As age increases, the body’s ability to monitor and guide cellular processes diminishes. This leads to increasing malfunction with respect to cell repair, for example. These malfunctions are often the cause of cancer or cardiovascular diseases in old age. Such age-related diseases pose a major challenge to the healthcare system in an ageing society. A better understanding of the mechanisms of ageing offers great potential to develop new therapeutic approaches that could help maintain health during the ageing process and effectively reduce age-related diseases. In order to understand the highly complex ageing process, the authors of the discussion paper recommend establishing an interdisciplinary systems ageing consortium in Germany. This consortium would pool expert knowledge in the biology of ageing and systems biology and make it possible to link research data from model organisms with human data such as biospecimens and patient data.
The availability, linking, and evaluation of large amounts of data are key to better understanding the ageing process, identifying environmental factors that influence ageing, and developing possible geroprotective measures. Multiomics data, which refers to combined data from various levels such as DNA, RNA, and proteins, could help researchers develop biomarkers for ageing. These biomarkers would provide information about the biological age of humans (which often differs from chronological age) and thus show the efficacy of geroprotective measures or medication in clinical studies. The authors of the discussion paper thus recommend setting up a national biological database. Similar to the British Biobank, multiomics data could be pooled here and made available to research.
This could enable numerous new treatment approaches, for example for the pharmacological treatment of ageing. Medications already exist – for example, to treat high blood pressure or type 2 diabetes – that have also been shown to have a geroprotective effect. The authors claim that analysing large amounts of data could help identify additional existing drugs that could also be used as geroprotectors. They also present cellular reprogramming as a highly promising strategy to reverse the ageing process, in that it could help restore tissue functions. Additionally, reliable biomarkers could enable a future paradigm shift in GP practices and hospitals in order to provide patients with evidence-based advice on preventing disease and supporting resilience processes.
In November 2024, initiated by the Leopoldina Focus Group Medicine, an international workshop on geriatric medicine took place at the Leopoldina in Halle (Saale)/Germany. Björn Schumacher led the workshop, which featured national and international experts from the field of geriatric medicine. The authors have written this discussion paper as a follow-up to the workshop. About the Focus Group Medicine