Biotechnology for Healthy Ageing
Ageing, the gradual decline of organismal homeostasis and of physiologic functions throughout the body and mind, is a critical shared risk factor for many ageing-related chronic diseases. The EU also has an ageing society - by 2050, the share of 85+ year-olds in the EU is expected to more than double, but extended life expectancy is not matched with years spent in good health, which currently stands at 70.5 years. This will present significant social, economic and healthcare challenges and thus calls for interventions that will promote healthy longevity, as well as tools that will enable the adoption of these interventions.
Over the past decades basic research has identified hallmarks and cellular mechanisms of ageing, creating the basis for biotechnology-based or pharmaceutical therapeutic interventions, such as targeting cellular maintenance pathways, stem cell exhaustion, cellular senescence or metabolic fitness. Nonetheless, translating these insights into clinical interventions has had a low success rate, partially due to the difficulty of:
- Translating approaches from model systems
- Identifying when to intervene
- Rigorous validation, and
- End-to-end considerations of implementation (i.e. the delivery of an intervention).
This Challenge therefore looks to translate decades of ageing research into tangible biopharmaceutical solutions for healthy ageing
This Challenge looks to accelerate the development and uptake of clinically validated interventions that target the root cause of multiple age-related morbidities. It will:
- Deliver biotechnology-based interventions for healthy ageing
- Accelerate the implementation of personalised care in ageing based on molecular phenotyping
- Provide recommendations for regulatory pathways addressing ageing as a target to inform developers, regulators, and other decision makers, and
- Improve citizen literacy on longevity.