A heart strained by injury or disease can develop fibrosis, where stiff scar tissue builds up and impairs its ability to pump. How does that happen? We funded Michael Alexanian’s lab to work on this. Findings now published in Nature 👇

With age, the immune system can start to look like an overworked security system. It becomes more reactive and sounds more alarms, but gets worse at catching real threats. We funded Korbyn Dahlquist through Norn Group’s Impetus Grants to work on this aging immune bottleneck. 👇

Partial reprogramming could rejuvenate aging cells, but only if we control it precisely. Getting this right depends on our ability to control exactly where, when, and how strongly reprogramming is induced. We funded talent in @harvardmed.bsky.social through Impetus Grants to work on that 👇

Hibernation is linked to unusually long lifespans, but natural torpor bundles lower metabolism, lower body temperature, reduced food intake, and inactivity. Causality has been hard to isolate. We funded Sinisa Hrvatin's lab through Impetus Grants to make progress on that front. 🧵👇

Over 400 ageing researchers. One unified mission. Today, ICCARP launches its new platform, dedicated to rewriting how ageing-related pathologies are classified, staged & treated worldwide. The reclassification of ageing begins here: iccarp.org #Geroscience #Aging #Ageing #Longevity #ICD11

ICCARP — International Consortium to Classify Ageing-Related Pathologies

An international consortium of clinicians and scientists developing a systematic classification of ageing-related pathologies, structured for submission to the WHO and ICD-11.

iccarp.org

~95% of adults carry Epstein-Barr Virus. It is usually “hidden” and can cause multiple sclerosis and various cancers. But evidence points to a factor that might control whether the virus stays hidden or not: methionine. How? 🧵🪡

🫁 Now published in @thelancet.com Healthy Longevity: the ICCARP Respiratory Working Group review on how ageing drives respiratory decline & disease, and why this matters for classification & intervention. doi.org/10.1016/j.la... Supported by @norngroup.bsky.social #aging #longevity

Observational analyses are great for identifying patterns to pursue. To get to truth and real progress, we need randomized clinical trial data. To expand the pool of hard-outcomes data in longevity, we funded Matt Kaeberlein's group to run a randomized clinical trial on off-label rapamycin use. 👇

Aging and disease play out at the level of tissues and organs, but many molecular changes are still hard to measure without destroying tissue context in vivo. This often means sacrificing either detail or tissue context in repeated measurements. We funded a talented team to work on solutions 👇

Proteomics gives us a window into the biology of aging, but current studies often miss the full picture because they lack proteome coverage across a complete lifespan. Through Impetus Grants, we are funding Xiao Tian to expand this landscape. 👇

AlphaFold predicted the shape of every known protein, but we are still far from solving the dynamics of protein folding, the process of going from genes to functional macromolecules. If a protein misfolds, cells attempt to fix it, but this is not what always happens 👇

We audit the aging field to map the bottlenecks on the road to aging therapies, & one of the biggest is that most targets still aren’t druggable. More than 2/3s of targets are out of reach for conventional medicines, & gene therapies often trigger an immune response. Why's this problem so hard?👇

Finding actionable drug targets is a primary bottleneck in human longevity research. Through Impetus Grants, we’ve been funding researchers like Ryan Dhindsa @ryandhindsa.bsky.social from the Baylor College of Medicine @bcmhouston.bsky.social to make progress in exactly that 👇

There are more talented scientists working on aging today because of Norn Group. "Impetus grants uniquely find early career scientists right at pivotal moments in their careers and give them the support to take bold steps in aging." - Sophia Liu @sophialiu.bsky.social youtu.be/Ym9cZUuKy98

Impetus Grants Awardee Testimonial - Sophia Liu | Norn Group

YouTube video by Norn Group

youtube.com

A lot of insight in biology is behind experiments that take decades to run, and are therefore rarely started. This paper out this week in Nat Comms describes 20y of cloning a single mouse lineage until the line failed from genomic mutations accumulating with no recombination to filter them out...👇

Congrats @xinjin.bsky.social! The Jin lab at @scripps.edu was previously funded by Impetus Grants to apply their cutting-edge genomic tools to brain rejuvenation (thread 👇)

Xin Jin@xinjin.bsky.social · 7mo ago

Excited to share: enhanced capture in vivo multiome Perturb-seq! Worried about low gRNA recovery and wasting sequencing on cells that can’t assign a perturbation? We engineered gRNA transcripts to stay in the nucleus, enabling efficient multiomic Perturb-seq! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

CAR-T cell therapy reshaped cancer treatment over the past decade. @corina-amor.bsky.social’s lab at CSHL @cshlnews.bsky.social is pointing the same technology at aging, engineering CAR-T cells to recognize and eliminate senescent cells. Impetus was the lab’s first grant 👇

Concretizing the capabilities of clocks to accelerate discovery in aging biology ⚡ We invite you to join us in building or sponsoring this initiative, and reach out to us for further discussion: team@norn.group

Norn Group@norngroup.bsky.social · 2y ago

@satvik3.bsky.social @martinbjensen.bsky.social propose a path for robustly validating aging clocks to replace lengthy lifespan studies, a 2-10x speedup, by extending the gold-standard lifespan assessment program to generate the data needed to benchmark predictive validity norn.group/agingclocks 🧵

Excited to share our work @science.org. led by our incredible @tommyz626.bsky.social at @rockefelleruniv.bsky.social! By profiling 21 million single cells across life stages, we reveal aging as distinct, development-like transitions, with dramatic cell population changes in specific time windows!

A panoramic view of cell population dynamics in mammalian aging

To elucidate aging-associated cellular population dynamics, we present PanSci, a single-cell transcriptome atlas profiling over 20 million cells from 623 mouse tissues across different life stages, se...

tinyurl.com

Exciting mix of biotech tools and systems aging biology. Proud to have supported via @norngroup.bsky.social Impetus Grants, and hope for more like it.

Junyue Cao@junyuecao.bsky.social · 2y ago

Excited to share our work @science.org. led by our incredible @tommyz626.bsky.social at @rockefelleruniv.bsky.social! By profiling 21 million single cells across life stages, we reveal aging as distinct, development-like transitions, with dramatic cell population changes in specific time windows!

@satvik3.bsky.social @martinbjensen.bsky.social propose a path for robustly validating aging clocks to replace lengthy lifespan studies, a 2-10x speedup, by extending the gold-standard lifespan assessment program to generate the data needed to benchmark predictive validity norn.group/agingclocks 🧵