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Latest Mprize Winners
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Z Dave Sharp
On October 8, 2009 Dave Sharp, University of Texas, San Antonio was awarded the Special Mprize Lifespan Achievement. This special recognition was for the first pharmaceutical intervention to successfully extend the life of laboratory mice. The study, published in the journal Nature, showed that when aging mice were given the drug rapamycin, they lived longer than other mice. Read more about rapamycin in the news and the event. 
Andrzej Bartke
"...Dwarf mice...lack growth hormone (GH), prolactin (PRL), and thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH), (and) live much longer than their normal siblings, and exhibit many symptoms of delayed aging." 
Steven Spindler
"Caloric restriction (CR), the consumption of fewer calories while avoiding malnutrition, is a robust method of decelerating aging and the development of age-related diseases. The effects of CR are conserved in nearly every species tested, perhaps including humans. CR delays the onset and reduces the incidence and severity of age-related diseases, including cancer." |
Competitor Stephen SpindlerThe rate of animal aging is strongly influenced by diet. The more calories consumed, the faster it ages. Well-fed animals not only age faster, they have higher mortality from cancer, heart disease, and diabetes. And the reverse is true, the fewer calories eaten (provided malnutrition is avoided) the slower an animal ages, the lower the death rate from cancer, and the lower the rate of heart disease and diabetes. CR has been viewed as less effective in older animals and as acting incrementally to slow or prevent age-related changes in gene expression. However, we found that mice who begin CR in late middle-age reap its benefits almost immediately. We also have performed other genome-wide gene-expression studies in mice with disrupted growth hormone-insulin-like growth factor-1 signaling (DF) that were either CR or given free access to food. Others have shown that either DF or CR alone can extend lifespan, and that together they act additively to extend the lifespan of mice even more. We found that CR and DF additively affected the expression of a group of genes. Individually and together, DF and CR independently affected the expression of other groups of genes. These results indicate that DF and CR affect overlapping sets of genes, and additively affect a subset of genes associated with enhanced longevity. These results provide a focused group of new genes which are important in regulating the lifespan of mammals, and which may be 'drugable targets' for anti-aging therapeutics. 
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