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Wisconsin Nathan Shock Center focuses on link between metabolism and healthier aging
MADISON, Wis. – A new research center at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health will focus on understanding how metabolic changes associated with aging influence health and cause disease.
The National Institute on Aging has recognized the UW School of Medicine and Public Health’s strength in aging research through a competitive grant awarded for the Wisconsin Nathan Shock Center of Excellence in the Basic Biology of Aging.
Researchers will study how aging broadly affects biochemical reactions that provide energy to cells, and how metabolic dysfunction contributes to conditions such as diabetes, cancer, heart disease and neurodegenerative conditions like Parkinson’s disease, with the goal of generating insights that may one day guide improved approaches to health care.
The National Institutes of Health and UW–Madison are investing $6.3 million in the center to foster cross-campus collaboration on the biology of aging. Wisconsin joins eight other Nathan Shock Centers, which are named for the first director of the National Institute on Aging, part of the NIH.
Rozalyn Anderson, professor of medicine, will lead the center, with co-directors John Denu, professor of biomolecular chemistry, and Dudley Lamming, professor of medicine.
“It has become abundantly clear that aging biology affects a host of chronic diseases that we see in health care in America today,” Anderson said. “Aging is the biggest risk factor for cancer, neurodegenerative disease and cardiovascular disease, and all of these chronic conditions occur more frequently in older individuals.”
The center, which has already issued a national call for proposals for pilot projects on the biology of aging, will bring together more than 40 researchers from across the UW–Madison campus who work on metabolism and aging.
“We go from molecules to organisms to populations,” Anderson said. “It is a virtual center spread across the entire campus; a gathering of minds rather than a building of rooms. We’re looking forward to being the hub that attracts more people into aging research.”
Another key goal of the center is to build knowledge from basic research that may guide future strategies in health care.
“We saw a gap: there are a lot of great ideas in basic biology, but the systems for translating that knowledge to the clinic are distributed across institutes and centers and not widely known to basic scientists,” Anderson said. “The fundamental goal is to understand what is happening with aging biology that creates disease vulnerability. If you could understand how to delay the problems of age, you could prevent a host of age-related diseases all in one swoop.”
The new center will partner with other federally funded biomedical research efforts on campus, including the Primate Center, University of Wisconsin Carbone Cancer Center, Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center and Institute for Clinical and Translational Research, leveraging broad expertise and creating a comprehensive biomedical research portfolio.
Anderson’s lab studies how metabolism modulates longevity. Her vision for the center is to build a multidisciplinary collaborative community that will identify new mechanisms in aging and age-related disease and use those insights to develop new interventions to sustain health and function into advanced age.
“The Wisconsin Nathan Shock Center will take advantage of really magnificent resources on this campus, for example, molecular profiling, computational analysis and data integration,” she said. “This allows us to start understanding what the biology is telling us, and to use that to define what happens with aging and what leads to age-related disease.”
