Involving the research community in NIA's Interventions Testing Program
NIA’s Interventions Testing Program (ITP) wants you! We want to expand the involvement of the research community in this unique program that tests compounds for potential drug development. The Collaborative Interactions Program (ITP CIP) is a new phase of community involvement to broaden what we know about the health and lifespan outcomes of the interventions we test.
Remind me – What does the ITP do?
The ITP was set up to test in mice compounds with the potential to promote healthy aging. We use the genetically heterogeneous HET3 4-way-cross mouse model to minimize the effect of strain-specific characteristics. We measure increased lifespan (as one surrogate marker for healthy aging), and health span, including body weight, immune function, and physical functions like grip strength.
We use a community approach to strengthen program outcomes, with investigators in the extramural research community proposing many of the compounds for testing. By tapping into this broad range of expertise, the ITP has benefited from proposals for a wide variety of compounds and dietary interventions. The investigators whose interventions are tested also benefit by playing an active role as collaborators, participating in data evaluation and publications. In addition, two committees of extramural researchers help us evaluate and prioritize proposals and review operating procedures to maintain the state of the science, representing additional opportunities for your involvement.
Any successes so far?
To date, the ITP has found six compounds that gave statistically significant positive effects on lifespan (five are published, one more in press). You can find a description of the ITP, the list of compounds tested and in progress, and a list of the program’s publications on the NIA website. Several laboratories followed up the report on rapamycin, publishing on an array of health span and lifespan findings. I hope that, through the new CIP, the broader range of findings published in the ITP reports will encourage other labs to embark on mechanistic and pre-translational studies on compounds showing a beneficial effect on lifespan, health span, or both.
What will the Community Interactions Program do?
The Program is looking for collaborators to expand the kinds of health span measurements we conduct on mice, as these are important complements to lifespan studies in phase I testing. We’re looking for people with expertise in mouse physiology and cellular function in particular, who can perform functional and biological tests that will complement those performed by the ITP sites. This added characterization will give us a more robust picture of the effects of the compounds we test in the ITP.
I expect that the ITP CIP can help collaborations in several ways, including receiving data, cells, tissues, or live animals from the cohorts that the ITP is treating. When a collaboration is set up in advance, the ITP can determine if extra mice will be needed in a particular cohort to meet the needs of the additional experiments. We set up limited numbers of extra mice in each of the treatment and control groups, to allow for new collaborations that come up during a particular testing period, starting with the mice born in 2015 (the C2015 cohort). We are also developing a tissue repository from treatment and control groups that will include fixed and frozen samples collected at different times, starting with the C2014 mouse cohort. Finally, we have limited numbers of untreated HET3 4-way-cross mice of various ages that we can ship to collaborators’ labs to facilitate baseline studies in the HET3 mice.
Our current collaborations with investigators outside the ITP include microbiome analysis (acarbose and inulin, a project still in progress) and cataract development, pathology analysis, and tendon elasticity (rapamycin, published in Wilkinson et al., (2012) Aging Cell 11:675).
Information about the CIP is available on the CIP FAQs page of the ITP website, or by emailing me. I hope to hear from you!