Aging is the one of the biggest risk factors for a variety of diseases, including cancer and cognitive decline. At Feinberg School of Medicine’s Potocsnak Longevity Institute, doctors are searching for a way to delay the aging process.
A person’s aging trajectory can be affected by factors they are exposed to, such as viruses, stress, inflammatory conditions, air pollution and more, institute Director and Feinberg Prof. Douglas E. Vaughan said.
“We’re really interested in finding ways to slow down aging in people that are disadvantaged in that space because of chronic conditions or circumstances,” Vaughan said. “And we’re going to test interventions to see if we can slow down the pace of aging in people.”
The institute uses a myriad of techniques to measure biological age and compare it to chronological age, such as blood pressure, molecular profiles, olfactory tests and more.
Several research units work together at the institute, Vaughan said. These include the Human Longevity Laboratory, Potocsnak Center for Aging & HIV, Center for Population Science & Aging, Claude D. Pepper Older Americans’ Independence Center, Center for Basic and Translational Science and Center for Nanoscience & Aging.
The Human Longevity Laboratory is a unique clinical component of the institute, which has collected functional and physiological measures of age in more than 300 people. Vaughan said it is the only longevity laboratory at a medical school in the United States.
Vaughan said most longevity facilities are not really involved in “academic research,” highlighting the billions of dollars invested in finding ways to expand the human lifespan, pointing to Jeff Bezos’s Altos Labs and Google’s company, Calico.
“We’re really interested in finding ways to slow down the aging in 99% of people, not the 0.1% of people that can afford to have their stem cells reprogrammed or have some kind of transplantation or whatever it might be,” Vaughan said.
Vaughan also has ambitious plans to build a network with laboratories across the world.
He said he has already received verbal commitments from leadership at Tohoku University in northeastern Japan, Stellenbosch University in South Africa, The London Clinic, Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami and San Raffaelle hospital in Milan to create longevity laboratories and join Northwestern’s research network.
“Together, our dream is to do studies in humans across time zones, cultures, ethnic groups and diets and to see if we can find interventions,” Vaughan said. “It might be drugs, it might be supplements, see if we can slow down aging in people, no matter where you live, no matter who you are.”
The institute began in 2022 when Chicago industrialist John Potocsnak donated to fund research on how to slow down aging in people with chronic HIV infections.
Part of the Potocsnak Center for Aging & HIV is located in Feinberg’s Center for Human Immunobiology, on the 15th floor of the Tarry Research & Education Building.
Feinberg Prof. Mohamed Abdel Mohsen’s lab studies HIV and aging. Mohsen studies the human glycome, an intricate layer of sugar coating cells, proteins and lipids, to calculate people’s biological ages and develop glyco-immunotherapies to extend “healthspans” for people aging with chronic diseases.
“We work between those three entities: longevity, immunology and infectious diseases because a lot of the work we are doing focuses on how sugars or glycans can impact immunological responses in people with chronic diseases, specifically those that can cause premature aging,” Mohsen said.
Feinberg Prof. Leila Bertoni Giron works in Mohsen’s lab, using a machine to label the structure of glycan in antibodies to estimate biological age.
Mohsen said that it is important for the body to have an equilibrium of glycan. He said that violently infected cells and cancer cells have too much glycan, allowing them to evade surveillance, while aged cells remove too much glycan causing inflation.
“You can use these to estimate a kind of biological age, so you can compare, ‘Oh this person is 30 years old, but the glycosylation is like 50,’” Bertoni Giron said.
Mohsen said there is room for expansion in the institute and it is necessary to work together with the other laboratories and centers in the institute to tackle the “elephant of aging.”
“How different demographics, socioeconomics, reproductive aging, gender and sex, impact all of those mechanisms are also very big unknowns in the field of longevity, which will be very important to understand to make those precision made biomarkers, and interventions,” Moshen said.
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