Policy Research

Areas of Policy Research and Development

Key Priorities

  1. Connect our Fellows to the new $1.8 billion annual NIH fund for Cures currently under congressional approval through the 21st Century Act, ensuring that these funds can be used to address the systemic and underlying causes of aging-related disease.
  2. Uniting a diverse community of public policy, private industry, and consumer group stakeholders behind the goals of the TAME/Metformin study.
  3. Promoting relevant attempts by key pharmaceutical industry players to follow in the footsteps of the TAME/Metformin study by initiating similar FDA-approved clinical trials

Secondary Priorities

  1. Help identify bottlenecks and possible means to circumvent them for research, development and application of healthspan extending therapies, via consulting experts in the relevant fields, in all the stages, from research to translation to clinical application to distribution.
  2. Identify possible facilitating mechanisms, processes and legislations for the development of healthspan extending therapies, searching for ways to join these mechanisms, contribute to them and improve them.
  3. Map agencies from which funding could be allocated to healthspan research and the possible procedural means to achieve these allocations (e.g. through specific types of legislation, parliamentary and governmental procedures, managerial decision, informal consensus, specific agencies, etc.)
  4. Suggest criteria or even specific measures and markers for the efficacy and safety of quality healthspan substances and therapies, to derive from the current criteria and categories for therapies, biomarkers, and frailty indexes, considering the possibilities to combine methodologies, and/or devising new and improved criteria and methodologies.
  5. Suggest regulatory statuses, that can be utilized to advance healthspan extending therapies and cures, e.g. the “senility” code in the ICD, “life extending drugs”, “life saving drugs”, “adjuvant therapies”, and other statuses and categories in different countries.
  6. List desirable incentives and benefits that should be suggested, and the procedures for obtaining them for specific categories:
    1. Commercial entities – what do they need (pharmacological companies, biomedical technology companies, life and health insurance companies, wellness companies, etc.)
    2. Public organizations – what do they want (patient advocacy groups and gerontological associations especially).