Julie Andersen was at the University of Southern California researching the death of brain cells that occurs in Parkinson's disease, but found her abilities as a neurobiologist only took her so far. She needed an expert in proteomics to help unravel the complex of proteins and amino acids that cause the mitochondria—the powerhouses of cells—to lose function.

When she moved to the Buck Institute for Age Research, that changed. There she has been able to enlist the proteomics expertise of Brad Gibson and his state-of-the-art mass spectrometry, as well as David Nicholls, an expert in the biochemistry and physiology of mitochondrion, to help solve what was considered a near intractable problem.

"There wasn't really a protein chemist available to me at USC with whom I could collaborate and move the project forward," said Andersen. "We have this triad of interdisciplinary research that has allowed us to understand more about what's going on in Parkinson's disease."

A Different Model
Since its founding in 1999 the Novato, California-based Buck Institute has approached science with the idea that eliminating the departmental walls found in academia would allow scientists studying the biology of aging and the diseases associated with aging and technologists expert in powerful machinery for analyzing biological processes to sit around the same table and teach each other.

That approach got a big boost this week as the National Institutes of Health awarded the Buck Institute a $25-million grant, the largest in the Institute's history. The grant is one of nine interdisciplinary programs awarded the NIH's Roadmap for Medical Research just announced. The grants are designed to foster an interdisciplinary approach to tackle health challenges that have been resistant to traditional research approaches.

"With this support from the NIH, our research will initiate a new 'interdiscipline' called 'geroscience,' which promises new understanding of the relationship between aging and disease," said Dale Bredesen, CEO of the Buck Institute.

The emergence of geroscience as a unique field is similar, Bredesen said, to the development of neuroscience about 35 years ago when researchers working in disparate fields of chemistry, biology, physiology, and other areas focused on the brain came together under a new umbrella. He describes geroscience as focused on the interface of normal aging and age-related disease, such as cancer, neurodegenerative diseases, and cardiovascular disease.

In addition to funding a set of specific projects at the Institute, the grant will also establish the nation's first post-doctoral training program in geroscience.

Increasing Complexity of Questions
The need for such a discipline has become apparent in recent years as scientists have found individual effort to solve problems of efforts more difficult from a single approach. While scientists have been able to boast achievements such as doubling the lifespan of worms by knocking out a gene, Buck Institute's Geroscience Project Director Gordon Lithgow noted that the frustration has been that genetics alone can't answer why this is so. Nor can it explain what happens in the process of aging that causes certain diseases, such as Alzheimer's or cancer. It is the complexity of such questions, he said, that has driven the need to study biology on a grander scale and bring together scientists with different expertise.

"It's dissatisfaction with the answers you get from a single discipline. We're delighted you can do all those great tricks with worms. It's great fun," said Lithgow. "But we're no further forward to answers to why aging causes Alzheimer's, or no closer to a therapeutic approach. That's what we need."

Geroscience at the Buck Institute initially will include a wide range of specialists in various biological disciplines and neurodegenerative diseases and cancer. As the Institute expands in the years ahead, though, it hopes to attract researchers from fields as disparate as physics, anthropology, engineering, and mathematics, many of whom may have no background in geroscience and may not initially think of themselves as researchers in this new field.

Jack Rowe, a professor of health policy at Columbia University and a gerontologist who was a founding board member of the Institute, said when considered with a string of research successes and the Institute's 2005 designation by the National Institute of Aging as a Center of Excellence in the Biology of Aging, the NIH geroscience grant validates the Institute's model, which had met resistance from academics, researchers, and the community when it was first established.

"This punctuates a period of success," he said. "It's encouraging for other institutions nationwide that may be considering a similar pathway. The fundamental questions of aging that are being addressed with some success seem to beyond any one discipline."