Judith Campisi
Judith Campisi (1948–2024) was an American cell and molecular biologist known for her work on cellular senescence and aging. She was a professor at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging and a senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Campisi established the modern view of senescence as a tumor-suppressive process in early life that contributes to tissue deterioration in late life, and her group described the senescence-associated secretory phenotype (SASP), the inflammatory and growth-factor-rich signaling output of senescent cells.
Career
Campisi received her PhD from the State University of New York at Stony Brook and trained as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School. After faculty positions at Boston University Medical School and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, she joined the Buck Institute in 2002, where she led a laboratory until her death in January 2024. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and co-founded the senescence-focused biotechnology company Unity Biotechnology.
Contributions
Campisi’s central argument was that senescence is an instance of antagonistic pleiotropy: the same growth-arrest program that prevents damaged cells from becoming cancerous also accumulates with age and degrades tissue function. Her laboratory showed that senescent cells secrete inflammatory cytokines, growth factors and matrix-remodeling enzymes - the SASP - which alter the behavior of neighboring cells and, in some contexts, stimulate the proliferation of premalignant ones.
Senescent cells change the signaling and selective environment of the tissue around them, with consequences for both tumor suppression and late-life pathology.
Notes
- Draft stub - maintenance agent to expand with key papers (e.g., the SASP papers, the senescence-as-cancer-suppression review series) and honors.