Division of Basic Medical Research Project for Elucidating and Controlling Mechanisms of Aging and Longevity

In our country facing a rapidly aging society, we have a serious necessity to keep in good physical and mental shape during our golden years, through prolonging our healthy life span by retarding aging. Not only to improve the quality of elderly people’s lives but also for maintaining the working population and reducing the social security expenses related to medical care and nursing, this is one of the most crucial subjects in our social and economic issues.

On the other hand, research on aging in model organisms has been remarkably advanced by the progress in finding the gene relating to retarding aging. Accordingly, the innovative outcomes of developing methods to retard aging, which lead to prolonging healthy life span, can also be expected by promoting practical research along with further studies clarifying the aging mechanism. In our country, outstanding research on age-related diseases that shorten the healthy life span, has also been implemented on an individual basis. This comprehensive basic research, including systematic approaches across many relevant fields toward preventing or overcoming diseases and putting them into practical or social implementation, are required to make good use of the strengths of our fundamental research.

In this project, we will comprehensively promote the development of research that will lead toward retarding human aging through studies on clarifying and controlling the aging mechanism, by regarding aging itself as the basic cause of various related diseases. Finally, our goal is to build a research center dedicated to aging in Japan, by establishing a network of leading researchers in the aging field.