Aging affects all living creatures and is the greatest factor in numerous diseases. The greatest health care burdens are borne by diseases in older patients — a population expected to nearly double by 2050, according to U.S. Census Bureau projections.
Over the past 30 years, scientists at The University of Texas Health Science at San Antonio (UT Health San Antonio) Nathan Shock Center of Excellence in the Basic Biology of Aging have been dedicated to the discovery and testing of novel pathways that have the potential to extend life and promote healthy aging. Recently, the center’s directors announced that they are approved for continued National Institute on Aging funding for the next five years.
This center at UT Health San Antonio has provided core services for aging research since 1995, with the goal of leveraging institutional resources to promote aging research and helping other scientists with aging-related projects and training. The eight Nathan Shock Centers of Excellence around the United States each have unique research, development and service cores that provide oversight, assistance in research endeavors and training opportunities for scientists new to the field.
The UT Health San Antonio center includes six cores:
- An Administrative and Program Enrichment core that enhances the research environment along with providing services and programs across the country.
- An Aging Animal and Functional Assessment core where scientists have access to aged animal models as well as novel aging models developed here that might not be available anywhere else.
- A GeroMetabolism core where they investigate changes in lifetime metabolism and metabolic drivers of aging, including lipidomics and metabolomics cores.
- A Pathology core which looks at pathological implications of aging, which diseases are connected to aging and how they develop.
- A Pharmacology and Drug Design core, which seeks to discover interventions for aging focused on drugs and compounds.
- A Research Development core that helps expand research in the aging field at UT Health San Antonio and at other institutions in the San Antonio area. This core also helps develop scientists who are new to the aging research field.
Adam Salmon, PhD
“All of these services are available to scientists locally and around the world. In the past five years, we have helped people with simple requests or discussions all the way up to providing crucial services,” said Adam B. Salmon, PhD, professor of molecular medicine, associate director of the Sam and Ann Barshop Institute for Longevity and Aging Studies and principal investigator for the San Antonio Nathan Shock Center.
The San Antonio center also collaborates with the other seven centers across the country individually and collectively through the American Federation for Aging Research, which serves as the coordinating center for the Nathan Shock Centers program.
“This brings us together to provide better service and listen to the community, but also to work on dissemination of our findings,” Salmon said.
In the past decade, the San Antonio center has focused primarily on gerotherapeutics — compounds, diets or other interventions that may promote healthy aging. Through the National Institute on Aging’s Interventions Testing Program, the center has become a leader in the research of rapamycin, a Food and Drug Administration-approved mTOR inhibitor that shows promise as a pro-longevity treatment. MTOR, or mammalian target of rapamycin, is a protein complex that is crucial to cell growth, metabolism and survival. By slowing down the progression of the cell cycle, rapamycin could potentially extend lifespan and improve healthspan, or how long we stay healthy. Through their core programs, the center has been able to develop this treatment to the point that they are now conducting human trials on the potential of rapamycin to extend life and promote healthy aging. Several other candidate drugs have been shown to similarly extend lifespan in laboratory animals with added focus by the Nathan Shock Center investigators in understanding the mechanisms and physiology affected.
“This focused approach is likely to have the greatest impact on taking the basic biology of aging and actually applying it to people,” Salmon said.
Over the next five years, Salmon said they would like to implement additional training programs in which UT Health San Antonio researchers and scientists from around the country can come to the center to learn from some of the top experts in the aging research field. As the population of older adults increases, he says it is vital to provide the structure to expand and develop the next generation of aging researchers.
“And not every place in the United States has the density of aging researchers like we do at UT Health San Antonio,” Salmon said.
The continued funding for the UT Health San Antonio Nathan Shock Center helps expand the institution’s impact in aging research and highlights the excellence of UT Health San Antonio scientists as world leaders in the research of aging and aging-related diseases.