What inspired you to pursue aging research?
The biology of aging presents an immensely complex problem: how can we understand such a multi-faceted condition, where even a strong definition of what aging is has eluded the field?The difficultly of this challenge is only met by potential value of therapies for age-associated disease, which will eventually affect billions worldwide. Aging research presents an opportunity to develop new approaches to solve these outstanding problems and use cutting edge technologies to accelerate the development of new medicines for aging.
In your view, what does AFAR mean to the field, and what does it mean, for you, to receive an AFAR grant now?
AFAR represents an essential mechanism to fund basic research—by providing grants for basic aging research, AFAR allows for the development of new approaches to understand the biology of aging. An AFAR award can confer essential resources to accelerate a project, and receiving this AFAR grant will allow my group to pursue new approaches towards understanding the rejuvenation of blood stem cells.
What is exciting about your research’s potential impact?
This research spans the basic biology of aging and the therapeutic applications of aging research, with the potential to nominate new therapies for age-associated diseases. By using novel methods for profiling aging and new techniques to reprogram the body at the cellular level, we can screen for potential genes that rejuvenate blood stem cells. These findings will extend our understanding of the aging of the blood and other complex organ systems and inform new methods for rejuvenating aged tissues in the body.
How would you describe your research to a non-scientist?
My general research focuses on programmability in biology and how we can apply this notion to aging. During aging, the cells of the body change their states, leading to age-associated disease. By using new techniques to profile these changes at the cellular level, we can nominate new ways to program cells and reverse these age-associated changes. Ultimately, these methods to reprogram cells could serve as new therapies for age-associated diseaseas.
