Impetus Grants is preparing to launch round 2 of funding
Impetus Grants is happy to announce its next round of funding, this time focused on funding specific bounties suggested below. The application will go live on May 1st 2022 and will be closed on May 31st 2022. All responses will be sent out in weeks after the round is closed.
Test the causal role of methylation in driving aging
Methylation clocks are one of the most promising candidates for aging biomarkers. Even though such clocks have already been used in a few clinical trials as a biomarker, the question of whether the role of methylation in aging is associative or causal remains open. This bounty suggests assessing the causal role of methylation through direct manipulation. We will prioritize proposals that aim to assess multiple methylation sites and their combinations rather than proposals that assess only a few methylation loci.
Interventional data in humans
During the first round, Impetus funded a number of biomarker initiatives. One of the key criteria for a biomarker is its susceptibility to interventional change. In this category, we aim to fund data-generating initiatives that longitudinally explore omics / multi-omics under individual interventions or their combinations in humans. We hope that this will serve as a powerful reference for current and future biomarker studies.
We are open to supporting existing biobanks to complement their storage with interventional samples. This category is also open to existing aging trials that want to add more measurements to their study, conditional on making their data publicly accessible. In this category we will prioritize proposals that explore and compare interventions for which multi-omic data and samples aren’t available in humans yet.
Protocols/methods for simultaneous measurement of multiple aging mechanisms, in vivo
While there is undeniable evidence that all aging mechanisms are connected and influence each other, most studies still assess them independently. For further assessments of what aging is and for translation of this assessment into clinical assays, we want to fund tools and protocols that offer to measure molecular aging mechanisms in connection to each other. While we will prioritize molecular measurements in this category, we are also open to considering other metrics.
An initiative that aims to compile all open problems in the field
In 1977 Bernard Strehler published a comprehensive list of 100 problems biologists need to resolve to come closer to solving aging (Chapter 9 of “Time, Cells and Aging”). With time, our understanding of aging has been changing, and today many problems in this list are either outdated or resolved. As no unbiased and comprehensive alternative has been created yet, in the current category we aim to fund a road mapping initiative to gather all open questions, challenges, and controversies in the biology of aging.
Since this category doesn’t have a strong experimental part, in your proposal we want to see a plan for finding all relevant problems, debiasing them, as well as a discussion of deliverables and timelines. Optionally, you can attach any preliminary collected open problems in the figure, to help us assess the style of your problem-picking.