Sage Bionetworks awarded NIH grant to facilitate collaborative translation research on exceptional longevity

The Exceptional Longevity Data Management and Coordinating Center enables collaborations between researchers to identify what protective factors contribute to healthy aging past the century mark.

SEATTLE, WA – A new National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded data management and coordination center (DMCC) will advance ongoing research on people living past 100 years old and the factors that contribute to their resilience and health.

The Exceptional Longevity (EL) DMCC brings together gerontology researchers, data scientists, and bioethicists in an open science approach to centralizing many sources of ongoing research into advanced age, and how our life spans and “health spans” – our period of good health and wellbeing – intersect.

The Exceptional Longevity Data Portal will be built on Sage Bionetworks’ Synapse platform, a technology platform that supports scientific collaborations centered around shared biomedical data sets under a robust data governance framework. The NIH’s ongoing Accelerating Medicines Partnership® Program for Alzheimer’s Disease (AMP® AD) is one example of where this tool is already in use to facilitate collaborative neurodegenerative disease and aging research through the AD Knowledge Portal.

“The EL DMCC will open a new frontier in research into aging, in which large-scale datasets are made widely accessible to accelerate discoveries that will benefit clinicians and patients grappling with age-related disease and decline,” explains Anna Greenwood, Director of Alzheimer’s Disease Translational Research at Sage Bionetworks. “Through the Data Portal, qualified researchers will have easier access to data that is rigorously managed. Ultimately, this team’s goal is to enable better science through greater collaboration and shared resources.”

EL researchers will have access to powerful computing capabilities through the connection of the Data Portal to a new Data Commons, being developed by Seven Bridges Genomics.

“Connecting researchers and helping them discover, explore, and analyze relevant datasets will help drive improvements for patients and their families,” said Jack DiGiovanna, General Manager at Seven Bridges. “We are excited to partner with Sage; integrating the Synapse Platform with CAVATICA to create a collaborative and interoperable research environment for longevity researchers.”

“High quality preventative medicine and improved quality of life are top goals of clinicians and their patients,” said Paola Sebastiani, Faculty Biostatistician at Tufts Medical Center and Professor of Medicine at Tufts University. “Integration of data from multiple studies of human longevity will help accelerate the translation of science on aging and exceptional longevity into useful clinical insights.”

The Exceptional Longevity Data Management and Coordinating Center is supported by the National Institute on Aging, part of the National Institutes of Health under grant number U24AG078753.

The content of this release is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.