Hevolution Foundation Advancing Geroscience Efforts (HF-AGE) Grant Recipients Announced

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia: Hevolution Foundation, a global non-profit organization that provides grants and early-stage investments to incentivize research and entrepreneurship in healthspan science, announces the recipients of its grants program, Hevolution Foundation Advancing Geroscience Efforts (HF-AGE). First announced in October 2022, the program funds research that was deemed meritorious and praiseworthy by the National Institute on Aging (NIA), one of the institutes of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH).

“HF-AGE was inspired by my time with the NIA, where I saw so many superb grant proposals that were taken through the review process but ultimately not funded, oftentimes simply for lack of resources,” commented Felipe Sierra, PhD, Chief Scientific Officer of Hevolution Foundation. “I could not be more gratified to see the program come to life via these nine projects that so clearly align with our mission and goals.”

The nine grant recipients:

• Carlos Aguilar, PhD, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Michigan, “Understanding and engineering the relationship of muscle stem cells with the neuromuscular junction in aging”

• Olga Anczukow-Camarda, PhD, The Jackson Laboratory, Farmington, Connecticut, “Building a spatial transcriptomics infrastructure for isoform profiling in aging epithelial tissues”

• Holly Brown-Borg, PhD and LaDora Thompson, PhD, University of North Dakota, N. Dakota, “Cellular Mechanisms of Frailty Onset”

• Sean Curran, PhD, University of Southern California, “RNA editing mediates age-related responses to mitochondrial dysfunction”

• Samuel Joseph Endicott, PhD, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Michigan, “PTEN as a regulator of chaperone-mediated autophagy, and its effects on the lysosomal targetome”

• Vadim Gladyshev, PhD, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts, “Profiling epigenetic age in single cells and in a high-throughput manner”

• Cara Green, PhD, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin, “The Genetic Landscape Determines the Metabolic Response to Dietary Protein”

• Changhan Lee, PhD, University of Southern California, “Mitochondrial-Encoded Immunity in Aging”

• Shouan Zhu, PhD, Ohio University, Athens, Ohio, “Role of protein malonylation in osteoarthritis development during aging and obesity”

These applications were initially submitted to the NIH using one of the following activity codes:

• R01 - research project grant

• R21 – exploratory/developmental research grant

• R21/R33 – two-phased award (R21 – support initial developmental activities; R33 – expanded activities)

• K99/R00 – two-phased award (Career/Research Transition), (K99- mentored phase, R00 – independent phase)

Dr. Sierra concluded, “On behalf of the scientific team at Hevolution Foundation, I would like to congratulate these nine outstanding grant recipients. We look forward to continuing to enable their research over the life cycle of this program, and in so doing, helping to move aging biology and geroscience research forward.”