The Future of Human Healthspan Demography, Evolution, Medicine, and Bioengineering: Task Group Summaries (2008) / Chapter Skim
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Design New Research Paradigms to Assess Healthspan, Its Enhancement, and Prolongation in Experimental Research Animals
Design New Research Paradigms to Assess Healthspan, Its Enhancement, and Prolongation in Experimental Research Animals
Pages 17-28
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From page 17... ...
Basic biological researchers, fascinated by the prospect of altering the rate of aging, have been remarkably successful over the past two decades in discovering genetic, pharmaceutical, and environmental treatments that increase the lifespan of laboratory research animals. Specifically, laboratory longevity of the roundworm, Caenorhabditis elegans, has been experimentally increased more than sixfold; the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, more than twofold; and the house mouse, Mus musculus, by as much as 75 percent (Bartke et al., 2001; Partridge and Gems, 2002)
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From page 18... ...
. The aim of this task group is to provide strategies for assessing the lifelong health and functional capacities of animals traditionally used in aging research and thus to aid in the discovery of new medical treatments that improve health and healthspan irrespective of their effects on lifespan.
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Please be sure to review the second write-up, which immediately follows this one. TASK GROUP MEMBERS -- Group A • Kath Bogie, Case Western Reserve University • Daofen Chen, National Institutes of Health, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke Neuroscience Center • Matt Kaeberlein, University of Washington • Karim Nader, McGill University • Corinna Ross, University of Texas Health Science Center • Richard Sprott, Ellison Medical Foundation • Heidi A
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From page 20... ...
Instead of examining just a few specific models, then delineating their respective pros and cons and proposing a set of recommendations, the group decided it would be more beneficial in the long run to invest in a physical and virtual center -- a repository of available models where scientists could go and learn the best strategies for answering their questions of interest. Establishing the Problem Representing engineering, biology, and neuroscience, the group of seven researchers each brought a different set of experiences in the realm of animal models.
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From page 21... ...
There has been a tendency to stick to a few well-known animal models when it comes to aging research, said Corinna Ross, a primate behaviorist and postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. "We already know all kinds of things about mice, but I don't think there is enough thinking ‘outside the box.' Even bringing wild mice into the lab was a completely unusual thing." "Maybe one of the suggestions a group like this could provide is the development of a center for alternative models," said Richard Sprott, a behavior geneticist and executive director of the Ellison Medical Foundation.
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From page 22... ...
Kath Bogie, senior research associate in orthopedics at Case Western Reserve University, was struggling with just those sorts of troubling issues. Her investigations into ischemic wound healing in rabbits hadn't quite produced the results she had hoped for, and she asked for advice about other available animal models.
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From page 23... ...
The Next Step To further this idea the group decided a future meeting should be convened. Invitees should include prominent figures in the aging research community, as well as representatives of potential funding sources and from the National Academies to discuss more specifically what models and assays would be included in the initial development of the center.
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Lastly, we discussed the merits of benign lab environments. The Arc of Aging Plotting the aging life history of lab animals will be critical to understanding aging in every model species.
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It is clear then that there are signs of frailty that are readily observable in animals and thus can be used to define frailty in a species. It was suggested that animal models with long frailty periods -- and perhaps our lab rats or female organisms already express this -- would be a good model choice, because this longer frailty period would allow for multiple different experiments.
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From page 26... ...
For example, if we are trying to understand how socioeconomic factors affect aging, it was suggested that dogs would be the ideal animal model, for they live in the socioeconomic environment of their owner. If a researcher was interested in a transgenerational study, however, fruit flies would be preferred to dogs as they have higher fecundity rates.
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From page 27... ...
The group recommends that this needs to change, describing that there should be a sanctioned search for a new animal model: a call to experimentation that can be described as "C. elegans need not apply." Once the appropriate animal model is chosen for an aging study, it can be used by researchers in two different ways: Either it will help establish the arc of aging in the ways previously described, or it will be employed to test hypotheses.
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From page 28... ...
While scientists understand where the lay audience is coming from, they fear that their concerns will negatively affect aging research. There was also consensus that while scientists at some point need to make it clear -- without overextrapolating -- how their research in fruit flies relates to humans, it is not up to them to market their research to lay audiences.
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