FONIA Blog

FoNIA Calls on NIH Director Collins to Increase Aging Research Funding

The Friends of the National Institute on Aging has sent a letter to Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D., director of the National Institutes of Health, urging for an inclusion of an additional $500 million in the FY 2016 NIH Budget to support aging research. Its FY 2015 budget allocated about $2.5 billion for aging research.

The letter noted, “We believe that this funding is the minimum essential to sustain research needed to make progress in attacking the chronic diseases that are driving significant increases in our national healthcare costs. The institutes that make up the NIH, in particular the National institute on Aging (NIA), lead national scientific efforts to understand the nature of aging in order to promote the health and well-being of older adults, whose numbers are projected to increase dramatically in the coming years due to increased life expectancy and the aging of a baby boom generation.”

Please click here to read the letter.

FoNIA’s Message to President Obama: Increased Funding Needed for Aging Research at NIH

Members of the Friends of the National Institute on Aging have sent a letter to President Obama requesting an increase of $500 million to support biomedical, behavioral and social sciences aging research efforts at the National Institutes of Health for fiscal year 2016.

The letter points out that the 65 and older population is expected to double between 2010 and 2050. This will come with an increase in the prevalence of diseases disproportionately affecting older people, most notably Alzheimer’s disease.

With this added investment, however, the NIH can:

Implement new prevention and treatment clinical trials, research training initiatives, care interventions, and genetic research studies developed to meeting the goals of the National Plan to Address Alzheimer’s disease.
Bolster trans-NIH initiatives developed by the NIH GeroScience Interest Group to understand basic cellular and molecular underpinnings of aging as a principal risk factor for chronic disease and to explore common mechanisms governing relationships between aging and chronic disease.
Understand the impact of economic concerns on older adults by examining work and retirement behavior, health and functional ability, and policies that influence individual well-being.
Support family caregivers by enhancing physician-family communication during end-of-life and critical care.

To read the letter, please click on the link below:
FONIA final FY 2016 OMB

Documents from the June 6 Capitol Hill Briefings Now Available

In follow up to our briefings we held June 6 on Capitol Hill about the NIA and its research efforts, we are pleased to make available transcripts from the presentations. Below are links to them:

Presentation of Richard J. Hodes, M.D., NIA director

Presentation of Andrew B. Singleton, Ph.D., senior investigator and chief, NIA Laboratory of Neurogenetics

Presentation of Susan Peschin, M.H.S., chair, Friends of the NIA, and president & CEO, Alliance for Aging Research

Presentation of Kathryn Jedrziewski, Ph.D., co-chair, Friends of the NIA, and deputy director, Institute on Aging, University of Pennsylvania

Capitol Hill Briefings Lend Insights into Aging Research at the NIA

On Friday, June 6, Friends of the NIA hosted two briefings on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., on the National Institute on Aging and its aging research efforts. They were held for audiences in the House and Senate wings of the capitol complex.

The briefings featured presentations from Richard J. Hodes, M.D., NIA director; Andrew B. Singleton, Ph.D., senior investigator and chief, NIA Laboratory of Neurogenetics; Susan Peschin, M.H.S., chair, Friends of the NIA, and president & CEO, Alliance for Aging Research; and Kathryn Jedrziewski, Ph.D., co-chair, Friends of the NIA, and deputy director, Institute on Aging, University of Pennsylvania.

The presenters were then joined by the NIA’s Marie Bernard, M.D., John Haaga, Ph.D., and Ronald Kohanski, Ph.D., to take questions from the audience.

As was shown in the various presentations, the research within the NIA has produced discoveries that are leading to real-world applications. Dr. Singleton highlighted the work of his laboratory in the study of Parkinson’s.

Also of significant importance is the work being funded by the NIA, such as the programs at the Institute on Aging at Penn as illustrated by Dr. Jedrziewski in her presentation.

It’s our desire that the U.S. Congress will allocate more resources to the NIA so it can expand its ever important research. These briefings gave us a platform to spread the word.

NIA Interventions Testing Program Seeks Proposals

Posted by Linda Harootyan on August 7, 2013 at 1:07pm

Interventions Testing Program—upcoming deadline for candidate interventions

Nancy Nadon, Program Officer of the Biological Resources Program and Chief of the Biological Resources Branch, Division of Aging Biology

Have you come across a compound or treatment in your own research that you think might promote healthy aging? Now is the time to propose it be tested! An NIA program is accepting proposals for candidate interventions for testing in a genetically heterogeneous mouse model. The next deadline is September 20…

Read the full blog post