Fight Aging!

Animal studies of aging are costly, especially when researchers are working with genetically altered breeds: in order to see what happens, you have to wait. In mice, you wait for years, and that requires considerable ongoing expenditures to maintain laboratory animals and the staff who tend to them. This is one of the reasons why nowhere near every open question is well investigated at this time: a gap in the knowledge of aging biology has to be fairly compelling to justify the cost of a mouse study.

Over at the SENS Foundation, you'll find an interesting article on the application of better organization to this issue, with the aim of reducing to costs of some kinds of study of aging in laboratory animal populations.

The problem with testing rejuvenation biotechnologies in laboratory animals is that it takes them so long to get old. It takes more than two years for the exponential age-related increase in morbidity and mortality to become obvious in well-cared-for, wild-type laboratory mice and rats of a healthy strain. For that very reason, it takes at least this much time for the long-term health effects of the cellular and molecular lesions that accumulate with age in their tissues to reveal themselves, allowing researchers to probe the relationship -- and, more importantly, to test therapies that remove such damage from aging tissues, in order to restore youthful functionality to aging bodies. Feeding, housing, cleaning, and providing basic veterinary and other care to a colony of small mammals for this long is expensive, and introduces a burdensome delay between experimental conception and execution -- and just as you begin to want to study the animals, the colony begins suffering from attrition.

...

Now, a collaboration of British research organizations has come up with a completely new model to give scientists greater access to the aging animals that are the linchpin of progress in basic biogerontology and rejuvenation research. [They] recently devised a model to get much more data out of the aged mice that are already in rodent vivaria across the UK and beyond. [This] new Shared Ageing Research Models (ShARM) resource is now up and running. ... ShARM uses a collaborative, decentralized, and "lean" approach to increasing scientists' access to aging animals for biogerontology research. The approach is quite different from the system used by the NIA. Instead of providing more mice to the scientists that need them for research, ShARM gives more scientists access to the limited supply of aged animals and tissues that are already in the British and international research system, allowing them to unlock lifesaving information out of biological materials that would otherwise be lost to science.

Imagine a biogerontologist who has raised a colony of rats into senescence in order to study (for example) the relationship between age-related decline in cognitive function and associated changes in hippocampal gene expression. She runs the aged animals and young controls through a Morris water maze, and then sacrifices them to obtain brain tissue for a microarray study. Under status quo ante, two or three years' worth of investment in those mice -- and an unquantifiable amount of additional data on the impact of aging on the remainder of the aged organism -- would simply go out in the biological waste material stream. But by participating in ShARM's biorepository, the researcher can open up access for multiple additional laboratories to mine what the degenerative aging process has seared into the same animals' otherwise-forfeited tissues and serum.

You might look on this as an example to show that openness in scientific research still has a fair way to go. Many benefits to efficiency and speed of research might yet be unlocked by improvements in opening up the infrastructure and organization of science.