Grant: Project Grant

Advanced age is a major risk factor for many diseases, including cancers and neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson's disease. In our body's cells, damage accumulates as we age, and this is thought to be a key cause of these diseases and of aging itself. There are cellular processes that protect against such damage, and turning them on might prevent both aging and age-associated diseases. Our lab identifies and maps these processes, commonly referred to as stress responses. In the lab, we can study stress responses in a small roundworm, which lives only 20-30 days and shares many genes with us humans; this makes it an ideal animal in which to model aging and age-associated diseases. Using this approach, we discovered a new pathway by which cells respond to stresses; this pathway also staves off aging. Moreover, we also studied this pathway in human cancer cells and found that there, too, it may protect cells from damaging cellular stress. In the current project, we will (a) map genes that activate the stress response pathway we discovered; (b) find out which biological processes are activated by the new pathway to keep animals healthy as they age; and (c) study if the human analog of one of the worm genes protects human lung cancer cells from stress and whether blocking this pathway can therefore be used to destroy cancerous cells. We anticipate that our research will reveal new molecules that may be used to treat some age-associated diseases, such as cancers.