New Center for Research on Aging Established with Grant from Glenn Foundation

Tom Rando, Director

The Center’s Deputy Director Tom Rando won two important grant awards in February 2011. The first, from the Glenn Foundation for Medical Research, is a $5 million grant to launch a new center on the biology of aging, focusing on the basic mechanisms regulating tissue and organismal aging. Rando will serve as the director of the new center. The second, from the National Institutes of Health, is a National Institute of Aging program project grant, totaling $7.5 million over 5 years, in support of research on the aging of stem cells.

“There is something about age that predisposes us to disease,” said Rando, MD, PhD, a professor of neurology and neurological sciences. “If we could somehow figure out the mechanisms of aging and are able to intervene, it would potentially offer therapy to a wide variety of diseases — not just cancer, heart disease or Alzheimer’s, but all of them.”