Impetus Grants

LDL cholesterol let researchers evaluate cardiovascular drugs years before their effects on heart attacks become visible. This has led to more drugs, faster.

Aging has no equivalent, making effective drugs very hard to find. These projects span clock development, benchmarking and validation, aiming to predict future health from measurements today.

We helped Corina Amor set up her new lab at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, and she’s been prolific: her team’s CAR-T cells improved glucose control, exercise capacity and intestinal regeneration in mice. She also helped identify potential CAR-T targets in liver disease.

The team found that bowhead whale cells repair DNA breaks more accurately than those of other mammals, with fewer mutations. Part of this ability comes from unusually high levels of a protein called CIRBP. Increasing the whale protein in cultured human cells improved DNA repair and reduced chromosome damage. In fruit flies, it extended lifespan and increased resistance to radiation damage.

Junyue Cao’s team built PanSci, which profiles 21.8 million mouse cells across 14 organs, revealing which cell populations expand or decline with age. It was the largest single-cell atlas of mammalian aging at publication. A follow-up atlas spans 21 mouse tissues, mapping changes in cell populations and gene regulation.

We also supported Yousin Suh and Zev Williams’s human ovarian atlas, which maps gene activity and regulation and reveals increased mTOR signalling with age.

Sophia Liu and colleagues mapped how the mouse thymus changes with age, connecting changes in tissue organisation with reduced T-cell receptor diversity.

Dhindsa’s team identified rare variants disrupting ITSN1 that were associated with roughly tenfold higher odds of Parkinson’s disease. Follow-up experiments in a fly model showed that loss of the gene worsened neuronal damage and movement problems.

The team also identified genetic variants associated with persistent Epstein–Barr virus (EBV) DNA in the blood, pointing to differences in how the immune system recognises the virus.