Aging
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Meeting Report|Volume 11, Issue 22|pp 9971—9981

Latest advances in aging research and drug discovery

Daniela Bakula1, Andrea Ablasser2, Adriano Aguzzi3, Adam Antebi4,5, Nir Barzilai6, Martin-Immanuel Bittner7, Martin Borch Jensen8, Cornelis F. Calkhoven9, Danica Chen10, Aubrey D.N.J. de Grey11, Jerome N. Feige12,13, Anastasia Georgievskaya14, Vadim N. Gladyshev15, Tyler Golato16, Andrei V. Gudkov17, Thorsten Hoppe18, Matt Kaeberlein19,20, Pekka Katajisto21,22, Brian K. Kennedy23,24,25, Unmesh Lal26, Ana Martin-Villalba27, Alexey A. Moskalev28,29,30, Ivan Ozerov31, Michael A. Petr1, Reason32, David C. Rubinsztein33,34, Alexander Tyshkovskiy15,35, Quentin Vanhaelen31, Alex Zhavoronkov31, Morten Scheibye-Knudsen1
  • 1Center for Healthy Aging, Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark
  • 2Global Health Institute, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland
  • 3Institute of Neuropathology, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
  • 4Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing, Cologne, Germany
  • 5Cologne Excellence Cluster on Cellular Stress Responses in Aging-Associated Diseases (CECAD), University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany
  • 6Department of Medicine, Institute for Aging Research, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Bronx, NY 10461, USA
  • 7Arctoris, Oxford, UK
  • 8Gordian Biotechnology, San Francisco, CA 94107, USA
  • 9European Research Institute for the Biology of Ageing (ERIBA), University Medical Center Groningen, University of Groningen, AD Groningen, The Netherlands
  • 10Program in Metabolic Biology, Nutritional Sciences and Toxicology, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA
  • 11SENS Research Foundation, Mountain View, CA 94041, USA
  • 12Nestlé Research, EPFL Innovation Park, Lausanne, Switzerland
  • 13School of Life Sciences, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland
  • 14Haut.AI, Tallinn, Estonia
  • 15Division of Genetics, Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02115, USA
  • 16Molecule, Basel, Switzerland
  • 17Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center and Genome Protection, Inc., Buffalo, NY 14203, USA
  • 18Institute for Genetics and CECAD Research Center, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany
  • 19Department of Pathology, School of Medicine, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, USA
  • 20Department of Genome Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, USA
  • 21Department of Biosciences and Nutrition, Center for Innovative Medicine, Karolinska Institutet, Huddinge, Sweden
  • 22Institute of Biotechnology, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland
  • 23Departments of Biochemistry and Physiology, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University Singapore, Singapore
  • 24Centre for Healthy Ageing, National University Healthy System, Singapore
  • 25Buck Institute for Research on Aging, Novato, CA 94945, USA
  • 26Frost and Sullivan, Frankfurt am Main, Germany
  • 27Molecular Neurobiology, German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, Germany
  • 28Engelhardt Institute of Molecular Biology, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia
  • 29Institute of Biology of Komi Science Center of Ural Branch of RAS, Syktyvkar, Russia
  • 30Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, Dolgoprudny, Russia
  • 31Pharmaceutical Artificial Intelligence Department, Insilico Medicine, Inc., Rockville, MD 20850, USA
  • 32Repair Biotechnologies, Inc., Syracuse, NY 13210, USA
  • 33Department of Medical Genetics, Cambridge Institute for Medical Research, The Keith Peters Building, Cambridge CB2 0XY, UK
  • 34UK Dementia Research Institute, The Keith Peters Building, Cambridge Biomedical Campus, Cambridge, UK
  • 35Belozersky Institute of Physico-Chemical Biology, Moscow State University, Moscow, Russia
Received: October 30, 2019Accepted: November 9, 2019Published: November 21, 2019

Copyright © 2019 Bakula et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

An increasing aging population poses a significant challenge to societies worldwide. A better understanding of the molecular, cellular, organ, tissue, physiological, psychological, and even sociological changes that occur with aging is needed in order to treat age-associated diseases. The field of aging research is rapidly expanding with multiple advances transpiring in many previously disconnected areas. Several major pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and consumer companies made aging research a priority and are building internal expertise, integrating aging research into traditional business models and exploring new go-to-market strategies. Many of these efforts are spearheaded by the latest advances in artificial intelligence, namely deep learning, including generative and reinforcement learning. To facilitate these trends, the Center for Healthy Aging at the University of Copenhagen and Insilico Medicine are building a community of Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) in these areas and launched the annual conference series titled “Aging Research and Drug Discovery (ARDD)” held in the capital of the pharmaceutical industry, Basel, Switzerland (www.agingpharma.org). This ARDD collection contains summaries from the 6th annual meeting that explored aging mechanisms and new interventions in age-associated diseases. The 7th annual ARDD exhibition will transpire 2nd-4th of September, 2020, in Basel.