Aging-Research:
Age-related Kidney Disease
The steady increase in human life expectancy in developed countries since the mid-nineteenth century must be regarded as a triumph of public health and medical care. However, it also means that more people live long enough to suffer from ageing-associated diseases including major killers such as diabetes, atherosclerosis, heart failure, cancer or renal disease. The major burden of ill health is thus now falling on the older section of the population, thereby causing enormous challenges both for individuals and societies in terms of health and life quality as well as economic burden.
Age-related kidney disease is a very common, yet not well understood disorder. Although ‘normal ageing’ does not necessarily lead to a significant loss of overall renal function, decline of glomerular filtration rate and glomerulosclerosis may occur. This is very common. However, the mechanisms that are responsible for age-related kidney diseases are not well understood and are being studied in the lab using mouse as well as C. elegans as model organisms. Members of our lab are working on the pathogenesis and molecular details of ageing-associated kidney diseases and the biology of the ageing process itself. The ageing process is highly complex and involves various types of decline in both structure and function in different tissues. However, despite this complexity, a recent discovery has shown that genetic and environmental interventions can produce improvement in health during ageing and increase lifespan in laboratory model organisms. In addition, extension of healthy lifespan was observed to be accompanied by prevention of diverse ageing-related pathologies including renal disease. This discovery has therefore opened up a promising new avenue for the prevention of ageing-associated diseases by the use of novel interventions and development of new therapies that specifically target the ageing process itself. However, it should be noted that the interventions that have so far proven successful, such as caloric restriction, have far reaching and complex effects that cannot be characterized by classical signaling studies alone. Therefore, our vision is to advance understanding of how such novel interventions work at the molecular level using a systems biology approach. Work on the biology of ageing and age-related kidney disease is being performed in the context of a very strong research surrounding in Cologne focusing on the biology of ageing.
The University of Cologne was recently awarded with an excellence cluster for research on "Cellular Stress Responses in Ageing-Associated Diseases" (CECAD) as part of the Excellence Initiative of the German Government. The successful CECAD bid has resulted in the recruitment of a number of additional high ranking individuals eminent in the field of ageing research which interact. Further, the Max Planck Society has also significantly supported CECAD’s efforts and a new Max Planck Institute (MPI) for the Biology of Ageing is currently being built on the campus of the University of Cologne, thereby adding impetus and critical mass to this research field. Research on ageing-associated kidney diseases is among the major research interests of the CECAD initiative and a central topic of our lab.
