After many years of planning, the Center for Aging and Longevity Studies (CALS) launched this month at UC Santa Barbara.
“The goal of the center is to bring together researchers from broad areas who are motivated by a wide variety of questions around aging and longevity,” Dr. Joel Rothman said.
As a professor of molecular and cell biology and director of the center, Rothman said the focus is on slowing the onset of diseases normally associated with aging like cardiovascular and neurodegenerative diseases, and cancer.
“The biomedical part of it is to perform research all the way from the basic level to really applied levels including drug development that will advance our understanding and treatment of this problem that we call aging,” he said.
Rothman said recent discoveries show that genetics play a role in aging, and identifying those genes can lead to pharmaceutical treatments to slow the aging clock.
“There are currently clinical trials going on in humans with drugs that have already been approved by the FDA to test their efficacy in older humans,” Rothman said.
He said it’s possible something like this could be available within his life-time – he’s a Baby Boomer, which means there might be a pill to take in the next few decades.
“If I live as long as my parents do, that would be another 30 years for me, and I hope as I approach those years that there will be new pharmaceuticals and new therapies that actually eliminate some of the problems that I would be facing at that age,” Rothman said.
The primary goal, he explained, is to extend the human healthspan or the time of youthful vibrancy.
“We know that age-related disease really picks up intensely starting in the 50s and 60s, and then it ramps up very rapidly after that. And so, the period before that happens would be called healthspan,” he said.
Extending healthspan will likely add many years of good health to people’s lives, and therefore, increase lifespan, too. Rothman said the center will also grapple with the ethics and equity issues associated with this work — including the possibility of the human lifespan reaching 150 years.
“We have to consider the environmental impact of that, the world population impact of that, and we need to consider the ethics of that because this could create a very difficult income disparity situation, too,” he said.
The center brings together 30 professors and hundreds of researchers from 15 different departments to study all aspects of growing old including psychology, anthropology, engineering, economics and more.
Dr. Nicole Alea Albada is a professor of psychology and brain sciences at UCSB. She’s the center’s education and outreach director.
“A center like ours naturally lends itself to that kind of broad interdisciplinary, multi-disciplinary work in order to really try to answer the questions not just from one perspective, but from a variety of perspectives,” she said.
Albada said she wants her undergraduate psychology students to become enthusiastic about studying the effects of aging, but it's not always an easy sell.
“It’s really hard to get a 20-something-year-old to care about what might happen when they’re in their 70s because it feels so far removed from where they currently are,” she said.
Aging is a critical issue, she said, and the changing demographics in our country impact every generation.
Albada said community engagement is an important aspect of the center and there will be guest speakers and forums open to the public. Community members can participate in studies, too.
“We’re developing a participant pool for human subjects, but it’s in no way tied to a specific project. It’s more a place for older individuals from the community, if they’re interested in participating in research studies, that they just give us permission to contact them,” she said.
Rothman and Albada said studies of the aging process are happening worldwide in a variety of fields, and now, UCSB is in a position to add to the research, and potentially offer all of us years and years and years of good health.
You can find out more about the Center for Aging and Longevity Studies at longevity.ucsb.edu.
