Senescent cells — cells that have permanently stopped dividing in response to stress — are a fundamental feature of aging, yet remarkably little is known about where they are, how many exist, or how they change across a human lifespan. The NIH SenNet Consortium was established to answer those questions at scale.
This Perspective lays out the goals, approach, and infrastructure of SenNet: a Common Fund initiative to comprehensively map senescent cells across 18 human tissues and build a publicly available atlas.
What SenNet Is Building
Senescent cells (SnCs) are not uniform. They vary in origin, molecular signature, and behavior across tissue types and across time. Characterizing that heterogeneity — and understanding its relationship to physiological health — requires the kind of coordinated, multi-site effort that SenNet was designed to enable.
The core deliverables:
- A 4D SnC atlas integrating data across tissues and timepoints through a common coordinate framework
- Novel biomarkers for identifying senescent cells across tissue types
- Innovative detection tools for single-cell and spatial profiling
- Public multi-omics datasets deposited in open repositories
- Coverage across 18 human tissues, from young to old donors
Why It Matters
Senescent cells have been implicated in a wide range of age-related conditions, from fibrosis to neurodegeneration. Their therapeutic potential — the idea that clearing or modulating SnCs could slow or reverse aspects of aging — has attracted significant interest. But translating that potential into clinical reality requires knowing where senescent cells actually are, how they differ across tissues, and how they accumulate over time.
SenNet’s atlas is the foundation that makes that work possible.
Connection to PSC
Large-scale atlas efforts like SenNet generate and share enormous volumes of multi-omics data. My work at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center contributes to the computational infrastructure — storage, pipelines, and data portals — that makes that data accessible to the research community. SenNet is another node in a growing ecosystem of atlas programs, alongside HuBMAP and the Brain Image Library, that PSC helps support.