Rejuvenome

The Rejuvenome is a Focused Research Organization established to conduct the largest and most systematic study of the biological effects of putative anti-aging interventions.

The project is led by Nicholas Schaum, former Stanford postdoctoral scholar and a central coordinator of the Tabula Muris project, with an advisory board of Morgan Levine of the Yale Center for Research on Aging, Joao Pedro de Magalhaes of Liverpool’s Integrative Genomics of Ageing Group, and Tony Wyss-Coray, the D.H. Chen distinguished professor of neurology and neurological sciences at Stanford University. Astera is funding and partnering with the Buck Institute for Research on Aging to carry out the wet-lab portion of the project. At the Buck, Simon Melov is the scientific lead for the project. The Rejuvenome will coordinate with the aging science community to produce an open and comprehensive dataset describing how key biomarkers are impacted by multiple interventions across the lifespan of mice. The results will help provide a foundation for future aging research. The Rejuvenome will ultimately study the effects of a number of intervention combinations with the potential to disrupt multiple aging processes at once.

A key current limitation in the longevity field is that deep biological studies on individual interventions have primarily been investigated independently and in an ad hoc fashion, leading to a lack of comprehensive data on any one intervention. One project examines brain aging but doesn’t measure lifespan, while another measures metabolism but doesn’t track epigenetics, and yet another looks just at lifespan itself. This fractured approach makes it difficult to compare or combine aging interventions within a common framework.

To resolve this problem, the Rejuvenome will conduct a large-scale experiment in genetically diverse mice to measure system-wide multi-omics spanning a panel of rejuvenation interventions. By measuring multiple hallmarks of aging across the lifespan of mice, the project will provide a high-resolution description of the interconnection or independence of different aspects of the aging process and of how interventions alter these pathways. The resulting intervention-effect matrix will support the field in its advance towards better interventions.

rejuvenome

Intervention x phenotypic effect matrix under current paradigms

The Rejuvenome aims to complete the entire matrix and to use it to guide the design of combinatorial interventions.

Upon completion, The Rejuvenome will provide the most complete picture of the impact of aging interventions across multiple biomarkers. We believe this type of work is needed to more deeply grasp the nature of aging and will produce powerful new avenues for future research.

Ultimately, the Rejuvenome will test combinations of interventions designed to target multiple aspects of aging simultaneously. There is good reason to believe such combinations will produce synergistic effects. Multiple gene knockouts in C. elegans have been shown to increase lifespan by 10x, and a combination of three compounds extended lifespan in flies beyond the effects of any of the individual components — a similar multifaceted approach could produce the longest living mice and suggest potential future multi-factorial therapies for humans.

We believe the Rejuvenome is a unique opportunity to unite the field in a cooperative endeavor for the advancement of aging science and betterment of human health. We will perform global analyses on critical areas that require a centralized effort not easily done within individual labs. We desire to build a community of aging researchers to design, analyze, and interpret these critical experiments. We strive to never be competitive and always cooperative.

This requires complete transparency. The internal computational team will  provide all raw and preprocessed data to the community for free. Our analyses will be reported to the community, conducted with advice from the community, and where appropriate, performed together with outside experts. Our goal is always to provide maximum benefit to everyone within the field.