Dear Dr Leptin,
Congratulations on becoming the President of the European Research Council!
Congratulations on your new Director role at Altos Labs!
Your insightful remarks in the Altos Labs press release resonate with many of us within the geroscience field:
The idea that fundamental cellular principles govern our ability to tolerate insults from “congenital and infectious disease to stress and aging” has critical implications. What if, in contrast to our successes in infectious diseases, our lack of success in chronic disease is due to a myopic focus on disease, as opposed to resilience?
Attention on geroscience is accelerating in the private sector, but pales compared to that of cancer or Alzheimer’s research, despite age being the greatest risk factor for most major diseases. More importantly, the public sector is lagging, although the UK recently was the 1st Government to support the “biology of ageing” in its Life Sciences Vision critical healthcare missions.
The breakthroughs achieved with mRNA vaccines were made possible by early support for basic science, while having the right sociopolitical context during a global pandemic. Though not yet over, it is a stark reminder of our society’s age-related vulnerability. With an increasingly ageing, multimorbid population, and rapid progress in geroscience, the time for clinical translational geroscience is now.
The European Longevity Initiative (ELI) has submitted a proposal for the Conference on the Future of Europe to accelerate development and equitable access of geroscience-based medicines within the European Union. We propose effective legal, budgetary, regulatory and institutional commitments to achieve our goals. This has been the top endorsed proposal in the ‘Health’ category ever since its submission, April, 2021.
We are inviting you to sign and promote our CoFoE proposal accessible here: https://futureu.europa.eu/processes/Health/f/3/proposals/826 just like you have already promoted the RescueHorizonEurope proposal personally.
Please see citizenship indicated in parentheses after the names.Best wishes,
Attila Csordas (Hungary)
ChairpersonEuropean Longevity Initiative
Ana Baroni (Spain)
Alexander Tietz-Latza (Germany)
Bolek Kerous (Czech Republic)
Martin Lipovšek (Slovenia)
Sam Brouwers (Netherlands)
Sara Hägg (Sweden)
Sebastian Hofer (Austria)
Valeria Miranda González Rubio (Spain)
We’d like to thank Benjamin Wu for drafting an initial version of this letter.