Buck Institute plans $70M effort with new nonprofit
The Buck Institute for Research on Aging has received a second grant from the National Institutes of Health and will launch a $70 million collaboration with a new Berkeley nonprofit dedicated to developing high leverage technologies, the Novato-based nonprofit announced this week.
Buck Institute professors Judith Campisi and Birgit Schilling have been awarded a five-year $12.7 million grant to identify and characterize senescent cells in human ovaries, breast tissue and skeletal muscle. Senescence refers to a process by which aging cells stop dividing but do not die.
Last month, the Buck Institute announced that Campisi, a pioneer in the study of cellular senescence, and Lisa Ellerby, a Buck neuroscientist, had been awarded a five-year, $14.3 million grant to look for connections between aging cells and age-related dementias such as Alzheimer’s disease.
Kris Rebillot, a spokeswoman for the Buck, said that for the institute,“The $27 million sets a new record for grant awards announced within a 30-day period.”
In addition to that, the Buck announced it is entering into a joint effort with the Berkeley-based Astera Institute — dubbed the Rejuvenome Project — to develop data on the biological mechanisms underlying the aging process with the goal of potentially impeding the process. The data generated will be shared freely with other researchers.
The Astera Institute, a 501(c) (3) nonprofit, was founded in July 2020 by Jed McCaleb, an early pioneer in blockchain and cryptocurrency. This year Forbes ranked McCaleb 377th on its annual list of the 400 wealthiest Americans with a net worth of $3 billion.
In December 2020, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission sued Ripple Labs, which McCaleb helped to found, for selling cryptocurrency tokens which the SEC classified as unregistered securities.
Astera is currently focusing its efforts on four areas: longevity, artificial general intelligence, metascience, and frontier engineering.
“The Rejuvenome is the quintessential moonshot project in longevity,” McCaleb said in a statement. “If we are successful it will provide the most complete picture ever of how best to intervene in aging and will produce powerful new avenues for drug development.”
The goal of the Rejuvenome Project is to fill in crucial gaps in basic understanding about the mechanism underlying aging and to determine whether combining various interventions developed to extend longevity will produce a synergistic effect.
In the past, due to funding constraints and infrastructure limitations, smaller research projects have been conducted independently of each
other with little research into combination therapies.
Over a period of seven years, Rejuvenome will conduct a series of largescale lifespan studies in genetically diverse mice. Researchers will test interventions known or suspected to extend longevity both singly and in combination.
The lifespan of the roundworms was increased by 10 times in experiments in which multiple genes were rendered inoperative in the worms, and a combination of three compounds extended lifespan in flies beyond the effects of any of the individual components.
The Buck will be handling the project’s “wet lab” operations, which involve the manipulation of liquids, biological matter, and chemicals, while Astera will oversee the “dry lab” aspects, involving computation and analysis using artificial intelligence.
Remy Gross, the Buck’s vice president in charge of business development and technology advancement, said Astera is funding the project with $70 million of its own money. Gross said it has not yet been determined how much the Buck will be paid for the work it will do.
Buck Institute CEO Eric Verdin said in a statement that the breadth and depth of the Rejuvenome Project “has the potential to redefine scientific understanding of how to best intervene in the aging process.”
The announcement of the two NIH grants is indicative of how the Buck Institute’s fortunes have turned for the better since Verdin was named CEO in late 2016. The institute’s expenses exceeded its revenues by $137,569 in the fiscal year ending in June 2016 with a $29.9 million total budget.
One reason cited then for the Buck’s financial difficulties was a reduction in NIH funding. From 2012 through 2016, the NIH’s program level funding increased by an average of about 1% per year. Despite former President Donald Trump’s attempts to slash the NIH budget, NIH program level funding increased by just under 6% per year from 2017 to 2021.
“It was really paradoxical,” Verdin said. “I think this created a reaction by Congress, which holds the purse, to increase the NIH budget.”
The Buck’s government grant revenue has increased from $12.5 million in fiscal year 2016 to an estimated $23 million in the current 2022 fiscal year.
Verdin said funding of the NIH’s National Institute on Aging (NIA) has been particularly strong of late.
“A lot of that funding at NIA has come towards Alzheimer’s,” Verdin said. “So we have benefited from some of this.”
Verdin noted that the Buck’s revenue from philanthropy and corporate sponsorships has also grown resulting in the institute’s operating budget increasing to an estimated $51 million in the current fiscal year.
“The science of aging is coming of age,” Verdin said. “It was a frontier research area when we started. It has become one of the hottest areas in biological research. We are incredibly well positioned to capitalize on this.”