Could p16 possibly be nature’s way of protecting people from cancer as they age?
We think the increase in p16 is important because it protects people from cancer on a daily basis. It is sort of like the police. At any moment, a police force’s activity is very important to suppressing crime; but if you have an overzealous police officer, you might not notice it on any given day. Over time, however, society will suffer because eventually the overzealous officer will have a negative impact on law-abiding citizens and beneficial activities. So we think of p16 as behaving in a kind of good cop, bad cop way. p16 is a good cop when it cracks down on individual cancers that crop up; but at the same time, it acts like a bad cop when activation of the tumor-suppression mechanism in p16 causes self-renewing cells like stem cells and beta cells in the pancreas to become senescent. As a result, your bone marrow gets older, the beta and islet cells in your pancreas get older, and you have a tissue that cannot regenerate and repair. Does p16 go up in all tissues as they age? p16
