Grant: Operating Grant - Priority Announcement: INMD Start Up Funds (bridge funding)

Most people are unaware that researchers in the field of aging still do not completely understand the biology of the aging process. We know what the consequences of aging are, but we do not understand yet what mechanisms and processes are responsible for aging. Many of the main theories put forward to explain aging have not been well-supported by evidence in recent years. However, there is an emerging view that aging is not caused by any single process, but rather by the declining ability of the body to properly regulate a whole set of biological processes. This decline arises from the difficulty in maintaining the complex systems necessary for normal functioning. Although this idea has the potential to explain the aging process, no one has yet measured this "dysregulation." This project, based on blood and clinical measures collected in several long-term human data sets, will apply novel statistical methods to measure the relevant changes in the underlying physiological networks and will use the results to assess which pathways are most important in driving the aging process. It is relatively easy to collect blood samples and to measure many molecules in these samples; the challenge for the researcher is to make sense of these large quantities of data. This situation requires both careful choices of measures and sophisticated statistical techniques. As elements of the aging process are identified, they can be linked to frailty and the chances of developing different diseases in the patients. Results from this investigation will help identify processes associated with chronic diseases as well, allowing better prevention, earlier detection, and new targeted treatments. The goals of this project are (a) to develop better ways to measure aging physiology; (b) to use this information to understand what aging is in humans; and (c) to fight chronic diseases by better understanding how they arise from the aging process.