaccine against aging cells and a timeline of the steps from mice to people, subscribe.
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