The Rejuvenome Project Announces Collaboration with the Buck Institute
I recently noted the Astera Institute's Rejuvenome project. The work will be conducted in collaboration with the Buck Institute. It is a sizable proposal, to conduct large and rigorous mouse studies with the ultimate goal of testing combined interventions, a necessary activity that the research community and industry alike largely fail to carry out. This is a big problem in the field of aging, as aging is the outcome of a range of distinct processes of damage accumulation. Sizable degrees of rejuvenation or slowing of aging can in the long run only emerge from combinations of approaches, repairing or working around multiple forms of damage. Given this large gap in research and development, one that will never be filled by existing institutions, philanthropic efforts must step in to fill the gap.
Research on aging is at a critical inflection point, with breakthroughs in basic science and multiple compounds being tested in clinical trials. While the field is starting to have tools and treatments that target the biology of aging and improve health, a deep and fundamental understanding of how they work, and the models used to validate such findings, is still lacking. Further, because of vision, funding constraints, infrastructure limitations and other impediments, smaller projects are conducted independently of each other and there is little to no research into combination therapies, even though this will likely be the only avenue to achieving meaningful results.
"The Rejuvenome Project was launched to target these bottlenecks. We hope to do that by characterizing treatments and regimens, both established and newly invented, for which we have reason to believe improve health and longevity. The breadth and depth of this project centered around an unprecedentedly extensive and deep whole-body functional and multi-omic assay panel has the potential to redefine scientific understanding of how to best intervene in the aging process."
The Rejuvenome Project is expected to take approximately seven years to complete. All wet lab operations will be centered at the Buck while the dry lab computational aspects of the project will reside at the Astera Institute in Berkeley. "The Rejuvenome is the quintessential moonshot project in longevity. If we are successful it will provide the most complete picture ever of how best to intervene in aging and will produce powerful new avenues for drug development."
$70 Million....again to make mice live longer....
This field is so wayward...