Ageing and longevity in UK need more funding and research, peers are told

Health and lifespan

Watt underlined the importance of exploring the process of healthy ageing and how to shrink the gap between health and lifespan. “It has to be a matter that is widely discussed and disseminated with the public,” she said. “I think it’s a wake-up call, and we really need to focus on it because I think it’s achievable.”

Peers asked whether the government was sufficiently focused on this area of research.

Louise Wood, director of science, research, and evidence at the Department of Health and Social Care and co-lead of the NIHR, told the committee, “NIHR invests a significant amount of funding in infrastructure to support translation of these basic science advances into new treatments, technologies, and diagnostics.

“We invest £816m over five years in our biomedical research centres, which support translational research aimed at things that kill us—cardiovascular disease, cancer, neuro-degeneration—and chronic illness like diabetes, asthma, [and] musculoskeletal conditions, as well as elements of the life course and nutrition.”

A fellow witness was Jim Mellon, chair of Juvenescence, a biopharmaceutical company that has raised money to study science in the field of longevity. He said, “We are going to live much longer. We read the headlines that longevity has stalled in this country and in the United States, but that’s a temporary thing.

“The scientific developments that we’re talking about and are developing ourselves are not yet in wide circulation and won’t be for the next five or 10 years, but they will make a massive difference.”

“World’s biggest industry”

Mellon added, “For the first time ever we are the first cohort on the planet for whom bioengineering our bodies is possible to live longer and healthier, but this is a very primitive science. It will be the world’s biggest industry, because there is no one on the planet who isn’t interested in living a longer and healthier life and compressing the period of morbidity at the end.”

Sheuli Porkess, executive director of medical and innovation research at the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry, said that the drug industry was also aware of the stakes involved. She told the committee, “Our members are primarily focusing on the diseases rather than ageing itself, but clearly that better scientific understanding is an absolute foundation that we need in order to be able to develop those medicines of the future.”