The longevity advocacy and lobbying group has submitted detailed feedback to the congressional proposal to replace NIA with the National Institute on Dementia – and now you can sign the petition.
No, dementia doesn’t equal aging
Back in June, the longevity community was rattled by the news that representative Cathy McMorris-Rogers (R-WA), Chair of the Energy and Commerce Committee, proposed a transformation of the National Institute on Aging (NIA) into the National Institute on Dementia. While the proposal, part of a sprawling reform of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), simultaneously called for increasing the institute’s budget by 47 million dollars, it was slammed as misguided and dangerous by many aging experts.
Dementia, of course, is just one age-related disease. Others include cancer, cardiovascular diseases, type 2 diabetes, osteoporosis and osteoarthritis, and so on. The geroscience hypothesis postulates that by influencing common upstream causes of those diseases, such as age-related inflammation (“inflammaging”), immunosenescence, and epigenetic dysregulation, we can exert a much larger effect on healthspan and lifespan than by fighting diseases one by one as they appear.
Cramming the vast realm of aging into the confines of a single age-related disease reveals a fundamental lack of understanding of what aging is and how it relates to human health. Were this proposal to go through, it would cripple aging research.
One of its critics, longevity advocate and author Andrew Steele, quipped on X: “This would be a health research disaster—aging causes 85% of American deaths, but we wouldn’t have an NIH institute?!”
NILAR: a vision for the future
The committee asked the public to submit feedback on the proposal. One organization that answered the call was the Alliance for Longevity Initiatives (A4LI), a DC-based non-profit focused on lobbying and educating politicians on the topic of longevity. A4LI was instrumental in the creation of the Congressional Caucus for Longevity Science and has organized numerous high-profile events.
Going beyond critique of the E&C committee’s proposal, A4LI put together its own counterproposal calling for the creation of NILAR: a new National Institute for Longevity and Aging Research. In stark contrast to the committee’s proposal, the one by A4LI is crafted with deep knowledge of the longevity field. It identifies NIH’s lack of focus on longevity research and calls it “a profound misallocation of federal resources.”
“Today, less than 0.5% of NIH funding is allocated toward investigating and treating the biology of aging, despite the fact that biological aging is the primary risk factor for 9 out of 10 leading causes of death in the U.S.,” the proposal says.
The proposed list of NILAR divisions is impressive: Aging Biology; Biomarkers of Health, Function and Aging; Translational Geroscience; and Economic and Societal Impact of Aging. All of these correspond to central problems and subfields in aging research.
“As the urgency of our aging population crisis grows day by day,” the proposal concludes, “the time has come for Congress to establish an agency focused directly on researching and developing therapeutics that target the biology of aging to ameliorate multiple age-related diseases at once.”
Sign to move forward
A4LI also started a petition that you can sign here. It was already signed by about 700 influential academics, biotech executives, and policy leaders. “We aim to reach 1,000 signatures by the end of the year,” A4LI founder Dylan Livingston told Lifespan.io.
“When I started A4LI in early 2021,” he added, “my first priority was to speak with as many industry experts as possible to identify the most critical policy initiatives. Refocusing and increasing funding for aging biology research and development emerged as the top priority. NILAR is the first step toward making that a reality.”
Lifespan.io President Keith Comito assisted with the creation of the proposal in his role as an A4LI board member and was one of the initial group of signatories. While Keith unequivocally supports the NILAR proposal, he has thoughts on how to upgrade it.
“Rather than the agency only passively receiving grant submissions to general grant calls, it would benefit from being more targeted and prescriptive, upregulating certain areas of funding based on tactical analysis of the field,” he said. “This could be assisted by leveraging a network or council of top-class experts with diverse opinions in a model akin to bounties in IT. Instead of just a grant call looking to fund dementia-related therapies, for example, the grant call could already have a very specifically identified research target.” The well-defined NILAR proposal has a context-independent value and can inform any future administration, regardless of the results of the November elections.
“Next, we’ll monitor the upcoming E&C proposal,” Dylan said. “Given the political developments since June 14th, when the E&C Committee first proposed this, I wouldn’t be surprised if we don’t hear anything until after the election. My hope is that NILAR is included in the next proposal, but if not, we have a strong foundation to build on.”
