Resilience as a new framework to promote healthy ageing: funding opportunity from Wellcome Leap

The Dynamic Resilience program seeks to identify and validate causal measures and models of dynamic resilience, at multiple scales, with predictive value sufficient to make clinical decisions and to test interventions. Importantly, reducing progression to frailty in those over the age of 65 by 25% would protect over 75,000 adults in the UK alone, and potentially as many as 87 million older adults worldwide. It is realistic to believe that this is possible – frailty can be halted and even reversed26.

The three program goals are:

  1. Discover and integrate markers of human dynamic resilience that identify individuals prior to a stress event (SE) with prediction accuracy of >85% sensitivity and >90% specificity for clinical outcomes post-SE (e.g., return to health, frailty progression, loss of independence, death).
  2. Develop multi-scale models that link the biomarkers predictive of loss of steady state and dynamic resilience to mechanism. It will be necessary to show that identified mechanisms (some of which may overlap with known hallmarks of ageing) either promote and maintain homeostasis, or are causative of resilience loss. Such models and demonstration of mechanism can be at the cellular, tissue, system, or whole-body scale.
  3. Validate the clinical and developmental utility of measures, models, and candidate preventative interventions to promote resilience in at-risk populations by undertaking specific, targeted trials. Of particular interest are trials involving preventative interventions in older adults prior to predictable stress events such as elective laparoscopic or orthopaedic surgery, or cancer therapy and that focus both on demonstrating pre-stressor predictive clinical outcome accuracy of >85% sensitivity and >90% specificity with respect to frailty progression and interventions that seek at least a 25% reduction in the number of patients showing frailty progression following the stress event.

Call for abstracts and proposals

Abstracts and proposals are solicited for work over three (3) years (with a potential additional one-year option) in one or more of the following thrust areas (see Thrust areas in full program announcement). Proposers should clearly relate work in these thrust areas to one or more of the program goals.

Deadline for initial submissions: 25 May, 2023

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