Aging report

"Модели и механизмы управления научными проектами в ВУЗах".

The initial step in the Roadmap process involved a series of five meetings in which Dr. Zerhouni and Directors of the various NIH Institutes and Centers led invited participants through lively discussions

The priority areas identified through the Roadmap meetings formed the basis for discussions held at the 2002 NIH Leadership Forum

What are today's scientific challenges? What are the roadblocks to progress? What do we need to do to overcome roadblocks? What can't be accomplished by any single Institute

Europhysiome Initiative

STEP coordination action

All valuable resources were moved to the VPH Square

This project is part of a wider umbrella program, the Physiome Project .

What is needed - and does not yet exist - is a concerted, focused, competent, and fully-funded effort to finish the development of the complete set of therapies and protocols that will prevent the occurrence of the diseases of aging.

И если вынести за скобки насильственные смерти, в том числе от несчастных случаев, то преждевременно мы умираем потому, что ускоренно стареем. Для России вообще характерно биологическое старение людей, которые официально еще не считаются пожилыми.

Именно применение пептидных биорегуляторов-геропротекторов стало основой программы. Программа на 2008 – 2015 гг., повторим, сейчас обсуждается в Академии медицинских наук и уже прошла обсуждения и экспертизу в Общественной палате РФ. По словам профессора Хавинсона, ООНовский департамент по старению охарактеризовал программу как «единственную реальную, доступную финансово систему по сохранению здоровья и повышению качества жизни лиц пожилого и старческого возраста».

William Millard - Chairman Founder and former chairman of ComputerLand Corporation with ultimately over 800 stores in 28 countries.

There are two aspects to aging which most will recognize, the chronological passage of time which we associate with the benefits of increased experience and wisdom, and the increasing levels of dysfunction we experience as we get older.  One is welcome, the other less so.

It is estimated that 80% of our health care dollars go to the treatment of age-related dysfunction.  The Miliken Institute reported in Oct 2007 that in 2003 it cost 1.3 TRILLION DOLLARS per year in direct and indirect costs ameliorate the suffering of the aged. This is in stark contrast to the 150-200 Million Dollars actualy spent on studying aging which amounts to 1/6th of 1 percent of the yearly budget of the National Health Institute of 28 Billion dollars.

The reason for this disproportionate focus on spending on dysfunction instead of research is that aside from healthy lifestyle choices, little can presently be done to intervene in the aging process and people tend to disbelieve that serious progress will ever be made in addressing the dysfunction that accompanies the aging process.  Due to new breakthroughs this overly-pessimistic perspective is slowly changing.

Anti-aging research is scandalously under-funded.  In the US, a vast proportion of the funding doled out by the National Institute of Aging is given to research on Alzheimer's disease. According to one estimate (from circa 2004), only about 0.02% of the money spent by the National Institutes of Health (of which the NIA is part) is spent on fundamental aging research.

The more we understand about the biochemical processes involved in senescence the more we find that they look like disease processes. The accumulation of lysosomal aggregates and amyloid plaques, extracellular protein-protein cross-linking, nuclear and mitochondrial mutations, cell atrophy, cell senescence, and cell loss without replacement: these processes may all be implicated in both pathology and senescence.   At the level of genetics and biochemistry, there simply does not seem to be any meaningful distinction between "processes predisposing to or constituting disease" and "normal aging".

Aging is not an evolutionary adaptation. Aging, rather, is what happens when various bodily systems evolved to maintain health gradually accumulate defects and begin to malfunction. In the Pleistocene, when life-expectancy is estimated to have been a mere 20 years, too few of our ancestors survived to ripe old age for evolution to favor investment in stronger anti-aging defenses than those we now possess and are forced to rely upon, notwithstanding their evident inadequacy in the modern era where many causes of premature death have been removed.

In order to develop ideas about the feasibility of WBE, ground technology foresight and stimulate interdisciplinary exchange, the Future of Humanity Institute hosted a workshop on May 26 and 27, 2007, in Oxford. Invited experts from areas such as computational neuroscience, brain‐scanning technology, computing, and neurobiology presented their findings and discussed the possibilities, problems and milestones that would have to be reached before WBE becomes feasible.

This document combines an earlier whitepaper that was circulated among workshop participants, and additions suggested by those participants before, during and after the workshop. It aims at providing a preliminary roadmap for WBE, sketching out key technologies that would need to be developed or refined, and identifying key problems or uncertainties.

This report is a major milestone, a detailed summary of the state of the art

Normal Human Aging The Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging

Division of Aging Biology (DAB)Supports research and training to enhance and extend the human health span through a better understanding of the biological mechanisms underlying the aging process.  

Division of Geriatrics and Clinical Gerontology (DGCG)Supports research on health and disease in the aged and research on aging over the human lifespan, including its relationships to health outcomes.

1991 – In a major report “Extending Life, Enhancing Life, a National Research Agenda on Aging”, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) calls for the establishment of at least 10 Centers of Excellence to undertake the multi-disciplinary study of aging.

February 2006 - The Buck Institute launches the public phase of its first capital campaign to raise funds for a lab expansion project. Dr. Jan Vijg, internationally-renowned aging/cancer researcher joins the Institute as a faculty member.

September 2007 - The Institute is awarded a $25 million "Roadmap" award from  the NIH to establish a new field of research called "Geroscience", which will focus on the intersection of aging and chronic disease. It is one of only nine "Roadmap" awards granted in the country and is designed to address critical health issues that have not responded to traditional research

transcripts of a Congressional forum on March 17, 2003

With the impending age boom in 2010, our nation must have a healthcare system in place that is prepared for the millions of Americans who will be living with chronic diseases, and that is able to foster the development of future treatments to meet their needs.

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