Massive study of dog aging likely to lose funding

Scientists who study aging are howling about the possible demise of one of the field’s biggest studies, the Dog Aging Project. The effort has been probing cognitive and physical aspects of aging in about 50,000 dogs and is running a clinical trial to test a drug that may boost the animals’ longevity. But organizers say the project will probably lose funding this year from the National Institute on Aging (NIA), which has furnished at least 90% of its annual budget, now about $7 million. “It is a big loss if this project in dogs does not continue,” says gerontologist João Pedro de Magalhães of the University of Birmingham, who notes that large, long-lived animal models promise valuable insights into human aging. “It was going to be the most informative study of aging that was not done in humans,” says biogerontologist Steve Austad of the University of Alabama at Birmingham. (Neither scientist has a role in the research, but Austad’s 2-year-old dachshund is a participant.) Organizers are pessimistic about continued funding because the project received marginal scores on its grant renewal application late last year. They are striving to raise money from other sources and have launched a petition drive to convince the director of the National Institutes of Health to intervene to restore funding. “I’m doing everything possible to keep [the project] going in its current form,” says co-director Daniel Promislow, an evolutionary geneticist at the Univ...
Source: ScienceNOW - Category: Science Source Type: news