NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – DNage, a wholly owned subsidiary of Dutch biotech Pharming Group, said today that it will participate in a five-year European study that aims to identify biomarkers of human aging.
The project, called MARK-AGE, is an EU-wide consortium of 26 industry and academic partners funded under the Seventh Research Framework Program. The EU has awarded a total of around €12 million ($19 million) for the study.
Germany’s University of Konstanz is leading the project, which will study about 4,000 volunteers between 35 and 74 years old. Subjects will be recruited from the general population, as well as from families with long-living parents and siblings that have already been recruited as part of the EU’s ongoing “Genetics of Healthy Aging” project.
DNage said that it plans to use its proprietary animal models to discover novel biomarkers of aging, and that it will recruit patients that suffer from Cockayne syndrome and other premature-aging syndromes to validate the identified biomarkers.
The consortium expects that biomarkers identified through the project could be used to predict the onset of age-related diseases and may be used as diagnostic markers or as therapeutic targets.