NEW YORK – The Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) and its partners in the Longevity Consortium have received a five-year $45 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to integrate results from previous studies, the institute said on Tuesday.
The grant will provide continuing support to current researchers, though approximately 35 to 40 percent will be used to fund new research.
The grant from the National Institute on Aging is the fourth "major" grant for the consortium, TGen Director of Clinical Genomics and Therapeutics Nicholas Schork said in a statement. Research conducted by the consortium includes different approaches to human aging, from the genetics of longevity in humans and other animals to the possible connections between specific diseases and long life. "The time has come to start putting the results from all these studies together," he said.
The goal of the program is to find genetic and cellular predictors of healthy human longevity and factors contributing to long life in other species. Consortium researchers have also searched for and tested drugs in mice that may prolong life and have looked for connections between living long and avoiding diseases such as Alzheimer's.
Participating organizations in the consortium are Boston University; California Pacific Medical Center Research Institute and Sutter Bay Hospital; Denmark's Institute of Biological Psychiatry; the Institute for Systems Biology; the Jackson Laboratory; Denmark's Mental Health Services; Oregon Health & Science University; the Salk Institute; Germany's Senckenberg Research Institute; TGen; Tufts University; the University of California, Davis; the University of California, Riverside; the University of Michigan; Finland's University of Turku; and Yale University.