Longevity Consortium

Winter Dance. Photo by Marsel van Oosten, with permission (Squiver.com).

Welcome

The Purpose of the Longevity Consortium (LC) is to integrate analyses of the genomic, proteomic, and metabolomic bases of human longevity and the lifespans of animal species into models of the molecular pathways that contribute to human longevity. An important goal is to identify pathways that are amenable to pharmacologic intervention.

Overview

Multiple studies of model organisms and humans have suggested that genetic variants, proteins, metabolites, as well as other biomolecules and molecular-physiologic processes, could play roles in mediating longevity, healthspan, and age-related disease in humans. Unfortunately, the direct relevance of many of these factors to human longevity, healthspan and age-related disease is uncertain, as is the amenability of these factors to pharmacological modulation. Therefore, well-integrated and sophisticated research strategies are needed to determine the degree to which various factors both influence human longevity and are amenable to pharmacological manipulation. The LC has a history of precedent-setting studies seeking to identify factors that influence human longevity and healthspan, and has defined goals and research strategies to elucidate additional factors affecting longevity, as well as their interactions and translatability into targets for pharmacotherapeutic manipulation. To enable appropriate integration in human longevity research, the Consortium leverages a multiple investigator structure with 5 interlinked research projects and 3 integrative cores. These projects and cores include: A cross-species project focusing on cellular and organismal phenotypes led by Richard Miller; a metabolomics project led by Oliver Fiehn; a Centenarians project co-led by Thomas Perls and Paola Sebastiani; a proteomics project led by Eric Orwoll and a disease context project led by Nicholas Schork. The cores include a Systems Biology core led by Noa Rappaport, a Chemoinformatics core led by Thomas Girke, and an administrative core with an overall administrative component led by Steve Cummings.


To learn more about specific projects, please click the blue funnel icons of the following flowchart or visit the image cards below.

LC Workflow

Interactions among LC components. Their descriptions are linked below.

The Admin Core is instrumental in facilitating interactions with Institutions from across the Nation.

Identification of longevity-associated drugs and target proteins for the genetic and molecular findings discovered by the LC.

Systems Biology drives the longevity discovery cycle of testing biological hypotheses with cross-"omics" discovery.

Discovery of rare variants associated with extreme longevity and their associated molecular profiles to identify targets for healthy-aging therapeutics.

Determine the overlap, if any, of genetically-mediated mechanisms contributing to diseases, aging and longevity.

Identification of metabolic mechanisms by which humans and long-lived animals reach a very old age.

Studies of long-lived mice and cells from long-lived species to find druggable pathways to slow aging and postpone diseases.

Proteomics analyses of animals, cells and human phenotypes drives discovery of new targets for pharmacotherapeutic manipulation.