Recent advances in the discovery of senolytics

•Cellular senescence is a state of persistent cell cycle arrest implemented as a safeguard to prevent proliferation of damaged cells and oncogenic neoplasia.•Pharmacological clearance of senescent cells with senolytics improves a wide range of age-related diseases and disorder in model organisms.•Approaches to identifying senolytics include the screening of compounds on senescent cells and bioinformatic analysis to identify targets.•Senolytics can be optimized through medicinal chemistry or linking to E3 targeting moieties to facilitate proteolysis of the targets.•Toxic compounds can be made specific to senescent cells through a pro-drug strategy such as where toxicity is activated by SA-β-gal.