Methuselah Foundation Announces Methuselah Prize Award to Dr. Huber Warner
San Antonio, TX (PRWEB) May 30, 2014 -- Methuselah Foundation, a medical charity focused on advancing the field of regenerative medicine to extend healthy life, is pleased to announce the Award of the Methuselah Prize to Dr. Huber Warner at the 43rd Annual Meeting of the American Aging Association. This $10,000 award is being given to recognize Dr. Warner’s founding of the National Institute on Aging’s Intervention Testing Program (ITP), a “multi-institutional study investigating treatments with the potential to extend lifespan and delay disease and dysfunction in mice.”
According to Kevin Perrott, Executive Director of the Methuselah Prize, “The vision Dr. Warner showed, and his persistence over years of resistance to establish the ITP, is truly worthy of recognition. This program is going to provide not only potential near-term interventions in the aging process, but hard data to support claims of health benefits in a statistically significant manner. Science needs solid foundations on which to base further investigations, and the ITP provides the highest level of confidence yet established.”
Dr. Warner is a former program director for the NIA Biology of Aging Program and former Associate Dean of Research for the College of Biological Sciences at the University of Minnesota.
“I saw lots of papers from grantees of the NIA about slowing down aging and extending lifespan, but they were rarely backed up and given credibility through testing,” said Dr. Warner. “Research over the last 25 years has been characterized by great success in identifying genes that play some role in extending the late-life health and longevity of several useful animal models of aging, such as yeast, fruit flies, and mice. The next challenging step is to demonstrate how this information might be used to increase the health of older members of our human populations around the world as they age.”
The Intervention Testing Program also seeks to demonstrate the legitimacy of utilizing scarce government funding for life extension research. The program has already achieved an early success in proving that the immunosuppressant drug, Rapamycin, extends maximum lifespan in mice.
About Methuselah Foundation
Methuselah Foundation is a medical charity spearheading the field of regenerative medicine to extend the healthy human lifespan. By fostering disruptive developments in biomedical engineering, it seeks to build a world where 90-year-olds can be as healthy as 50-year-olds by 2030. Learn more at http://www.mfoundation.org.
About the American Aging Association
The American Aging Association awards and promotes biomedical aging research through annual conferences and quarterly journals. Learn more at http://www.americanagingassociation.org.
About the National Institute on Aging
The National Institute on Aging is dedicated to understanding the nature of aging, supporting the health and well being of older adults, and extending healthy, active years of life for more people. Learn more at http://www.nia.nih.gov.
To learn more about the award, please contact:
Kevin Perrott
Executive Director, Methuselah Prize
821 Hayden Avenue
Novato, CA 94945
Phone: (415) 500-1377
Fax: (703) 229-3669
kevin.perrott(at)mfoundation(dot)org
Dane Gobel, Methuselah Foundation, http://www.mfoundation.org, +1 (206) 613-9364, [email protected]
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