The SASP: Inflammation Zombie Cells Spray
Zombie cells don't just sit there. They scream chemical signals that age the cells next to them.
Grounded in the research on senescence-associated secretory phenotype
the toxic cloud
SASP stands for senescence-associated secretory phenotype. When a cell goes senescent, stops dividing but won't die, it doesn't go quiet. It starts pumping out a cocktail of inflammatory cytokines, growth factors, and proteases into the tissue around it. The cell is a single zombie. The SASP is the chemical fog it breathes onto everything nearby. That fog is the actual weapon.
Campisi named it
The term comes from Judith Campisi's lab. Coppe, Campisi and co. coined it in a 2008 PLoS Biology paper on oncogenic RAS and p53. Before that, people knew senescent cells secreted stuff. Campisi's crew gave the whole secreted program one name and showed it was a coordinated phenotype, not random leakage. That made it a target you could actually study and drug.