Nir Eynon, PhD

What inspired you to pursue aging research?

The aged population is rapidly growing. This means that we need to look for sustainable solutions for people to live in good health, and disease free as they age. I became interested in ageing research about six years ago after being inspired by the revolutionary discovery of Professor Steve Horvath (Horvath, 2013, Genome Biology). He established the concept of Epigenetic Clocks—a biochemical test that can be used to measure age using epigenetics (DNA methylation) patterns. Among these clocks, the PhenoAge and GrimAge clocks (with Professor Morgan Levine) stand out. PhenoAge is an epigenetic clock that takes chronological age into account, and GrimAge uses the mortality risks of age together with risk factors. Many scientists have replicated Professor Horvath’s seminal work, and over the years many clocks across tissues and species have been established. Coming from the field of exercise and epigenetics, I always wondered how our genome and epigenome can be impacted by exercise as we age and whether we can slow down the biology of the ageing process via specific exercise regimes.

In your view, what does AFAR mean to the field, and what does it mean for you to receive an AFAR grant now?

AFAR’s mission is to “Support and Advance Healthy Ageing through Biomedical Research”. For me, AFAR is greatly contributing to the field. AFAR has been supporting outstanding research, via various schemes, at all career levels. The supported research is likely to significantly advance the field of ageing biology, resulting in new discoveries that can potentially slow down ageing.

It is an honor and privilege to receive the AFAR/Hevolution New Investigator Award. This award is a testament of my team’s work over the years, and although I am the named recipient, I consider this as an award for my entire group, and I feel very lucky to have such great people working with me. I particularly would like to thank Dr. Sarah Voisin from my group, who has been leading with me the research into epigenetics and ageing in the last six years.

What is exciting about your research’s potential impact?

I am very passionate to understand how our genes are changing as we age, and most importantly how can exercise be a sustainable solution embedded in people’s lifestyle to enable good health and mobility as they age. There are well known sex differences in human biological ageing. While women tend to live longer, men tend to have lower levels of muscle mass and lower strength decline. This can have significant sex-specific impacts on quality of life (e.g. mobility) as well as the development of age-related disorders. It is very exciting that we are now able to use advanced bioinformatics and statistical methods, to leverage and integrate the largest of its kind ( more than 4,000) data sets of human muscle samples, and analyze more than half a million epigenetics and gene expression molecular profiles in males and females across the human lifespan. There is a great potential for our research to provide novel insights into the different ways people can preserve their muscle strength and endurance as they age, and how they can optimize their lifestyle to live healthier for longer depending on their biological sex.

How would you describe your research to a non-scientist?

The aged population accounts for significant amount of the world’s health budget. My research aims to uncover a molecular biomarker, in males and females, that either predict or mediate healthy ageing in human skeletal muscle. This research expects to generate new knowledge in the area of genetic and epigenetic regulation of healthy ageing. This will lead to a much better understanding of fundamental biological processes across lifespan, and will underpin evidence-based for personalized and targeted health interventions to keep people healthier for longer.