Impact
Laura Niedernhofer, MD, PhD, works on DNA damage and repair, genome instability, cellular senescence and ageing. Her group uses a mouse model of a human progeroid syndrome caused by a DNA repair defect, and showed that removing DNA repair defenses accelerates ageing, supporting the view that unrepaired DNA damage can drive ageing. Her lab also reported that transplanting muscle-derived stem cells from young mice slowed ageing in progeroid mice, evidence that stem-cell dysfunction contributes to ageing rather than only reflecting it. She contributed to the discovery of senolytics, a class of drugs that target senescent cells, and her programme focuses on therapies that target ageing itself to prevent or attenuate multiple age-related diseases at once. Her work on the repair enzyme ERCC1-XPF described its roles in repairing DNA interstrand crosslinks and double-strand breaks, relevant to platinum and radiation therapy. At the University of Minnesota she directs the Masonic Institute on the Biology of Aging and Metabolism and the Medical Discovery Team on the Biology of Aging, and is a Professor of Biochemistry, Molecular Biology and Biophysics. She has served on NCI, NIEHS and NIA study sections.
Metrics
- h-index 89 · google scholar as of 2026-09-23 source ↗
Research output
472 works · 33,849 citations · h-index 82 OpenAlex ↗
Selected publications
- Cellular Senescence: Defining a Path Forward ↗ 2019 · 3,339 citations
- The Achilles’ heel of senescent cells: from transcriptome to senolytic drugs ↗ 2015 · 2,545 citations
- Senolytics improve physical function and increase lifespan in old age ↗ 2018 · 2,360 citations
- Identification of a novel senolytic agent, navitoclax, targeting the Bcl‐2 family of anti‐apoptotic factors ↗ 2015 · 1,165 citations
- A new gene set identifies senescent cells and predicts senescence-associated pathways across tissues ↗ 2022 · 1,051 citations
Research funding
46 NIH awards · USD 26M total NIH RePORTER ↗
- Minnesota Tissue Mapping Center for Senescent Cells National Institute on Aging · 2025 · USD 2M
- Minnesota Tissue Mapping Center for Senescent Cells National Institute on Aging · 2024 · USD 2M
- Minnesota Tissue Mapping Center for Senescent Cells National Institute on Aging · 2023 · USD 2M
- Minnesota Tissue Mapping Center for Senescent Cells National Institute on Aging · 2022 · USD 2M
- Minnesota Tissue Mapping Center for Senescent Cells National Institute on Aging · 2021 · USD 2M