Latest Ellison Foundation Grants

Fight Aging!

Do you want to live a longer life in good health? Simple practices can make some difference, such as exercise or calorie restriction. But over the long haul all that really matters is progress in medicine: building new classes of therapy to repair and reverse the known root causes of aging. The sooner these treatments arrive, the more lives will be saved. Find out how to help »

One of the most recent grants provided by the Ellison Medical Foundation went to biologist Alexander Varshavsky "to conduct a systematic investigation of the genetics and biochemistry of aging. ... Every cell contains within it a molecular machine to eventually destroy its own proteins, he notes ... Detailed understanding of these protein-destruction pathways will have a profound impact on the practice of medicine, because all kinds of things that go wrong with us, from cancer and infectious diseases, to neurodegenerative syndromes and even normal aging, have a lot to do with either inherent imperfections of the ubiquitin system, or with an overt damage to it in a specific disease ... His aim is to discover the molecular circuits that contribute to normal aging, and also to see whether some of the alterations that he plans to introduce could slow down the aging process."

Link: http://pr.caltech.edu/media/Press_Releases/PR12663.html