“Impetus funding allowed us to pursue a high-risk, high-reward idea at a critical moment, before traditional funders like NIH would have supported it. That early support directly enabled the development of our aging biomarker platform, now used in both clinical and research settings.”
Raghav Sehgal
Researcher, Yale University
“Impetus has consistently funded our novel biomolecular tools at conceptualization/fledgling stages, too preliminary for even the ‘exploratory’ NIH grants to support.”
Xiaojing Gao
Professor, Stanford University
“Impetus’ support enabled my lab to launch a brand-new research program exploring just how far we can extend lifespan in C. elegans. I love how the straightforward, concise application is so well suited for projects that pioneer new directions.”
Javier Apfeld
Professor, Northeastern University
“Me and my colleague were only junior postdocs when we received the grant. It allowed us to transition full time into longevity research (instead of it being a side-activity), making preclinical and clinical trials of geroprotective compounds our sole research focus. I think it is fair to say, without exaggeration, that the Impetus funds lay the foundation for our lab and its entire research agenda today.”
Pontus Plavén-Sigray
ERAP trial group - Karolinska Institutet
“The Impetus grant made a real difference. While aging research is the main focus of our lab, the grant encouraged us to rethink our approaches and pursue high-risk, high-reward ideas that traditional funders would not support. What I truly appreciate is that Impetus is willing to back innovative ideas, even without extensive preliminary data–something that’s often required by other agencies, yet hard to generate without funding in the first place.
Another important aspect is that Impetus supports projects based on the strength of the idea, regardless of whether the applicant is a PI or a trainee. This made a significant difference to a PhD student in my lab, whose career and motivation were meaningfully boosted by this opportunity.”
Dr. David Vilchez
Professor, CECAD Research Center - University of Cologne
“The Impetus grant played a key role in advancing my research. It provided essential support for generating preliminary data that laid the groundwork for future successful grant applications. It thus enabled us to launch a new line of research in my lab. The entire process—from application to funding—was seamless, allowing us to start the project without delay.”
Eliisa Kekäläinen
Professor, University of Helsinki
“As a new Principal Investigator, the funding we received from Impetus has really been game changing. The fast turnaround on review time allowed me to quickly expand my brand-new research team. The ‘bold ideas’ approach funded by Impetus allowed us to be more daring than we can afford to be in traditional grants. Perhaps most importantly, the value Impetus places on projects and ideas - rather than CVs and seniority - allowed me to have access to an unparalleled opportunity as a new PI. This grant, as its name promises, has truly been an ‘impetus’ for my new research group. I am very grateful for the opportunity and support, and looking forward to the results we will obtain.”
Marta Kovatcheva
Researcher, Laboratory of Cell Plasticity & Aging, IFOM
“The grant for me was a perfect opportunity for two (connected) reasons: 1. Australian funding schemes do not recognise ageing research as a field in the same way that most of the rest of the world do, so it was extremely important for my research program to get Impetus funding 2. We had an idea based on preliminary data that pointed to a new longevity intervention. An idea at the stage of research we were at would not have been funded through conventional channels. It turned out that our hypothesis was correct and so from a fairly preliminary starting position, we accelerated from idea to realization because of Impetus money. This story was published in the dedicated special issue of Geroscience last year and has already been accessed ~7000 times and cited 11 times.”
Matthew Piper
Professor, Monash University
“Starting my lab with limited funds, Impetus gave me the freedom to take risks and explore new ideas outside my comfort zone. It helped me grow my skills, attract additional funding, and broaden my perspective, leading to exciting collaborations and fresh research directions.”
Federico Pietrocola
Researcher, Cellular Stress in Health and Disease Lab - Karolinska Institutet
“Although redox imbalance is implicated in all hallmarks of aging, our lab recognizes that its underlying causes remain understudied in the aging field. The funding we received from Impetus Grants was instrumental in supporting our development of reagents to directly test how modulation of cellular redox state - linked to redox coenzymes NAD and NADP - can be harnessed to better understand its role on health- and lifespan. We pursued this work in Drosophila as part of a collaboration with the Parkhitko lab at the University of Pittsburgh.
To this day, I remember the joy of receiving the Impetus Grant after unsuccessfully trying to secure funding from AFAR for the same exact project. The generous support allowed us to directly test how modulation of redox state using genetically encoded tools or small molecule redox-cyclers (alone or in combination with known ‘NAD boosters’) promotes stress-resistance and sex-dependent changes in health- and lifespan.
We are confident that in the coming years, our lab will demonstrate multiple examples showing that “fixing” redox imbalance is a more effective strategy to attack aging compared to just “boosting total NAD levels”, which can even be harmful in certain circumstances. These insights would have not been possible without funding from Impetus Grants.”
Valentin Cracan
Professor, Scintillon Research Institute
“When our secretome project was still too risky for traditional funding, Impetus Grants stood out as a uniquely fast and significant funding opportunity. Impetus’ support specifically enabled us to hire a dedicated technician and more quickly achieve proof-of-concept for a new research method.”
Josh Tycko
Post-Doc, Harvard Medical School & BIDMC
“We are an early stage lab proposing an ambitious idea: to learn how torpor and hibernation affect aging. We had no funding for this research and the Impetus grant allowed us to begin pursuing these questions.”
Sinisa Hrvatin
Professor, MIT & Whitehead Institute
“Impetus funding provided key bridge support for maintaining our Spiny Mice (Acomys) colony, a non-traditional experimentally tractable mammalian regenerative model system meeting new and changing NIH policies. Impetus encouraged us to pursue a topic deemed too complex via traditional routes. Without Impetus support, we would not have successfully discovered new beneficial aging linked neuroimmune healthspan adaptations in Acomys that could be used to relandscape human aging outcomes for increased healthspans. Impetus provided our breakthrough and hopefully can continue to incentivize this type of research, pioneering novel funding mechanisms to uncover naturally selected biological solutions for promoting human health and longevity.”
Branden Nelson
Researcher, Seattle Children’s Research Institute
“Impetus is the best grant program for aging. It found and funded the right people to shift them to aging. I see Impetus all over the place in interesting work, almost never see Hevolution even though they have more money.”
Sophia Liu
Researcher, Ragon Institute of Mass General, MIT, and Harvard
