The five-year grant will integrate studies of factors contributing to longer and healthier lives

TGen, part of City of Hope, and its partners in the Longevity Consortium have received a five-year, $45 million grant to move the consortium’s work to its next stage: integrating results from numerous studies about the factors that contribute to longer and healthier lives.

Funded by the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute on Aging, the consortium has explored different approaches to human aging, from the genetics of longevity to longevity in other animals, to the possible connections between specific diseases and long life.

“This is the fourth major grant made to the consortium,” said Nicholas Schork, Ph.D., Distinguished Professor and Director Clinical Genomics and Therapeutics Division at TGen. Schork serves as principal investigator for the consortium.

Research by the consortium’s 19 institutional partners shows, “not surprisingly, that longevity is complex and multifactorial. Therefore, there needs to be a kind of integrated, bird’s eye view of what’s going on,” said Schork. “Now that we have not just data but results from different experiments, it’s time to meet this complexity head-on and move toward integration.”

The consortium’s research focuses on finding genetic and cellular predictors of healthy human longevity, as well as studies that look at what factors might contribute to long life in other species. Other consortium researchers are screening for and testing drugs in mice that might contribute to longevity, while others are looking at the possible connections between living long and avoiding diseases such as Alzheimer’s.

“We have partners interested in epidemiology, age-related disease pathology, evolutionary biology, cell biology, and pharmacology,” said Schork, “and we’re all playing in this big sandbox.”

The time has come to start putting the results from all these studies together, he noted.

“We want to know, for instance, if the genes found in the cell models turn out to be the same ones that are found in the evolutionary biology studies? Or is it the case that there is a ‘many roads to Rome’ hypothesis to longevity, that you can go down one of many different paths, and they all kind of contribute to longevity?” said Schork. 

“The research in the consortium is to see if the investigators taking different angles can communicate and come up with a whole that’s greater than the sum of its parts and shed light in more compelling ways on what’s contributing to aging,” he added. 

According to Schork, the grant will provide continuing support to current researchers yet also fund about 35% to 40% new work. TGen’s well-known strengths in translation and creative research with an eye toward timely patient impact make it a natural leader for the consortium, he suggested. 

“We are using unprecedented levels of integration of different scientific angles as well as bringing different experts together who are willing to trade notes to solve the riddle of human longevity,” said Schork.

Participating organizations in the consortium are: Boston University; California Pacific Medical Center Research Institute/Sutter Bay Hospital; Institute of Biological Psychiatry, Denmark; Institute for Systems Biology; The Jackson Laboratory; Mental Health Services, Denmark; Oregon Health & Science University; The Salk; Senckenberg Research Institute, Germany; Translational Genomics Research Institute; Tufts University; University of California, Davis; University of California, Riverside; University of Michigan; University of Turku, Finland and Yale University.

The Longevity Consortium is supported by the National Institute On Aging of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number U19AG023122.

Originally post written by Becky Ham / Tuesday October 29, 2024